Browsing by Subject "Sexual violence"

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Open Access
The identity of ‘the other’ for sexual violence victims: is there anything new in sexual violence prosecutions before the International Criminal Court?
(Routledge, 2017) Turan, G.
Despite the spectacular development in the field of international criminal law, critical feminism stresses the narrow scope of the sex and gender crimes in the Rome Statute establishing the first permanent International Criminal Court. The current international criminal law discourse, as expressed by recent case law, is geared towards the protection of certain groups targeted on account of their distinctiveness within the framework of a conflict situation, and gender is not recognized as one of these group identities. The question whether international criminal law on sexual violence applies only to inter-group conflicts brings to the fore an uneasy likelihood of exclusion of some recently emergent situations where identities of the conflicting parties transcend a particular ethnicity or nationality, and where victims of sexual violence belong to the same group as their perpetrators. The article argues that, rather than the Rome Statute or newly introduced rules and regulations, a significant obstacle in developing gender justice is the narrow interpretation of sexual violence to inter-group hostilities. © 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
Open Access
Manhood deprived and (Re)constructed during conflicts and international prosecutions : the curious case of the prosecutor v. Uhuru Muigai Kenyatta et al.
(Kluwer Law International, 2016) Turan, G.
Recent case law on sexual violence crimes heard before the ad hoc international criminal tribunals and courts, that interpret them in connection with ethnic conflict, raises the question of which acts can be defined as sexual violence. The International Criminal Court (ICC), in the situation of Kenya, does not regard acts of forced nudity, forcible circumcision and penile amputation as sexual violence when they are motivated by ethnic prejudice and intended to demonstrate the cultural superiority of one tribe over another. The Court argues that not every act of violence that targets parts of the body commonly associated with sexuality should be considered an act of sexual violence. This recent interpretation of what counts as sexual violence provides another example of the complicity of international criminal law institutions in the ongoing construction process of female subordination. The ICC, in the Kenya situation, implicitly confirms the mutilation of female agency by interpreting penile amputation as a kind of power game between males, and by instrumentalizing the male sexual organ as an indicator of masculinity and manhood. © 2016, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.