Sexual Violence

Citation:

Sovacool, Benjamin K. 2021. “When Subterranean Slavery Supports Sustainability Transitions? Power, Patriarchy, and Child Labor in Artisanal Congolese Cobalt Mining.” The Extractive Industries and Society 8 (1): 271–93.

Author: Benjamin K. Sovacool

Abstract:

Through the critical lenses of “modern slavery,” “dispossession,” and “gendering,” this study examines the contours of power, patriarchy, and child labor in the artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM) of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). There, a veritable mining boom for cobalt is underway, driven by rising global demand for batteries and other modern digital devices needed for future sustainability transitions. Based on extensive and original field research in the DRC—including 23 semi-structured expert interviews with a purposive sample, 48 semi-structured community interviews with ASM miners, traders, and community mem­ bers, and site visits to 17 artisanal mines, processing centers, and trading depots—this study asks: What power relations does ASM cobalt mining embed? What are its effects on patriarchy and gender relations? Critically, what is the extent and severity of child labor? It documents the exploitation of ASM miners by the government, the police, and even at times other mining actors such as traders or local communities. It reveals the often invisible gendered nature of mining, showing how many vulnerabilities—in terms of work, status, social norms, and sexual abuse and prostitution—fall disproportionately on women and girls. It lastly reveals sobering patterns of child labor and abuse, again at times by the government or police, but other times by families or mining communities themselves. These factors can at times make cobalt mining a modern form of slavery and a catalyst for social, economic, and even regional dispossession. However, rather than despair, the study also draws from its empirical data to showcase how mining can in selected situations empower. It also proposes a concerted mix of policy reforms aimed the Congolese government (at all scales, including local and national); suppliers and enduser companies for cobalt; and international governments and trading bodies. In doing so, the study humanizes the plight of Congolese cobalt artisanal miners, reveals the power relations associated with the recent mining boom, and also proposes pathways for positive change.

Keywords: artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM), Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Copper, Cobalt, modern slavery, disposession

Topics: Economies, Extractive Industries, Gender, Girls, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy, Governance, Multi-National Corporations, Sexual Violence Regions: Africa, Central Africa Countries: Democratic Republic of the Congo

Year: 2021

Citation:

Perks, Rachel, and Katrin Schulz. 2020. “Gender in Oil, Gas and Mining: An Overview of the Global State-of-Play.” The Extractive Industries and Society 7 (2): 380–88.

Authors: Rachel Perks, Katrin Schulz

Abstract:

This special section of the Extractive Industries and Society brings together a collection of papers on gender and the extractive industries. These papers were developed from presentations delivered at the international conference, Gender in Oil, Gas and Mining: New Frontiers of Progress, Challenges and Solutions, held at World Bank headquarters in Washington DC, June 2018. The section presents work which seeks to address gender gaps in oil, gas and mining. It includes papers that examine gender in the context of the Extractives Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI); traceability schemes for tin, tantalum and tungsten (otherwise known as the “3Ts”) and gold; and national policies on extractives.

Keywords: gender gaps, extractives, SGBV, artisanal mining, gender equality

Topics: Extractive Industries, Gender, Gender-Based Violence, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality, Sexual Violence Regions: Americas Countries: United States of America

Year: 2020

Citation:

Maha, Irayomi F. and Shary Charlotte Henriette Pattipeilohy. 2020. “Kebijakan Luar Negeri Feminis Swedia (2014-2018).” Journal of International Relations 7 (1): 1-12.

Authors: Irayomi F. Maha, Shary Charlotte Henriette Pattipeilohy

Abstract:

ENGLISH ABSTRACT:

In 2014, for the first time Sweden declared itself a country with a feminist foreign policy. The statement that drew international attention and attention was delivered by the Swedish foreign minister, Margot Wallstrӧm, who is an activist for women and gender equality. In implementing this policy, there are six external policies carried out by Sweden which are implemented by the Swedish foreign ministry and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (SIDA). The six policies include; fulfillment of human rights, freedom from acts of physical, mental and sexual violence, participation of women in preventing and resolving conflicts in the pre and post-conflict period, participation in elections, fulfillment of economic and development rights and finally the right to reproduce and sexually healthy. can analyze Sweden's reasons for implementing these six policies. The unit of analysis in foreign policy consisting of individuals, countries and the international system is used. This research is an explanatory research type and qualitative research type with literature research data collection techniques and uses congruent methods to analyze data. The results of this study indicate that the three unit level analyzes, both individual, state and international system, encourage the formation of feminist foreign policy from Sweden. 

Keywords: feminist foreign policy, sweden, SIDA, individual, state, international system

Topics: Conflict, Conflict Prevention, Feminisms, Feminist Foreign Policy, Gender, Women, Gender Equality/Inequality, Governance, Elections, Post-Conflict Governance, Health, Reproductive Health, Post-Conflict, Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Rights, Human Rights, Sexual Violence Regions: Europe, Nordic states, Northern Europe Countries: Sweden

Year: 2020

Citation:

Rubin, Maxine. 2020. “Exploring Transitional Justice’s Impact Pathways on Gender Justice: Trends in Sexual and Gender-Based Violence against Women from Thirteen African Cases.” Journal of Human Rights Practice 1 (1): 1-26.

