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In the years since the first reports of mass rapes in the Yugoslavian wars of secession and the genocidal massacres in Rwanda, feminist activists and scholars, human rights organizations, journalists, and social scientists have dedicated unprecedented efforts to document, explain, and seek solutions for the phenomenon of wartime rape. While contributors to this literature agree on much, there is no consensus on causal factors. This paper provides a brief overview of the literature on wartime rape in historical and ethnographical societies and a critical analysis of the four leading explanations for its root causes: the feminist theory, the cultural pathology theory, the strategic rape theory, and the biosocial theory. The paper concludes that the biosocial theory is the only one capable of bringing all the phenomena associated with wartime rape into a single explanatory context.
In the years since the first reports of mass rapes in the Yugoslavian wars of secession and the genocidal massacres in Rwanda, feminist activists and scholars, human rights organizations, journalists, and social scientists have dedicated unprecedented efforts to document, explain, and seek solutions for the phenomenon of wartime rape. While some researchers argue that the frequency, savagery, and systematic organization of wartime rape increased in late 20th-century conflicts (Barstow, 2000, p. 8; Brownmiller, 1993; Mackinnon, 1994b, p. 75; Sajor, 1998, p. 3), most emphasize the phenomenon's timeless ubiquity, tracing it back to early accounts in the Torah, in Homer, in the Anglo-Saxon chronicles, and in mythological events like the rape of the Sabine women. Researchers are also unified in their belief that the lack of attention to wartime rape by scholars and international courts represents a serious dereliction of moral and intellectual duty (e.g., Sajor, 1998, p. 2; Thomas & Regan, 1994). Most importantly, these writers agree that the only way to attack the problem of wartime rape is to identify and understand the factors and conditions that promote it (for representative samples of this literature see contributors to Barstow, 2000; contributors to Dombrowski, 1999; contributors to Sajor, 1998; contributors to Stiglmayer, 1994).
On this most critical issue, however, the consensus in the literature wavers. While there is significant agreement on some of the causal factors for wartime rape, there is no unified theory that can bring coherence to...