Angelina Jolie’s advocacy brought out the cameras, but advocates around the world have been working to end sexual violence and help survivors for decades.
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Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt at a London summit on sexual violence.
AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis
LONDON — For decades, activists, specialists and survivors have been working to prevent and punish sexual violence in war zones, and to assist survivors. Angelina Jolie gave them a major boost this week when she co-chaired a global summit on ending sexual violence in London.
But as the three-day meeting drew to a close on Friday with soaring rhetoric — "together, we have opened the eyes of the world on this issue," Foreign Secretary William Hague declared — lawyers, public health workers, activists and others recounted the concrete progress of two decades of work on the issue.
"Rape as a crime against humanity is still relatively new," said Toby Cadman, a human rights lawyer based in London. "It was the 1990s before it was really recognized."
Since then, there has been remarkable progress in trying perpetrators, assisting survivors and experimenting with informal forms of justice in imperfect settings.
The summit's language and feel suggested to some attendees that organizers felt they had newly discovered the problem — "Maybe William Hague did not know, but we have been working on this for a long time," said one grassroots human rights activist — and some attendees pointed out that it's those decades of work that led to the summit, not the other way around.
"Between 20 and 50 thousand women, and men, were victims of sexual violence in Bosnia between 1992 and 1995," said Lara Nettelfield, a lecturer at the University of London, who listed several initiatives Bosnian women made during the war to help protect other women and to bring perpetrators of rape to justice. "You can draw a direct line from those courageous women in Bosnia to the events of this week."
Nettelfield said there are many useful lessons about justice and sexual violence to learn from the Bosnian conflict. First and foremost, she said, is that "survivors can make legal history."
Nettelfield pointed to a 1995 lawsuit that victims brought against a Serb warlord in U.S. courts. The case established the validity of holding individuals responsible for crimes against humanity using a little-known 1789 American law called the alien tort claims act. The case marked a major milestone in the fight against impunity.
There have been other milestones in that fight: In the last 20 years, international criminal tribunals have established legal precedents that recognize rape as a crime against humanity and a tool of genocide; that define forced marriage to rebel leaders as a specific violation in and of itself; and that criminalize forced abortion from rape in times of war.
The founding document of the International Criminal Court, set up in 2002, explicitly recognizes rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, forced pregnancy, and other forms of sexual violence as distinct war crimes, and the court has prosecuted two sexual violence cases, though it has not yet won a conviction. The recent acquittal of a Congolese warlord brought forward concerns about the court's handling of sexual violence cases and catalyzed, in part, a new policy paper from the prosecutor's office on sexual violence investigations.
Local advocates have made progress in that time, too. In Liberia, where rape reports have sky-rocketed since the end of the country's civil war, prosecutor Felicia Coleman oversees a sexual violence investigations unit and pursues cases in a court set up specifically to try sexual violence cases, though the court is underfunded, and the police lack critical tools to investigate rape reports.
In Democratic Republic of Congo, a civil society group called Sofepadi offers one-stop medical, psychological and legal services to survivors, trains survivors as paralegals, and advocates for women who choose to pursue cases against their perpetrators.
In Kenya, a court last year ruled that police negligence in the investigation of 240 cases of child rape contributed to a culture of impunity; the court demanded police open investigations into the cases and threatened non-compliant officers with fines and imprisonment.
And a ruling by the Inter-American Court for Human Rights forced the Mexican government to apologize to Valentina Rosendo, an indigenous woman who was raped by Mexican soldiers when she was 17 years old, and to try rape cases against its soldiers in civilian, not military, courts.
Even as the London conference called generally for governments to take action against perpetrators, some human rights observers said that promising international legal action can also be an easy way of passing the buck on difficult political problems.
"The trouble with Syria is the international community keeps [saying], 'Assad will go to the Hague and everything will be fine,'" Cadman said. "Even if we have a trial, how many people will be tried? Four? Five?"
International courts famously try only a handful of high-ranking perpetrators, and at huge cost. Transitional justice initiatives like truth commissions or hybrid courts systems have become common ways to expand accountability and establish a historical record of fact. At least 45 countries have opened truth commission inquiries or commissions of inquiry into atrocities. Other countries, like Rwanda, opt for a slightly different model; there community courts known as gacaca tried more than a million accused genocide perpetrators over five years, including for crimes of sexual violence.
Even once a trial system is set up, sexual violence cases can be difficult to pursue.
"All crimes are bad, and all need to be properly adjudicated, but the ones most difficult to prosecute are sexual violence cases," Cadman said. It's difficult to get survivors to agree to come forward, and to protect them when they do, and it's difficult to get judges to understand how to weigh testimony about sexual violence.
"What you need to present as evidence in a war crimes trial is not necessarily the same as in a rape trial," Cadman said. That's because proving rape happened — an individual crime in war or in peace time — and proving it was a systematic policy — a crime against humanity — require different approaches, and because there's often so little physical evidence pointing to the systematic nature of the crime.
"You're relying almost exclusively on the testimony of the women coming forward, and judges tend to scrutinize that sometimes unfairly," he said.
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