Risky dis/entanglements: Torture and sexual violence in conflict
| Author | Maria Stern,Harriet Gray |
| Published date | 01 December 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066119832074 |
| Date | 01 December 2019 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066119832074
European Journal of
International Relations
2019, Vol. 25(4) 1035 –1058
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1354066119832074
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Risky dis/entanglements:
Torture and sexual violence
in conflict
Harriet Gray
University of York, UK; University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
Maria Stern
University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Abstract
Conflict-related sexual violence has become increasingly recognized in international
spaces as a serious, political form of violence. As part of this process, distinctions
between the categories of ‘sexual violence’ and ‘torture’ have blurred as scholars and
other actors have sought to capitalize on the globally recognized status of torture in
raising the profile of sexual violence. This move, while perhaps strategically promising,
even already fruitful, prompts us to heed caution. What might we inadvertently engender
by further pursuing such positioning? While torture and sexual violence have both been
widely framed within the academic literature as strategic in recent decades, only torture,
and not sexual violence, has emerged from elements of this literature as (potentially)
legitimate, despite the slippages between them as categories of violence. This article
offers one avenue for thinking through what an invigorated focus on sexual torture as
a category of violence might unwittingly render possible, and thus for reflecting on the
possible stakes of collapsing the categories of sexual violence and torture. Ultimately,
we argue that we should perhaps resist the urge to frame sexual violence as torture
and instead cleave to the sticky signifier of ‘the sexual’, despite the ways in which it has
served to normalize, perpetuate and obfuscate grievous harms throughout history.
Keywords
Conflict-related sexual violence, consent, gender, legitimacy, sexual torture, torture
Corresponding author:
Harriet Gray, University of York, Derwent College, Heslington, York, YO10 5DD, UK.
Email: harriet.gray@york.ac.uk
832074EJT0010.1177/1354066119832074European Journal of International RelationsGray and Stern
research-article2019
Article
1036 European Journal of International Relations 25(4)
Introduction
A member of an armed group forces a civilian prisoner to rape his daughter and son; a
soldier sodomizes and mutilates several women during a village raid; a commander
impregnates a young girl kept as his sexual slave; a doctor applies electric shocks to the
testicles of a suspected terrorist. Such acts can be understood as sexual violence, sexual
torture or simply torture, depending on the definition employed. They all target body
parts associated with sexuality. All are likely to meet accepted definitions of both torture
and sexual violence. All surely cause massive harm to victims/survivors. While such
atrocities have occurred in war throughout history, their specificity as ‘sexual’ and their
status as particularly egregious and unacceptable acts that accompany armed conflict
have been firmly established in the global policy architecture in recent years (Crawford,
2017; Eriksson Baaz and Stern, 2013; Hirschauer, 2014; Kirby, 2012). This long-overdue
attention has ushered in increased efforts to understand, theorize, categorize and distin-
guish between the forms, logics, acts and effects of sexual violence. Among other devel-
opments, it has led to the existence of deliberate and explicitly politically strategic efforts
on the part of feminist scholars to merge the categories of sexual violence and torture, as
well as an increasing understanding in international spaces that many harmful acts fall
into both. Indeed, many advocate for recognizing (particular forms of) sexual violence as
torture — either in labelling as ‘sexual torture’ those acts that fulfil the definitions of both
categories (such as those noted earlier) (Edwards, 2011: 224–226; Hayes, 2010: 137;
Henry, 2011: 74–75), or in re-conceptualizing all sexual violence as torture (MacKinnon,
2006; Pearce, 2003). The stakes of these efforts to position (some/all) sexual violence as
torture lie in their attempts to gain recognition for sexual violence as a serious and
extraordinary form of political violence by taking advantage of the recognized profile of
torture (Edwards, 2011: 257). This move, while perhaps strategically promising, even
already fruitful, prompts us to heed caution. What might we inadvertently engender by
further pursuing such positioning?
While torture and sexual violence have recently both been widely framed within the
academic literature as strategic, only torture, and not sexual violence, has emerged from
elements of this literature as (potentially) legitimate. Torture largely remains both pro-
hibited and taboo as a modern form of violence in academic scholarship, global policy
arenas and among people more generally; nonetheless, its use in the US-led Global War
on Terrorism has prompted an academic debate about its instrumental — and even moral
— value as strategy in this US context (which we term the ‘torture as strategy’ debate).
This resurgent debate includes deliberations about the potential legitimacy of torture as
a mode of political violence (e.g. Levinson, 2004). While it has incurred considerable
critique (both within the instrumental logic in which it is framed and from scholars
appalled by its ethical depravity and political ramifications), this debate nonetheless per-
sists. Despite the many ways of framing it in both policy and academic conversations,
sexual violence, on the other hand, is consistently cast as firmly illegitimate and indefen-
sible in modern (read: ‘civilized’) warfare — regardless of the particular military context
or theatre of war. Hence, despite the existing intermeshings, even the collapse, of the
categories of sexual violence and torture in academic debate, important lines of distinc-
tion remain.
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