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Sexual Enslavement and Reproductive Health: Narratives of Han among Korean Comfort Women Survivors

Chunghee Sarah Soh

in Sexual Inequalities and Social Justice

The Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945) witnessed a boom in forced prostitution of Japanese, Dutch, and Korean girls, with the last nationality constituting the bulk. This chapter seeks to discern the ... More

The Asia-Pacific War (1931–1945) witnessed a boom in forced prostitution of Japanese, Dutch, and Korean girls, with the last nationality constituting the bulk. This chapter seeks to discern the effect that sexual enslavement has had on reproductive health of comfort women (the term for these women in common parlance) survivors by analyzing their life-historical testimonial stories with a focus on the Korean cases. From a macrolevel structural perspective, class and ethnic discrimination under colonialism were the fundamental variables that precipitated their recruitment into military prostitution and sexual slavery in the first place. From a microlevel sexual and social psychological perspective, in contrast, there are intragroup differences that further complicate the causal factors for social inequality and personal suffering of former comfort women. The common thread between the subjects and the researcher in terms of pervasive gender discrimination in patriarchal societies such as Korea, inducts the inquiry into participatory research.Less

Rape in War

Claudia Card

in The Atrocity Paradigm: A Theory of Evil

Sexual enslavement of women and girls, for the enjoyment of soldiers and officers, destroys countless young female lives, and mass rape in war is further terroristic, aiming to intimidate and ... More

Sexual enslavement of women and girls, for the enjoyment of soldiers and officers, destroys countless young female lives, and mass rape in war is further terroristic, aiming to intimidate and demoralize the enemy, tamper with the identity and loyalties of the next generation, undermine national and cultural solidarity, splinter families, and disperse populations. The relative invisibility of the evils of both sexual slavery in war and rape as a weapon of war may be explained by the “magnitude gap” between perceptions of perpetrators and victims, by the intimate nature of the harm to victims, by the deaths of victims whose stories are never heard, and by the absence of sadism in the culpability of many perpetrators. As strategies of resistance, women could become armed, skilled in weapons use, and become integrated into the military at all levels. More long‐range goals are to dismantle domestic and international protection rackets and change the symbolic meanings of rape. Fantasies of castration and compulsory transsexual surgery for rapists are explored, with attention on the attitudinal advantages for women of supporting such penalties and the self‐defeating character of such penalties as means to changing the social meanings of rape.Less

The Foca Rape Case

in Justice in the Balkans: Prosecuting War Crimes in the Hague Tribunal

This chapter discusses the establishment of rape houses and conditions of sexual enslavement in the area of Foca, in the southern part of Bosnia. This case began within a week of the Srebrenica ... More

This chapter discusses the establishment of rape houses and conditions of sexual enslavement in the area of Foca, in the southern part of Bosnia. This case began within a week of the Srebrenica genocide case in mid-March 2000. The Srebrenica and Foca cases broke new ground in crucial areas of international criminal law that the Tadic case initially raised but failed to successfully address in the ICT's first trial. The Srebrenica and Foca cases represented two different parts of the effort to achieve a Greater Serbia by means of the ethnic cleansing of strategic areas in Bosnia and later Kosovo. Hence, the power of such experiences is reflected in the growth and maturation of the International Criminal Tribunal in The Hague and its linkages into the wider emerging field of international humanitarian and criminal law.Less

Touch, Intimacy, and Sexuality in Partnership and Domination Environments

Riane Eisler

in Nurturing Our Humanity: How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future

How people are touched, especially as children and in sexual and other intimate relations, affects and is in turn affected by cultural factors. This chapter explores how patterns of touch, intimacy, ... More

How people are touched, especially as children and in sexual and other intimate relations, affects and is in turn affected by cultural factors. This chapter explores how patterns of touch, intimacy, and sexuality differ at opposite ends of the domination-partnership continuum and why understanding this is important for moving forward. Studies show that we read other’s intentions and emotions by how we are touched and that the confluence of caring with coercion and pain is one of the most effective mechanisms for socializing people to suppress empathy and submit to domination as adults—whether through the painful binding of girls’ feet once traditional in China, or so-called Christian parenting guides that today admonish parents not to “overindulge” children and instead follow “God’s way” by forcing eight-month-old babies to sit with their hands on their trays or laps through threats and violence. Sexuality, too, is distorted in domination systems through the erotization of domination and violence, for example, by inculcating the belief that males are entitled to sex; through the mass shootings of women in the United States and Canada by men who call themselves incel (involuntarily celibate); and by the enslavement of women by Muslim fundamentalist groups like ISIS. The chapter contrasts these unhealthy interactions with healthy ones supported by partnership-oriented cultures.Less

Policy and Politics of (Forced) Prostitution

Maren Röger

in Wartime Relations: Intimacy, Violence, and Prostitution in Occupied Poland, 1939-1945

This chapter examines the policy and politics of (forced) prostitution. One of the most important measures against the spread of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) was the registration of regular ... More

This chapter examines the policy and politics of (forced) prostitution. One of the most important measures against the spread of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) was the registration of regular sex workers and women the authorities suspected of prostitution. Once the women had been registered as prostitutes, they seem to have been unable to express a preference for street or brothel prostitution. There was a degree of compulsion to enter the official brothels, with their barracked daily life, in the occupied Polish territories. The vast majority of sexual enslavement affected women in the Warthegau. The perverted racial policies in the Warthegau contributed to the prostitution system there being a place of “organized rape in conditions of terror”. In the Warthegau, fraternization was punished by committal to the brothels. The chapter then looks at forced prostitution. The German occupation authorities acted not only as pimps, but also as traffickers.Less