The Political Psychology of War Rape

Studies from Bosnia and Herzegovina

Inger Skjelsbæk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136620911
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a conceptual framework for understanding war rape and its impact, through empirical examination of the case of Bosnia.

Providing a contextual understanding of sexual violence in war, and situating Bosnian war rape in relation to subsequent conflicts, the book offers a methodological outline of how sexual violence in war can be studied from a political-psychological perspective. It presents empirical findings from the field that show what war rape can entail in the aftermath of armed conflict for victims and their communities.

Through its comprehensive approach to Bosnian experiences, the volume expands the conceptualization of victimhood and challenges the assumption that sexual violence is a particularly difficult theme to study because of victim silence. Rather, the author demonstrates there are many voices that can provide insight and understandings of war rape and its impact without having to compromise the safety and privacy of individual victims. Finally, the book shows the ways in which individual experiences of war rape are shaped by national and international discourses on gender, sexuality and politics.

This book will be of interest to students of political psychology, war and conflict studies, European politics, ethnic conflict, politics and IR in general.

1 Introduction

My interest in sexual violence in war grew out of a research project that looked at how living in a highly masculine setting – namely war – shaped women’s sense of identity. That particular project focused on how a group of women described their war experiences in Vietnam, El Salvador and Croatia. The one common factor that lurked in the background of all their stories was the fear of being raped or otherwise sexually abused. These women instinctively knew that the war-zone was a place where they were rendered vulnerable in particular ways and where lawlessness ruled. Had they been raped, the perpetrators would most likely remain at large, unpunished.

The research for that project was carried out in 1995. As I was finalizing my findings and writing up my work, the Bosnian war was coming to an end. The peace agreement negotiated in Dayton, Ohio, was signed by the warring parties in Paris on 14 December 1995. This war had been marked by numerous accounts of rape and sexual violence. I therefore became very curious about this particular aspect of war and started looking for studies, books and theories which could enlighten me on the subject. To my great surprise, or perhaps this was a reflection of my own naïveté, there was not much to be found. The words ‘rape’ and ‘sexual violence’ were seldom seen in the subject index of war accounts or theoretical works on peace and conflict. You might find it used in metaphorical ways as a means to describe particularly horrific battles, such as the ‘rape of Nanking’ in 1937 or the ‘rape of Berlin’ in 1945, but it was seldom noted that these metaphors reflect a cruel reality.

I decided that I would like to study this war phenomenon in more detail and applied for research funding, only to find that the funders were initially reluctant to support studies on this theme. They were concerned that it might be too traumatic to ask victims and others affected by this particular form of violence about these war experiences. While I believe the funders were genuinely concerned about the research subjects, choosing to not fund research this topic on the basis of these ethical concerns had the detrimental effect of rendering these experiences invisible and insufficiently studied, once again. I therefore went to visit some women’s NGOs in the former Yugoslavia to see whether they thought it would be possible to study the effects of sexual violence during the Bosnian war, and whether they thought that those who had worked with the sexual violence victims, or those who had experienced sexual violence themselves, would be willing to talk about it. The response was clear: these women wanted to let others know. I reapplied to the relevant funding sources and presented the arguments from the NGOs I had visited in the former Yugoslav region and managed to convince various funders that studying sexual violence in armed conflict, including talking to the victims of these forms of violence, was not only possible but also feasible. In addition, this was a timely theme to study and extremely important to hear the accounts of those affected by these acts of violence. The result of these efforts is what constitutes this book.

With secure funding and a network of people I could contact, I was still faced with numerous difficulties to resolve. In this book, therefore, I devote considerable time discussing not only the thematic issue of sexual violence in armed conflict, but also the theoretical, methodological and political concerns which I have had to grapple with and which might be relevant to other studies on the issue of sexual violence in war.

