Wars Against Women: Sexual Violence, Sexual Politics and the Militarised State

The core theme of this chapter is that sexual violence as a deliberate strategy in war and political repression by the state is connected in a range of ways to sexual violence in all other context. Sexual violence is one of the most extreme and effective forms of patriarchal control, which simultaneously damages and constrains women’s lives and prompts individual and collective resistance among women. In exploring these connections the conventional distinctions in political theory between ‘public’ and ‘private’, ‘war’ and ‘peace’ become problematic. Domestic violence, in particular, has been variously named the ‘invisible’ war, a ‘shadow war’ or, in the early days of second-wave feminism, simply ‘the sex war’; one question this chapter poses is whether the use by feminists of the word ‘war’ with respect to gender relations should be understood as a powerful metaphor or as an accurate naming of a historical reality.