ABSTRACT

Rape in wartime has occurred since antiquity (Trexler 1995). It came to public attention most recently in the West with the genocidal rapes of Bosnian women in the 1990s. Yet the Bosnian case is far from exceptional. Mass rape and other sex crimes have been used systematically throughout history and across geography: over 100,000 women were raped in Berlin in the Second World War (Seifert 1994); over 20,000 Chinese women were brutalised by Japanese soldiers during the 1937–8 ‘rape of Nanking’ (Copelon 1994) and, during the Bangladeshi War of Independence from Pakistan in 1971, it is estimated that 200,000 women were raped (Brownmiller 1975). Research by Karen Parker and Jennifer Chew (1994) estimates that each Japanese Comfort Woman 1 was raped at least five times a day and that there were at least 20,000 women at any one time, meaning that there were at least 100,000 rapes per day organised by the Japanese authorities and conducted by soldiers. They further calculate that in the five years of the Comfort Woman programme over 125 million rapes were enacted against women from the Philippines, Burma, China, Korea, Indonesia, Taiwan and the Netherlands.