Political psychology

The increasing focus on sexual violence in war has resulted in an emerging psychological trauma literature, which has paid particular attention to the Bosnian war rapes. These studies have focused on measuring and providing frequency descriptions of various forms of trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among Bosnian women (Basoglu et al. 2005; Dahl et al. 1998; Folnegovic-Smalc 1994; Momartin et al. 2004; Kozaric-Kovacic et al. 2004; Popovic and Bravo-Mehmedbasic 2000; Schnurr et al. 2004) and the use of psychosocial help and therapy methods (Dahl and Schei 1996; Dybdahl 2001; Agger et al. 1999;¹ Arcel 1995, 1998; Kostantinovic-Vilic 2000). What unites these different psychological publications is that they are all narrowly focused on the individual and individual coping mechanisms. This psychological literature is aimed at an audience of therapists from the psychological and medical field and is both important and impressive.

In this book, however, I aim to speak to a different kind of scholar, namely researchers in the field of peace and conflict studies. The field of peace and conflict studies, although multidisciplinary in nature, is dominated by scholars from political science; my aim is to draw from the field of psychology and bring an understanding of individual experiences in a sociopolitical setting, and thereby make individual experiences relevant for political analysis. This approach thus places this book within the broader field of political psychology. What unites various forms of research under the banner of political psychology is a topical interest in the interrelationships between psychological and political processes.

Over the past decade, political psychology has gained increasing momentum within both psychology and political science. A number of book publications since 2000 (e.g. Ascher and Hirschfelder-Ascher 2005; Hermann 2004; Jost and Sidanius 2004; Kuklinski 2002; Lavik and Sveaas 2005; McDermott 2004; Monroe 2002; Roazen 2003; Sears et al. 2003) clearly testify to this, and the main journal in this field, Political Psychology, which was first published in 1980, has a wide audience in diverse academic fields. The subtexts in many of the above publications represent attempts to consolidate and map out new avenues for the field of political psychology. These attempts to set the status quo for the field must be understood as the result of the increasing influence and recognition of the political nature of psychological processes, and, likewise, the psychological nature of political processes. While there is much to be said about the transformation process within political psychology at large, I will limit my focus in the following section to the sub-field of political psychology that addresses peace and conflict.

As opposed to mainstream political psychology, which has adhered to the demands of positivistic methodological ideals, it has not been possible to study the sub-field of peace and conflict in the laboratory for ethical and practical reasons (Jost and Sidanius 2004: 12). Rather, the field of peace and conflict psychology forces researchers to use more qualitative and innovative use of methodology than most conventional textbooks in political psychology would recommend, and this sets peace and conflict psychology apart from mainstream political psychology in distinct ways.

First, as was suggested above, peace and conflict psychology is characterized by methodological challenges. The infamous Milgram experiment on obedience from 1965 that was triggered by the Nazi death camps during World War II provided valuable data but has been deemed unethical. Other attempts at bringing war, peace and terrorism to the laboratory have been made (Beer et al. 2004; McDermott 2004), but these kinds of experiments do not represent the general methodological tendency. In one edited volume on political psychology (Jost and Sidanius 2004), the entire section on conflict, violence and political transformation is comprised of conceptual studies, and the same is true for the section on international relations in Sears et al. (2003).

Second, peace and conflict psychology is characterized by a common focus on thematic issues. A closer look at the book publications mentioned above, as well as others, reveals that there are certain themes falling under the peace and conflict heading that run through many publications. The common denominator within these publications is the aim to understand, and conceptualize, the impact that peace and conflict have on psychological processes at the individual, interpersonal and societal levels, as well as vice versa.

Finally, Rosenberg (2002) argues that there is an urgent need within political psychology to open the field to new epistemologies and approaches. This need is based in part, she argues, on an internal recognition that ‘most of what can be done within these [positivistic] frameworks has indeed been accomplished’ (Rosenberg 2002: 329). There is a need to improve conceptualizations of the psychological implications of political variations and change, and to find methodologies that can map these processes, rather than assume static relations between psychological and political phenomena. In addition, there is also a greater challenge coming from without the field itself, namely the poststructuralist and post-modern turn within the social sciences. Rosenberg argues in favour of an integrative social/political psychology that is characterized by intellectual pluralism, with an eclectic approach to methodologies and subjects:

[I]n order to move beyond the limitations of contemporary social and political psychological approaches, a fundamentally new theoretical orientation is required. Such an orientation must recognize that social life is dually structured, by both thinking, feeling individuals and by socially structured discursively constituted groups and that both individuals and groups are at least quasi-independent sources of meaning and value.

