Conflict-related sexual violence and the rights of female victims have received scholarly attention, but the same cannot be said of post-conflict rejection and re-victimization of the victims and the violation of their rights. This article examines the rejection and re-victimization of the returnee victims / survivors of Nigeria’s Boko Haram’s sexual terrorism. It discusses how this violates their fundamental human rights as contained in various UN conventions and other legal frameworks. Relying on a legal-doctrinal approach, it examines these violations and the difficulty in enforcing such rights. Findings reveal that these human rights violations continue through the rejection and re-victimization of victims / survivors by family and community members. Despite these obvious rights violations, it has been difficult to seek legal redress for enforcing such rights due to the absence of political will on the part of the government.

What kind of weapon is sex? Scholarship on the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90) has broadened the “war story” by foregrounding women’s perspectives as fighters and by adding complexity to militiamen’s narratives. Yet, while gendering the analysis, scholarship has not examined the role that sexual relations and sexual practices played in the war. Meanwhile, Lebanese Civil War–era cultural production, including films, novels and popular magazines, display sexual transactions and sexual violence as if they were common instances in the war. In this article, I engage an intertextual ethnographic reading of sex and sexual violence, combining the civil war’s cultural archive with oral histories that I conducted with former militiamen and militia women across Lebanon’s political spectrum, and with cis- and trans-women who had transactional sex with militia members, as well as urban participatory mapping and interviews with other participants in the war. Mapping the sex economy and sexual relations in the war reveals the central roles that sex played both as a traffic in and of itself, and as a tool of political governance of civilians, through a traffic in women. I argue that militias used sex and the threat of it for multiple purposes: as a form of mobility that enabled other goods to circulate more smoothly; as a tool of intra-sectarian extraction and coercion and as a weapon of patriarchal governance that kept civilians in their designated neighborhoods. While sex enabled cross-sectarian connections, the violent use of sex thus also reinforced sectarian social boundaries. My findings build on scholarship that has foregrounded the political economy of the war and on intersectional feminist analyses of political governance in Lebanon. The article is indebted to this scholarship as well as to ongoing civil society efforts to document sexual violence in the war.

Despite symbolic boundaries between civil and criminal law, sociolegal scholars note their conceptual and operational overlap, or hybridity. Values (e.g., restoration vs. punishment) and practices (e.g., monetary compensation vs. incarceration) thought distinct to each manifest in both, and contact with one legal system can generate involvement with the other. Scholars typically attribute hybridity’s emergence to top-down mechanisms like legislation. This article presents interviews with sexual violence plaintiffs’ attorneys who describe their efforts to improve case outcomes by incorporating criminal legal artifacts like police reports, police evidence and criminal convictions into civil litigation and inserting civil legal artifacts, including costly evidence, victim support and monetary compensation, into criminal prosecutions. Building on organizational theories of boundary work, this article argues that attorneys, in taking purposive action to win their cases, blur distinctions between civil and criminal law from the bottom-up, a distinct mechanism through which civil-criminal hybridity emerges.

While sexual violence is receiving increasing attention in terms of international humanitarian and criminal law, and on the world political scene, this does not apply to all aspects of such crimes. Sexual acts on dead bodies are a common practice in times of armed conflict, constituting an affront to universal moral values that exacerbates the violence, domination and humiliation which motivates such abuses. However, such crimes have rarely been prosecuted under international criminal law, and where they have, perpetrators have been charged with umbrella offences or in connection with the protection of human dignity rather than with sexual offences. To explain this tendency, the present article takes stock of the legal treatment of sexual violence on dead bodies, examining the legal, philosophical and moral concepts that apply, with a view to obtaining recognition of such acts as sexual offences.

