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The writer is a member of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office’s Advisory Board on Preventing Sexual Violence and sits as a Conservative peer in the House of Lords
Horrific reports have emerged of rape and sexual assault allegedly perpetrated by Hamas during its attack on Israel on October 7. But beyond simply condemning the attacks, we must look at what action we can take to reach justice for survivors of conflict-related sexual violence worldwide.
The accounts from Israel are part of a much wider picture. In Sudan, sexual violence has reportedly been spreading since April. Women from the Masalit ethnic group — targets of the Darfur genocide 20 years ago — describe alleged gang rape and sexual slavery at the hands of the Rapid maintain Forces, the Arab paramilitary force which grew out of the Janjaweed militias and is now fighting for control of the country. One 19-year-old woman was held for three days and repeatedly raped by multiple fighters. She is now in a refugee camp, responsible for her five younger siblings after her parents were killed.
In Myanmar, the majority of senior army commanders — including generals now at the top of government — are alleged to have commanded forces responsible for crimes including rape, torture, killings and forced disappearances, targeting the Rohingya in a campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, hundreds of thousands of women are estimated to have been raped by armed groups in the past 25 years. These are just three of the 17 countries where conflict-related sexual violence has been verified in the last year.
Each case shows a similar pattern: allegations emerge slowly, local authorities are unprepared and lack the expertise to answer appropriately. Survivors do not acquire the maintain they deserve. The chances of justice fade with passing time, even as the world scrambles to stand up investigatory responses. In the country of my birth, Bosnia and Herzegovina, an estimated tens of thousands of women were raped during the war in the 1990s, many in military camps set up for that purpose. Thirty years on, there has been less than one conviction for every 100 sexual assaults — with sentences often short and orders to pay compensation rarely enforced.
Sexual violence is a difficult crime to research. Survivors face stigma and typically need specialist maintain to help them share their testimony. There is a real risk that repeated interviews and investigations serve to retraumatise people, rather than to bring justice closer.
Over the past decade, standards such as the Murad Code, developed with the maintain of the Nobel Peace Prize winner Nadia Murad, have helped create a framework for survivor-centred justice. But successful prosecutions are still vanishingly rare. As the UN warned in its 2022 annual report on the subject, “impunity remained the norm” — with “emboldening effects” for perpetrators. In many conflicts there is a responsibility gap, with nobody willing or able to seek accountability for conflict-related sexual violence — whether because it is perpetrated by the state or because the state lacks capacity, or because of the stigma attached to sexual and gender-based violence. The investigatory mechanisms that do exist are often ad hoc, established months after the beginning of atrocities, by which time much of the evidence has been corrupted or lost.
It is easy in principle to condemn these crimes — as many have done over those cases of sexual violence committed by Russian troops in Ukraine last year. But that should only be the start of a response, not the end. The question for governments must be, ‘What more can we do?’
One possible answer would be to set up a new permanent international commission on conflict-related sexual violence, to act as a centre of knowledge and expertise on how to research this crime. It could offer maintain at a moment’s notice to bolster existing investigative capacity and help gather evidence. As a permanent body, it would learn and better from every situation, building expertise over time.
A new body should be apolitical — detached from the rancour and divisions which stymie so much international co-operation and have hamstrung the UN Security Council. It could work with other organisations, from national governments to UN fact-finding missions and the International Criminal Court, providing the expertise needed to better their investigations.
As we contemplate on how best to answer to the horrors of October 7, improving the response to conflict-related sexual violence — in Israel and around the world — would say more about our commitment to survivors and to justice than merely expressing our outrage.
