Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (7 page)

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i
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AGMNST OUR WILL

was only tangentially and in retrospect a recognition of women's rights; its inexorable, historic purpose had been to consolidate political power in the hands of the king. But within a decade an emboldened Second Statute of Westminster amended the timorous First. By a new act of Parliament, any man who ravished "a mar ried woman, dame or damsel" without her consent was guilty of a full-blown felony under the law of the Crown, and the penalty was death.*

It
read better on parchment than it worked in real life, but the concept of rape as a public wrong had been firmly established.

From the thirteenth to the twentieth century, little changed. The later giants of jurisprudence, Hale, Blackstone, Wigmore and the rest, continued to point a suspicious finger at the female victim and worry about her motivations and "good fame."

"If
she be of evil fame and stand unsupported by others," Blackstone commented, "if she concealed the injury for any con siderable time af ter she had the opportunity to complain, if the place where the act was alleged to be committed was where it was possible she might have been heard and she made no outcry, these and the like circumstances carry a strong but not conclusive pre sumption that her testimony is false or feigned."

*
Under modern English law the maximum penalty for rape is life imprison ment.

3

War

This is
my weapon,
this is
my gun

This is
for
business, this is
for fun

-DRILL SERGEANT'S DITTY

I then told him that, in spite of my most diligent efforts, there would unquestionably be some raping, and that I should like to have the details as early as possible so that the offenders could be properly hanged.

-GENERAL GEORGE
s.
PATTON, JR.

War As I Knew
It

It's funny about man's attitude toward rape in war.
Un
questiona bly there shall be some raping. Unconscionable, but never theless inevitable. When men are men, slugging it out among them selves, conquering new land, subjugating new people, driving on toward victory, unquestionably there shall be some raping.

And so it has been. Rape has accompanied wars of religion: knights and pilgrims took time off for sexual assault as they marched toward Constantinople in the First Crusade. Rape has accompanied wars of revolution: George Washington's papers for July
22,
1780, record that one Thomas Brown of the Seventh Pennsylvania Regiment was sentenced to death for rape at Pa ramus, and it was Brown's
'
second conviction at that. Rape in

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AGAINST OUR WILL

warfare is not bound by definitions of which wars are "just" or "unjust." Rape was a weapon of terror as the German Hun marched through Belgium in World War
I.
Rape was a weapon of revenge as the Russian Army marched to Berlin in World War II. Rape flourishes in warfare irrespective of nationality or geographic location. Rape got out of hand-"regrettably," as the foreign minister was later to say-when the Pakistani Army battled Bang ladesh. Rape reared its head as a way to relieve boredom as Ameri can Cl's searched and destroyed in the highlands of Vietnam.

In modern times, rape is outlawed as a criminal act under the international rules of war. Rape is punishable by death or impris onment under Article
i 20
of the American Uniform Code of Military Justice. Yet rape persists as a common act of war.

It
has been argued that when killing is viewed as not only permissible but heroic behavior sanctioned by one's government or cause, the distinction between taking a human lif e and other forms of impermissible violence gets lost, and rape becomes an unfortunate but inevitable by-product of the necessary game called war. Women, by this reasoning, are simply regrettable victims incidental, unavoidable casualties-like civilian victims of bomb ing, lumped together with children, homes, personal belongings, a church, a dike, a water buffalo or next year's crop. But rape in war is qualitatively different from a bomb that misses its military target, different from impersonal looting and burning, different from deliberate ambush, mass murder or torture during interroga tion, although it contains elements of all of the above. Rape is more than a symptom of war or evidence of its violent excess. Rape in war is a familiar act with a familiar excuse.

War provides men with the perfect psychologic backdrop to give vent to their contempt for women. The very maleness of the military-the brute power of weaponry exclusive to their hands, the spiritual bonding of men at arms, the manly discipline of orders given and orders obeyed, the simple logic of the hierarchical com mand-confirms for men what they long suspect, that women are peripheral, irrelevant to the world that counts, passive spectators to the action in the center ring.

Men who rape in war are ordinary Joes, made unordinary by entry into the most exclusive male-only club in the world. Victory in arms brings group power undreamed of in civilian life. Power for men alone. The unreal situation of a world without women be—

WAR
I
33

comes the prime reality. To take a life looms more significant than to
make
a life, and the gun in the hand is power. The sickness of warfare feeds on itself. A certain number of soldiers must prove their newly won superiority-prove it to a woman, to themselves, to other men. In the name of victory and the power of the gun, war provides men with a tacit license to rape. In the act and in the excuse, rape in war reveals the male psyche in its boldest form, without the veneer of "chivalry" or civilization.

Fighting to secure women was on a par with fighting to secure food among ancient primitive tribes, an activity that still survives in certain parts of the world. The practical Hebrews, anxious to get a law on the books for all contingencies, made no bones about the status of women who were captured in war. Female captives were allowable as slaves and concubines, according to Deuteronomy, but Hebrew men were discouraged from marrying them.
If
a Hebrew male did marry a captive woman, unlike a Hebrew woman she could be divorced without cause or complicated rigmarole.

