A Yazidi woman at a displaced persons camp in Iraq. Photo: Carol Guzy/PA Images. All rights reserved.
Sexual violence in conflict – and the attention it receives – is not new. Every generation grows up with its horror stories. For mine, it has been ISIS; for my mother's, the Bosnian war and the Rwandan genocide; for my grandmother's, World War Two. Wartime sexual violence is understood as a crime specifically against women, by men. Women are overwhelming named as the victims, and men, overwhelmingly, the perpetrators. This focus is also not unique to conflict zones, and it has rendered invisible male victims, female perpetrators, and violence that doesn’t fit within wider patriarchal, heterosexual narratives.