(Rosenberg 2002: 335)

In other words, political psychology appears to be at a crossroads in terms of its thematic and epistemological outlook. New themes and methodological approaches coupled within ‘new’ – that is, structuralist and post-structuralist – ontologies and epistemologies are welcomed. It is at this new juncture that this book finds its place. In the political psychological literature referred to above, none of the studies focus on gender in the context of war, peace and conflict. One important contribution of this book, therefore, is to bring gender issues, and sexual violence in particular, to the political psychological field of peace and conflict issues.

The book aims to contribute to the field of political psychology in two important ways: first, by examining the impact that different sociopolitical contexts (pre-war, wartime and post-war Bosnia) have on therapy methods and social identity construction for victims of sexual violence; second, by bringing a social constructionist perspective to a field of study that has predominantly been characterized by positivist and post-positivist research paradigms.

Putting gender centre stage

In addition to its political psychological angle, this book is also written from the perspective that the use of rape and sexual violence during a conflict, as well as their impact in the aftermath of conflict, is framed by sociopolitical constructions of gender. The overarching argument in the book is that we cannot fully understand the implications of rape and sexual violence in war and its aftermath without understanding how gender relations – that is, notions of femininity and masculinity – are socially constructed in direct and symbolic social interactions in various settings. The analyses in the different chapters thus emerge from the intersection between gender and the politics of identity.

Gender and social constructionist psychology

In the search for knowledge about human nature and interaction, early psychological researchers did not sufficiently acknowledge their own impact on their research and research questions; nor were uniqueness and peculiarity considered to be valid scientific findings, because the overall aim was to look for and identify stable patterns of behaviour. The ontological universalism on which this conceptualization of scientific work was based produced essentialist theories about human interaction and individuals that were at times benign, at other times potentially demeaning, racist and sexist.

It seemed inevitable that social groups who were not part of the academic establishment would react, as indeed they did. With the increase in female academics, people of colour and citizens not belonging to the upper classes graduating and taking seats at academic establishments, the legacy of the natural scientific mode of inquiry became increasingly criticized during the 1970s and 1980s. The critique came from feminist studies, Marxist studies, and politically driven research movements which argued that social scientific knowledge served to uphold certain political structures (e.g. capitalism and patriarchy), and that the role of research was to generate knowledge that contributed to generating sociopolitical change.

This conceptual shift also had an impact in the field of psychology. While traditional psychology has tended to identify psychological phenomena within the individual, social constructionist thought locates the psychological within the social (Hibberd 2005). Social constructionism, argues Hibberd,

emphasizes the historicity, the context-dependence and the sociolinguistically constituted character of all materials involving human activity. The psychological processes of human beings are … essentially social and are acquired through the public practice of conversation.

(Hibberd 2005: viii)

The important qualitative change that social constructionism represents is the transition from regarding the person as a perceiver to regarding the person as a conceiver and constructor (Ashworth 2003: 15). The implication for psychological research, according to Ashworth (2003: 22), is that ‘psychology should not pretend to reveal progressively true, universal human nature, but should make us aware of the implicit assumptions (about ‘human nature’ and kinds of human experiences) that are available to the members of a social group for the time being’. The focus of analysis, in other words, is on the person as sense-maker. The research goal is to find ways of understanding psychological processes of social life rather than psychological being in and of itself. While Hibberd focuses her presentation and discussion on social constructionism on the epistemological level, this line of thinking can also be found in the conceptualization of psychological therapy (Hare-Mustin 1997; Marecek 1997; McNamee and Gergen 1992). This line of thinking thus not only represents a shift in how psychological theories develop, but also influences the ways in which psychologists carry out their therapeutic work.

