Every year, the International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict compels us to confront an uncomfortable reality: sexual violence is not a side effect of war, but a deliberate strategy. Since time immemorial, the bodies of women and girls have been used as territory to be conquered, as tools of humiliation, and as symbols of the victor’s domination over the defeated. Throughout history, sexual violence has been perpetrated by individuals and groups of widely differing ideologies.
This violence does not belong to the past: it is still being used today, in ongoing conflicts in different parts of the world, as a weapon of war. Rape, sexual slavery, and forced marriage are part of tactics designed to terrorize entire communities, provoke displacement, and destroy the social fabric. These are neither isolated incidents nor unavoidable acts; they are systematic mechanisms of power.
Literature denounced this centuries ago. In The Trojan Women by Euripides, the fall of Troy results in the distribution of women as spoils of war. Hecuba, Andromache, and Cassandra embody a fate that has recurred throughout history: violence inflicted on those who did not bear arms yet pay the price of war. Centuries later, Nadia Murad’s testimony in The Last Girl offers devastating contemporary evidence: sexual violence used in an organized way against Yazidi women by fighters of the Islamic State as an instrument of terror and domination.
Remembering the Trojan women, the Yazidi women, and so many others silenced throughout history is to recognize that sexual violence persists in today’s conflicts, where women and girls around the world continue to be treated as spoils of war.
In the face of this reality, there can be no relativism or ideological disputes. The protection, care, and reparation of every woman and girl who is a victim of sexual violence in conflict must stand above any political agenda. It is a fundamental matter of human rights, dignity, justice, and one of the greatest acts of pacifism.
References
Euripides. The Trojan Women. Originally performed 415 BCE. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.
Murad, Nadia. The Last Girl: My Story of Captivity, and My Fight Against the Islamic State. New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2017.
Former Dean of the Faculty of Political Sciences and Sociology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; she is currently a Visiting Academic at the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh.