sexual violence in Bucha in Ukraine

A violent act against a woman is defined as ‘‘one that causes or is likely to harm or suffer women physically, sexually, or psychologically, including threats, coercion, or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, regardless of whether it occurs in public or private life" (United Nations, 1995, Platform for Action D. 112). definition emerged from the 1995 United Nations Conference on Women, Beijing, represents an international consensus on how to conceptualize the dynamics of gender-based violence and encompasses child sexual abuse, coercive sex, rape, stalking, and intimate partner violence. "Gender-based violence" refers to violence shaped by gender roles and status in society. Gender-based violence against women does not encompass every violent act a woman may happen to experience (being Terrorized with a weapon during a robbery, for example). Gender roles and expectations, male entitlement, sexual objectification, and discrepancies in power and status have legitimized, rendered invisible, sexualized, and helped to perpetuate violence against women. O’Toole and Schiffman (1997) offer a broad definition to include “any interpersonal, organisational or politically orientated violation perpetrated against people due to their gender identity, sexual orientation, or location in the hierarchy of male-dominated social systems such as family, military, organisations, or the labour force”. ‘‘Gender-based violence includes a broad spectrum of interactions, from verbal harassment and institutional discrimination to enslavement and murder. This continuum includes but is not limited to: acts of physical, sexual, emotional, verbal, economic and psychological violence by intimate partners or family members; sexual assault (including sexual assaults on children, stranger ra rape, marital rape and any unwanted touching, kissing or other sexual acts); sexual harassment and intimidation, and forced prostitution’’ (Russell, 1984). Definition of Sexual assault: illegal sexual contact that usually involves force upon a person without consent or is inflicted upon a person who is incapable of giving consent (as because of age or physical or mental incapacity) or who places the assailant (such as a doctor) in a position of trust or authority. At the time of the Early Modern period, there was a cultural acceptance of women’s sexual pleasure. However, outside marriage the sexually desiring woman very often appeared tainted by ‘whorishness, witchcraft. . . [or]. . . sin’ (Gowing 2003: 85). Sexual violence is rare in Early Modern records, but some women and girls did come to court to protest the personal injury of sexual violence even though the odds were stacked against them, and they could articulate their wrongs only in muted form. This was an era that often -understood emotional states through their social effects and consequences, through religion and the workings of providence, or even through the action of the supernatural, not as in modern society through interiority and the psyche Although there are examples of women suffering emotional hurt following sexual assaults (Macdonald 1981: 87, 106), the chief injury of sexual violence was to reputation, rather than the modern view which prioritises psychological damage. ‘’Women’s reputations were crucial in shaping their social position and depended on sexual chastity even more than on their work and household duties’’ (Walker 1996). Loss of virginity was not the only concern. Married women, who arguably had greater access to the range of metaphor and allusion with which rape could be described in court, made up the majority of the complainants in Laura Gowing’s research, which uses ecclesiastical court records (Gowing 1996, 2003). Given the cultural complexities of sexual violence and the power dynamics in the legal institutions that tried it, courtroom narratives need to be appreciated as multi-layered and allusive texts which, with careful reading, can shed some light, however tangential, on sexual identities and cultures as well as on legal process. ‘’Anthropologist Mary Douglas argued that rituals or talk about dirt and pollution sign social and cultural disruptions and things out of place’’. (Douglas 1991). ‘’Miranda Chaytor has used a psychological approach to read the silences and metaphors in women’s court depositions, which, she proposes, were a narrative means of skirting around the shame and dishonour implicit in a woman’s description of the injury done to her. Although there was no pattern of ‘honour killing’ as can, for example, be identified in mid-twentieth century Greece’’ (Avdela 2010), metaphors of pollution, of disruption, or assertions of honour founded in non-sexual matters provided a way of signalling the sexual violence which, ’’ Chaytor argues, might be sufficiently shameful to be repressed in direct memory’’ (Chaytor 1995). However, as Garthine Walker points out, such an approach tends to read modern perceptions of sexual violence back in time (Walker 1998: 1). Dianne Herman (1984), the first scholar to articulate the definition, posited that rape will continue to be pervasive as long as sexual violence and male dominance are glamorized. In 1993, Buchwald, Fletcher, and Roth defined rape culture as one in which rape is a fact of life, like death or taxes. ‘’Rape culture does not only pertain to women; men, and gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered individuals are raped’’ (Ridgway, 2014; Stotzer, 2009). Disabled people are raped at a high rate (80%) as well (Madden, 2014). . In the United Kingdom, more than 85, 000 women are raped and 400, 000 are assaulted each year (Bates, 2014). ‘’Men in nine countries in Asia and the South Pacific reported committing single- and multiple-perpetrator rape, with over 50 percent having raped as young teenagers’’ (Jewkes, Fula, Roselli, & Garcia-Moreno, 2013). ‘’In India, after the gang rape of the student on the bus in New Delhi, activists began to shed light on the widespread problem in that country’’ (Udas, 2013