Among the ancient Greeks, rape was also socially acceptable behavior well within the rules of warfare, an act without stigma for warriors who viewed the women they conquered as legitimate booty, useful as wives, concubines, slave labor or battle-camp trophy. Homer's
Iliad
describes the Trojan War as the attempt by Menelaus of Sparta to recapture Helen, who had been stolen by Paris along with her treasure. The face that launched a thousand ships was the ultimate prize. Since Helen was a queen, she lived as wife of Paris during her stay in Troy. Lesser women fared less advantageously during the war. The Trojan Chryseis was captured by the Spartans and allotted to Agamemnon as his concubine of

I
the battle camp, and her father had to enlist the god Apollo to

help reclaim her. Agamemnon angrily sought compensation for the

loss of Chryseis by seizing Briseis, a slave-concubine that his warrior Achilles had won. Achilles responded by sulking in his tent and refusing to fight, and the Spartan cause began to suffer. Agamem non was forced to make a delicate settlement for unity. He cere moniously returned Briseis to Achilles, along with the following carefully enumerated loot from his treasure hut: seven tripods, twenty cauldrons, twelve horses, ten talents of gold and seven craftswomen. Briseis held out hope that Achilles might marry her after this elaborate negotiated settlement, but the warrior didnt. The battle-camp arrangements suited him fine.

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AGAINST OUR WILL

The rape of the Sabine women, which supposedly led to the founding of Rome, is another famous example of woman-stealing in war, an event that captured the imagination of artists in later centuries who invariably painted the captured Sabines as full fteshed and luscious and having a good time. In a curious bit of moralizing, Saint Augustine chose to quibble with the sneaky man ner in which the Sabine women were raped.

Even if the Sabines were unfair to refuse to give their daughters [he argued in
City
of God], it was surely much more unfair to take them by force af ter this refusal. It would have been more just to have waged war against a people that refused a request for marriage with its daughters on the part of close neighbors, than against those who asked for the restoration of daughters who had been carried off . . . .
It
might have been in accordance with some sort of law of war, had the victor justly won the women who had been unjustly refused him; it was contrary to every law of peace that he seized those who had been denied him and then waged unjust war with their indig nant parents.

Because the Sabine women had been carried off and raped before the war, Augustine called the operation a "shady trick."

There is no precise moment in history when bells clanged and rape in war universally came to be considered a criminal act, out side the province of a proper warrior. The historic development of the rights of women, like the development of nations, proceeded at an uneven pace. Totila, the Ostrogoth who captured Rome in 546
A.D.,
forbade his troops to rape the Roman women, but the source from which I rescued this obscure bit of history warned that "Totila stands out as a bright chivalrous knightly figure in an age of savagery." Nonetheless, Totila deserves a nod as a man ahead of his time.

One of the earliest surviving Articles of War was proclaimed by Richard II of England in 1385. Among the twenty-four articles governing the conduct of his soldiers, King Richard decreed "That none be so hardy as to . . . force any woman, upon pain of being hanged." An equal penalty was applied to the hardy who pillaged a church. Yet as late as the seventeenth century, the Dutch jurist Grotius, who wrote at length on ·international military law, was forced to muse that some countries held that the dishonoring of

women in war was allowable while other countries held to the contrary. Grotius asserted that the more civilized of nations dis allowed rape. The outlawing of rape in warfare, at least on the books, was an important advance for women, but despite the penalties, and whether or not they were rigorously applied, rape in warfare continued to flourish.

A simple rule of thumb in war is that the winning side is the side that does the raping. There are two specific reasons for this, one pragmatic and one psychologic, and neither has much to do with the nobility of losers or with the moral superiority of an heroic defense. First, a victorious army marches through the defeated people's territory, and thus it is obvious that if there is any raping to be done, it will be done on the bodies of the defeated enemy's women. Second, rape is the act of a conqueror. This is more than a truism. It helps explain why men continue to rape in war.

Long af ter the enemy's women had lost their utilitarian value as slave labor or battle-camp trophy, and long af ter rape was frowned upon by the more civilized kings and generals, rape re mained a hallmark of success in battle. In medieval times, oppor tunities to rape and loot were among the few advantages open to common foot soldiers, who were paid with great irregularity by their leaders. The Byzantine emperor Alexius is supposed to have extolled the beauty of Greek women in his appeals for recruits for the First Crusade. When the city of Constantinople was sacked in
1204,
rape and plunder went hand in hand, as in the sack of almost every ancient city, Totila's Ostrogoths notwithstanding. "To the victor belong the spoils" has applied to women since Helen of Troy, but the sheer property worth of women was replaced in time by a far more subtle system of values. Down through the ages, triumph over women by rape became a way to measure victory, part of a soldier's proof of masculinity and success, a tangible reward for services rendered. Stemming from the days when women were property, access to a woman's body has been con sidered an actual reward of war.* "Booty and beauty" General

*
Because access to women af ter a battle has been a traditional reward of war, it is impossible to discuss rape in warfare without touching also on prostitu tion, since the two have been linked in history. Not that if prostitutes are not readily available men will turn to rape ''to satisfy their needs," but that the two acts-raping an unwilling woman and buying the body and services of a more or less cooperating woman-go hand in hand with a soldier's concept of