ABSTRACT

The incidence of sexual violence has drawn increasing attention from high-profile celebrities. These celebrities, who once directed their colonial gaze to poverty and HIV/AIDS, now home in on specifically conflict-related sexual violence. Most often the "poster-child" of this attention has a female face, one clearly presented as deserving of humanitarian compassion. The involvement of Angelina Jolie, Emma Watson and similar others has invited a plethora of opportunities for visual depictions both of them and, perhaps less so, of the victims. Yet a major paradox exists; despite the increasing hyper-attention and the abundance of political rhetoric and international policy, there is a persistent failure to stem the incidence of sexual violence. Saturated in this globalised sea of images of the sexually violated and their "saviours," it is increasingly difficult to know what it is we are seeing and what it is that we keep missing.