The social constructionist mode of analysis, and conceptualization of individual identities, has had a major impact on the ways in which gender is understood within psychological research. Historically, conceptualizations of gender and gender difference have followed much the same turns as other developments within the larger psychological field. The status quo is one of multiple models of feminist research, in which the conceptualizations of gender and research aims vary. Haavind (2000) argues that gender differences are not innate but serve to construct interactions between people within a power relation. The research aim, therefore, is to investigate what forms of power are associated with masculinity and femininity. Hare-Mustin and Marecek (1990) conceptualized the workings of these forms of social differentiation by examining the ways in which men and women come to be seen as representing, and constituting, difference in language, signs and symbols. More specifically, their primary research interest was to look at the ‘processes by which gender, like other categories of social reality is constructed and given meaning through social interactions’ (Hare-Mustin and Marecek 1990: 6).

Social constructionist psychology locates its analytical understanding of gender differences on transaction processes between the sex of the given person (i.e. the biological constitution of him or her) and the sociopolitical context in which the individual is situated. Social constructionist approaches to gender stretch from a radical post-structuralist approach that debates whether biological difference has any significance at all (e.g. Butler 1990) and other approaches that take the biological differences between men and women as their basis for understanding (e.g. Gilligan [1982] 1993). Social constructionist approaches discuss the distinction between sex and gender, and look at how gender relations are produced through actions, inactions and perceptions of what we do as men and women, boys and girls. Male and female identities are negotiated interpretations of what it means to be a man or a woman, which exist in perpetual and contested power relationships. The methodological approaches within this particular field of study are qualitative, transactional, and based on dialogue with the research subjects. The path to knowledge goes through generating understanding of experiences, perceptions and actions.

Gender in peace and conflict studies

Since the mid-1980s, the works of Boulding (1981), Elshtain ([1987] 1995), Enloe (1983, 1990, 1993, 2000), Tickner (1992) and many others have been instrumental in placing the role of gender on the agenda within peace and conflict studies. These, and other, early writings achieved three major things: they voiced a sharp and forceful critique of the narrow focus within peace and conflict research; they did so in a way that could not be dismissed as mere polemic; and, they established a challenging new agenda to be assessed and explored. In addition to – or perhaps because of – the theoretical shift within the thinking, writing and reporting of war during the 1990s, there has been more awareness of gender issues than ever before. This increased attention led to a new wave of empirical studies of women’s various experiences during war (Bennett et al. 1995; Cockburn 1998; Giles et al. 2003; Manchanda 2001; Skjelsbæk and Smith 2001; Waller and Rycenga 2000; West 1997; Wilford and Miller 1998). These studies focus on women as victims, political agitators, soldiers, mothers and care-givers, and have differing aims and political agendas. Some confirm and uphold gendered stereotypes by focusing on the differing forms of women’s victimization during war, while others challenge conventional understandings of male and female relations. Whatever the theoretical or political aim of the various studies the increase in empirical academic work has led to a growth in qualitative (e.g. Bloom 2010; Olsson 2009; Sjoberg and Gentry 2007; Väyrynen 2004; Wood 2009) as well as quantitative studies (e.g. Cohen 2010; Leiby 2009, Nordås and Cohen, 2011) focusing on women’s diverse experiences in war. In addition a new literature on the role of masculinity in war has emerged where it is the socialization of the man into becoming a soldier which is the core (e.g. Braudy [2003] 2005; Higate 2006, 2007). Hutchings (...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Designing a study of the aftermath of the war rapes in Bosnia
• 3. Victim and survivor: narrated social identities of women who experienced rape during the war
• 4. What do we know about war rapes before the 1990s?
• 5. The turning points in the 1990s which created a new understanding of war rape
• 6. The first generation of systematic documentation of sexual violence in war 1990–1998: naming the unnameable and understanding the incomprehensible
• 7. Therapeutic work with victims of sexual violence in war and post-war
• 8. Traditions and transitions: perceptions of ‘good womanhood’ among 20 Bosnian focus group participants
• 9. Beyond Bosnia: international efforts to move from accounting to accountability
• 10. The political psychology of war rape
• Notes
• References
• Index