Author: Maxine Rubin

Abstract:

The main element of gender justice addressed in transitional justice processes has been sexual and gender-based violence against women (SGBVAW). This article explores if particular dimensions (core characteristics) of transitional justice processes are more likely to positively contribute toward measures taken by the state to address SGBVAW outcomes. Empirical evidence from 13 African cases suggested that transitional justice processes that had autonomous, gender-inclusive, and reparative dimensions were more likely to see positive SGBVAW outcomes. Pending further research, the results suggest that using these dimensions of transitional justice to unpack the impact pathways of transitional justice helps to clarify the ways that transitional justice can benefit societies. The findings also suggest that impact pathways between transitional justice and SGBVAW outcomes exist, but the nature of these pathways is varied and often indirect.

Keywords: 'transitional justice', Africa, SGBV, conflict-related sexual violence and gender-based violence

Topics: Gender-Based Violence, Justice, Transitional Justice, Post-Conflict, Sexual Violence, SV against Women Regions: Africa

Year: 2020

Citation:

Touquet, Heleen, and Ellen Gorris. 2016. "Out of The Shadows? The Inclusion of Men and Boys in Conceptualisations of Wartime Sexual Violence." Reproductive Health Matters 24 (47): 36-46. 

Authors: Heleen Touquet, Ellen Gorris

Abstract:

Researchers increasingly acknowledge that men and boys are frequent victims of sexual violence in conflict alongside women and girls, who remain the group that is disproportionately affected. This increasing awareness has contributed to significant efforts to include men and boys in conceptualisations of conflict related sexual violence in policy as well as in international criminal law. This article analyses the changes that have occurred in these two fields in recent years. We argue that while a major shift towards including male victims in international policy on wartime sexual violence took place in 2013-2014, this development has yet to be consolidated in salient policy guidelines and handbooks. While men and boys’ potential victimisation is frequently recognised, most policy documents do not treat the topic of male victimisation in depth. International criminal law on the other hand has pioneered gender-neutral and inclusive definitions. However, the interpretation and application of the gender-inclusive approach is often left to the discretion of judges and the prosecution who at times fail to take the experience of males fully into account, signalling the continuing influence of gender stereotypes and deeply held cultural myths. A renewed effort to fully integrate male victims into conceptualisations of conflict-related sexual violence in both policy and law is therefore advised.

Keywords: sexual violence, gender-based violence, male victims, conflict, 'gender'

Topics: Conflict, Gender, International Law, International Criminal Law, Justice, Male Victims, Sexual Violence, SV against Men

Year: 2016

Citation:

Kirby, Paul. 2020. “Sexual Violence in the Border Zone: The EU, the Women, Peace and Security Agenda and Carceral Humanitarianism in Libya.” International Affairs 96 (5): 1209–26.

Author: Paul Kirby

Abstract:

The last decades have seen a striking increase in international policy seeking to protect against conflict-related sexual violence. Norms of protection are, however, unevenly applied in practice. In this article, I address one such situation: the significant and growing evidence of widespread sexual violence at detention sites in Libya where migrants are imprisoned after interception on the Mediterranean Sea. Drawing on policy documents, human rights reports, interviews with advocates and officials, and an analysis of debates in the EU Parliament and UNHCR's humanitarian evacuation scheme in Libya, I examine how abuses have been framed, and with what effects. I argue that decisions about protection are shaped not only by raced and gendered categorizations but also by a demarcation of bodies in the border zone, where vulnerability is to some degree acknowledged, but agency and responsibility also disavowed by politicians, diplomats and practitioners. The wrong of sexual violence is thus both explicitly recognized but also re-articulated in ways that lessen the obligations of the same states and regional organizations that otherwise champion the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. The combination of mass pullback and detention for many migrants with evacuation for a vulnerable few is an example of carceral humanitarianism, where ‘rescue’ often translates into confinement and abuse for unwelcome populations. My analysis highlights the importance of the positionality of migrants in the Libyan border zone for the form of recognition they are afforded, and the significant limits to the implementation of the EU's gender-responsive humanitarian policies in practice.

Topics: Displacement & Migration, Migration, Gender, Humanitarian Assistance, Race, Rights, Human Rights, Sexual Violence, UN Security Council Resolutions on WPS Regions: Africa, MENA, North Africa Countries: Libya

Year: 2020

Citation:

Holzberg, Billy, and Priya Raghavan. 2020. “Securing the Nation through the Politics of Sexual Violence: Tracing Resonances between Delhi and Cologne.” International Affairs 96 (5): 1189–208.

