ABSTRACT
What counts as “conflict-related sexual violence?” How much of it happens in a given conflict? What kinds of people suffer conflict-related sexual violence? What kind of people perpetrate it, and under what circumstances? What explains variation in levels of conflict-related sexual violence across time, space, conflicts, and individuals? Research into conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) has attempted to answer all these questions. In doing so, this area aligns with a more general trend toward disaggregation and micro-comparison in the social sciences. 1 Several scholars have produced studies that problematize the category of CRSV, much as other research has sought to problematize the over-aggregation of “violence” more generally (Ron 1997, 2000; Wood 2008; Steele 2011; Hoover Green 2011). While research specific to sexual violence is still a relatively small part of the overall study of conflict-related violence, this literature has advanced considerably in the past several years.
