(You can follow Professor John D Brewer on Twitter by clicking here)
At the beginning of the Belfast conference 28-30 May 2013 in the Culloden Hotel, organised by the Nobel Women’s Initiative and called Moving Beyond Militarism and War: Women-Drive Solutions for a Non-Violent World – it is worth being reminded why the issues are so very important.
The key lies in the distinction between sexual violence and gendered violence. Korea’s ‘comfort women’, a group which to me seem so inappropriately named, who are in the news at the moment because of their demand for reparation from the Japanese government, represent an example of sexual violence, where the women were subjected to sexual violation by Japanese soldiers during the Second World War as a matter of policy.
Sexual violence of this sort is ancient and associated with all wars; it is also still going on. Modern day analysts refer to it as ‘military rape’. It is about the satisfaction of combatants’ sexual drives by means of force and fear.
Gendered violence is something different altogether. It means attacking women not for reasons of sex but of politics. Because of the stereotypical cultural association of women with the nation, women are seen as the bearers of the next generation, the carriers of the tribe, ethnic or national group, and the intent in war to violate that group, or indeed to eliminate it, results in women being special targets for attack, giving them particular victim experiences.
When gendered violence is combined with the new forms of war in late modernity, women are often subject to atrocious and brutal attack. New forms of war are those that draw no distinction between civilians and combatants, where there is no restricted combat zone geographically determined, and in which the human body is turned into a site of conflict and is subjected to horrendous atrocity in a return to almost pre-modern, de-technological warfare.
Women’s bodies are particularly vulnerable as battle sites because gendered violence links these bodies to political and national genocide. Hence the barbaric atrocities that get vented on women’s bodies in new forms of war.
This gives women also particular post-conflict victim experiences – bodily mutilations, children born of rape, AIDS, cultural and social ostracism and rejection. The empowerment of women in peace processes is important in order to ensure these victim experiences are recognised and made key issues of post-conflict policy.
The empowerment of women in peace processes is important also to give women a voice in politics so that sexual and gendered violence can be made humanitarian war crimes and the cultural stereotypes that sustain them can be challenged politically.
What we must not do is perpetuate cultural stereotypes in which we allege that women are ‘natural’ healers, that somehow peace is ‘instinctive’ to women. We must not dishonour women at the very point when we acknowledge their contribution by wrongly suggesting that their role in building peace is innate rather than cultural.
Empowering women is a political imperative not a biological one.
(You can follow Professor John D Brewer on Twitter by clicking here)
