Rape and Sexual Harassment Around the World - Purposes Of Rape

Punitive rape is sometimes practiced in countries where men resent women taking initiative or assuming positions of authority or power. In Latin America, feminists contend that women are raped as a way to force them back into the traditional sphere of home and children. In India, a leader of the Women's Development Program, an organization that helps women start businesses, was gangraped in front of her husband by men who disapproved of her campaign against child marriages.

Rape is also practiced as a weapon of war or as a right of victorious forces—"spoils of war," as noted by Nancy Farwell in her "War Rape: New Conceptualizations and Responses" (Affilia, vol. 19, Winter 2004). Combatants and their sympathizers have raped women in wartime with near complete impunity. In 1993, for the first time, the UN passed a resolution identifying rape as a war crime. Documented cases of wartime rape have occurred in Sierra Leone, Kosovo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, Liberia, Rwanda, El Salvador, Guatemala, Kuwait, Bangladesh, the former Yugoslavia, and by U.S. troops in the Vietnam War. In Darfur, Sudan, rape has been used as a weapon of war by governmentsponsored militia known as Janjawid since 2003 ("Darfur: Rape as a Weapon of War: Sexual Violence and Its Consequences," Amnesty International, July 19, 2004, http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGAFR540762004?open&of=ENG-373, accessed November 22, 2004).

There is little accurate information on rates of rape and sexual assault, especially in developing countries. The challenge of defining rape across cultures makes data collection difficult, and underreporting raises suspicion about the actual number of incidents. For example, a 1999 UN Children's Fund study found that from 1989 to 1997 reported rapes declined in all but three of the twelve countries for which data were available. This decline seems unlikely since during the same years there were sharp increases in all other crime statistics.

The Seventh United Nations Survey on Crime Trends and the Operations of Criminal Justice Systems (1998–2000) indicated that rapes were being reported as readily as other crimes. The survey is a major worldwide study conducted periodically by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/crime_cicp_survey_seventh.html, accessed November 22, 2004). It revealed that the total number of recorded rapes in the ninety-two countries that participated in the survey dropped 30% between 1999 and 2000. The total number of recorded crimes reported by those countries also dropped by 30% during the same period. In comparison, the total number of recorded rapes actually increased slightly, by 0.2% between 1998 and 1999, and the total number of recorded crimes similarly rose by 0.4%. This possibly indicates changes in the way countries defined and recorded crimes from one year to the next.

It also may reflect an unwillingness of governments and victims to report rape. The authors of Not a Minute More: Ending Violence against Women (The United Nations Women's Development Fund, 2003, http://www.unifem.org/filesconfirmed/207/312_book_complete_eng.pdf, accessed November 22, 2004) notes that reporting a rape is seen as a danger by victims, who may suffer further at the hands of police or their own families:

The stigma, disbelief, ridicule or retribution attached to speaking out makes it nearly impossible to obtain accurate national statistics on rape in many countries. Having suffered one trauma, many women do not want to undergo additional emotional pain at the hands of the police. According to the Philippines National Police, approximately two in ten rapes are reported. The rest are kept hidden; in many cases a woman's family discourages her from reporting the incident.

Rape and gender-based sexual assault are closely linked to suicide, prostitution, trafficking for sex, substance abuse, murder, high-risk and unintended pregnancy, HIV/AIDS, other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), and disability. Having suffered rape and sexual assault also increase an individual's utilization of health care services. One U.S. study found a history of rape or sexual assault to be a stronger predictor of using health care than any other factor—rape victims used two-and-a-half times more services than women who had not been raped.