Authors: Billy Holzberg, Priya Raghavan

Abstract:

Postcolonial and black feminist scholars have long cautioned against the dangerous proximity between the politics of sexual violence and the advancement of nationalist and imperial projects. In this article, we uncover what it is in particular about efforts to address sexual violence that makes them so amenable to exclusionary nationalist projects, by attending to the political aftermaths of the rape of Jyoti Singh in Delhi in 2012, and the cases of mass sexual abuse that took place during New Year's Eve in Cologne in 2015. Tracing the nationalist discourses and policies precipitated in their wake, we demonstrate how across both contexts, the response to sexual violence was ultimately to augment the securitizing power and remit of the state—albeit through different mechanisms, and while producing different subjects of/for surveillance, control and regulation. We highlight how in both cases it is through contemporary resonances of a persistent (post)colonial echo—which enmeshes the normative female body with the idea of the nation—that sexual abuse becomes an issue of national security and the politics of sexual violence becomes tethered to exclusionary nationalisms. Revealing the more general, shared, rationalities that bind the nation to the normative female body while attending to the located political reverberations that make this entanglement so affectively potent in the distinct contexts of India and Germany helps distinguish and amplify transnational and intersectional feminist approaches to sexual violence that do not so readily accommodate nationalist ambitions.

Topics: Coloniality/Post-Coloniality, Feminisms, Gender, Women, Intersectionality, Nationalism, Security, Sexual Violence, Rape, Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, SV against Women Regions: Asia, South Asia, Europe, Central Europe Countries: Germany, India

Year: 2020

Citation:

Schulz, Philipp, and Heleen Touquet. 2020. “Queering Explanatory Frameworks for Wartime Sexual Violence against Men.” International Affairs 96 (5): 1169–87.

Authors: Philipp Schulz, Heleen Touquet

Abstract:

In this article we argue that prevalent explanatory frameworks of sexual violence against men primarily pursue one line of inquiry, explaining its occurrence as exclusively strategic and systematic, based on heteronormative and homophobic assumptions about violence, gender and sexualities. Feminist IR scholarship has significantly complexified our understanding of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), documenting its multiple forms and causes across time and space—thereby moving beyond the persistent opportunism-strategy dichotomy and critically engaging with the dominant ‘rape as a weapon of war’ narrative. Drawing on empirical material from Sri Lanka and northern Uganda we queer the current explanatory frameworks, analyzing multiple instances of CRSV against men that both simultaneously seem to confirm and defy categorizations as opportunistic or strategic, while being situated in broader and systematic warfare dynamics and unequal power-relationships. Our empirical material shows that relying on crude categorizations such as the opportunism–strategy binary is unproductive and essentialist, as it tends to mask over the complexities and messiness of deeply gendered power relationships during times of war. Binary strategy/opportunism categorizations also imply broader unintended political consequences, including the further marginalization of sexual violence acts that fall outside the dominant scripts or binary frameworks—such as sexual violence against men with opportunistic underpinnings.

Topics: Conflict, Gender, Men, Gendered Power Relations, Male Victims, Sexual Violence, Rape, SV against Men, Sexuality Regions: Africa, East Africa, Asia, South Asia Countries: Sri Lanka, Uganda

Year: 2020

Citation:

Dolan, Chris, Maria Eriksson Baaz, and Maria Stern. 2020. “What Is Sexual about Conflict-Related Sexual Violence? Stories from Men and Women Survivors.” International Affairs 96 (5): 1151–68.

Authors: Chris Dolan, Maria Eriksson Baaz, Maria Stern

Abstract:

Despite the prominent attention that the problem of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) has recently garnered globally, we still know far too little about what is sexual about sexual violence, according to whom, as well as why and how this matters in our efforts to prevent and redress its harms. A growing theoretical, political, legal and ethical imperative to ask questions about the sexual part of sexual violence across both war and peace is nonetheless emerging. This article therefore turns to the accounts of male and female survivors of CRSV at the at the Refugee Law Project (RLP) in Kampala, Uganda. In our reading of their accounts, we explore how the participants understand the possible imbrication of the perpetrator's sexual desire and pleasure with the violence they inflicted, as well as how they deem such intermeshing impossible or deeply problematic in and to the gendered frames that govern how they think about the distinctions between violence and sex, as well as themselves as sexual, social, embodied subjects. Read together, these conflicted and conflicting testimonies offer a vantage point from which to rethink some of the reductive truisms that persist in dominant policy-friendly accounts of wartime sexual violence—namely that such violence is about power and not about ‘sex’. The participants’ accounts thus urge us, as scholars and policy advocates, to resist reducing the multi-layered experiences of victim/survivors of sexual violence to fit into the palatable narratives of victimhood that prevail in humanitarian, juridical and policy spaces.

Topics: Conflict, Gender, Gendered Discourses, Sexual Violence, SV against Men, SV against Women, Sexuality, Violence Regions: Africa, East Africa Countries: Uganda

Year: 2020

Citation:

Thomas, Lahoma, and Rebecca Tiessen. 2010. "Human Security, Gender-Based Violence and the Spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa: A Feminist Analysis." Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne Des Études Africaines 44 (3): 479-502.

Authors: Lahoma Thomas , Rebecca Tiessen

Abstract:

Topics: Domestic Violence, Gender, Women, Girls, Masculinity/ies, Gender-Based Violence, Gendered Power Relations, Health, HIV/AIDS, Post-Conflict, Security, Human Security, Sexual Violence, Rape, SV against Women Regions: Africa, East Africa Countries: Uganda

Year: 2010