In 2008, Major General Patrick Cammaert remarked: ‘It is now more dangerous to be a woman than to be a soldier in modern wars’. Cammaert made this observation during his period of service as the Deputy Force Commander of the United Nations Mission in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). In what had been, and remains, a protracted civil conflict, the DRC gained the unenviable reputation as ‘rape capital of the world’. Sadly, while this conflict has been marked by unprecedented levels of sexual violence, gross offences committed against civilian populations including rape, sexual torture and forced pregnancy have been a regular occurrence in warfare for millennia. Often perpetrated as a conscious strategy to ‘terrorize, demoralize, injure, degrade, intimidate and punish affected populations’, yet for millennia sexual violence has been dismissed as an inevitable consequence of armed conflict and excluded from laws of war designed to prevent the degeneration of men into brutes. Currently, research is making visible the hidden history of sexual abuse against men and boys in conflict zones. As Brenda Fitzpatrick acknowledges, this is important work, but in pursuing new agendas, we should not neglect the continued suffering of women and girls in conflict. In international humanitarian law, the exclusion of women from the category of ‘human’ has gone unchallenged for far too long, viewed instead as the property of men, and the violation of women deemed a ‘property crime’.

The conflict in the former Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s marked a turning point. In the wake of these events, there was significant progress in recognising and confronting conflict related sexual violence. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (2000) was particularly important in recognising that such violence might be organised, systematic and perpetrated by states. The Women, Peace and Security Agenda initiated at the Beijing Conference in 1995, United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (2000) and subsequent Security Council resolutions, along with developments in international humanitarian law and in the International Criminal Courts, have all contributed to the understanding that sexual violence in conflict might be strategic – undertaken in pursuit of military and political objectives. There is now an international architecture, legal instruments and processes in place to challenge the long-standing culture of impunity, to hold perpetrators to account and to realise justice for survivors.