Current prevalence of disability in Bangladesh stands at 7.14%. Due to various misconceptions, stigma, and lack of policies, they are more vulnerable to violence and abuse from perpetrators. However, there is a paucity of research on the prevalence of emotional, physical, and sexual violence in the country. To address this knowledge gap, the current study aims to estimate the prevalence and explore the experiences of emotional abuse, physical, and sexual violence of persons with disabilities with their coping strategies. This study adopted a mixed-method sequential design comprising qualitative and quantitative components. A total of 5000 persons with disabilities were interviewed during the survey, and mini-ethnographic case studies were conducted with 51 purposively selected persons with disabilities from all eight administrative divisions of Bangladesh. Descriptive and bivariate statistical analysis was performed for quantitative data. Qualitative data were analysed through thematic analysis. The study concludes that the lifetime prevalence of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse is 68.9%, 26.6%, and 11.5%, respectively. Male participants were more prone to experience sexual abuse than females for both lifetimes (male: 12.7% & female: 10.3%) and within the last 12 months before the survey (male: 6.6% & female: 5.1%). Neighbours and close family members were found to be perpetrators of emotional and physical violence, whereas immediate family members were the perpetrators of sexual violence. Even though participants shared several coping mechanisms, equal to or less than 0.5% sought help from a counsellor to cope with the trauma. Results from the study correspond to the earlier studies with implications for future research and urgent policy reform. Although women are more vulnerable to experiencing different forms of violence, men with disabilities are no different. However, this remains unseen and unheard. To reduce the prevalence of violence against this marginalised group, a coordinated and collaborative approach is required targeting nationwide sensitisation, easy access to help-seeking centres, and adequate policy implementation.

This paper analyzes the animating potential of narrative in Medoruma Shun's Me no oku no mori (In the Woods of Memory, 2009). The novel's narrative structure embodies both the constant circulation of traumatic memories, particularly surrounding sexual violence, and the inevitable gaps in such memories. The text draws the reader in turn into its spiral of telling and re-telling, shifting the burden of narrating history onto countless new witnesses. Moreover, the act of narrating this violent past necessarily entails the acknowledgment of one's own complicity in its violent reverberations in the present.

In this article, translated and abridged (with an introduction) by Caroline Norma, Morita advances a view of the “comfort women” system not simply as an isolated war crime, but as an extreme symptom of institutionalised, pervasive and persistent violence against women that extends to peacetime as well as wartime. Norma argues that Morita’s paper, first published in 1999, prefigures a “feminist turn” in interpretation of the comfort women system that has more recently been embraced by Yoshimi Yoshiaki, Kim Puja and other scholars and activists. Both Norma and Morita argue that the comfort women system can only be understood in the context of ingrained societal attitudes towards women, and that it is therefore closely related to phenomena such as pornography and the commercial sex industry. For both scholars, campaigning for recognition of wrongs committed against comfort women in the past is thus intimately linked to efforts to abolish institutionalised violence and discrimination against women in the present.

In this transcription of a webinar from October 2023, speakers Kevin Blackburn (Nanyang Technological University, Singapore), Katharine McGregor (University of Melbourne, Australia), and Sachiyo Tsukamoto (University of Newcastle, Australia) talk about their new books on the “comfort women.”

Raising awareness about the extent of sexual violence in Japan and the damage inflicted on individuals is essential to change the status quo. This article draws on quantitative and qualitative data to reveal the reality of sexual violence and victimization, which has been poorly understood and largely ignored in Japanese society. The quantitative data is drawn from a landmark 2022 survey of sexual victims conducted by NHK that collected over 38,000 responses. Raising awareness about the harm caused by sexual violence is necessary, but not enough. It is a scourge that is symptomatic of Japan's patriarchal social system where attitudes, norms, values, and practices render many people marginal and vulnerable to abuse. This includes the social norms of “masculinity” and “femininity,” the education system, the labor market structure, and a tax and social security system based on a division of labor that reinforces a strict division of gender roles. Due to the harmful consequences of widespread sexual violence on people and the economy, it is incumbent on the government to offer more support for relevant services, especially civil society organizations that have been playing a key role in helping victims. In this pivotal transition from ignoring to addressing sexual violence, it is also essential to engage the police and judicial officials in ways that enhance sensitivity towards victims, and to take actions that increase accountability.

This article explores the promises and pitfalls of the colonial archives for the study of seeing and knowing contemporary violence. As an ethnographic field and a site of decolonial struggles, the colonial archive is increasingly mobilised in scholarship that seeks to historicise and disrupt conventional, Western-centric knowledge production. While using the colonial archives might reproduce asymmetrical power relations, they also hold the potential to unsettle the ‘toxic imperial debris’ of our time. How can the colonial archives challenge the post-colonial politics of erasing imperial violence and contribute to decolonial futures? Drawing on research in the African Archives in Belgium and fieldwork in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), this paper complicates problematic portrayals of the post-colonial state in the DRC and Congolese women as always already violated or silenced. We argue that the logics of the African Archives reveal a set of destabilising state anxieties that reflect the duality and instability of colonial rule itself and that infuse contemporary (international) politics. This recounting of the violence contained in the archives both narrates the concrete, violent manifestations of our ‘global coloniality’ and works towards its own demise as part of a broader ‘anticolonial archive’.