(4 of 5)
But Bosnia shows how that logic can be turned upside down. There, "elite" units of Serbian irregulars such as the White Eagles have evidently made rape a gesture of group solidarity. A man who refuses to join the others in rape is regarded as a traitor to the unit, and to his Serbian blood. Sometimes, that impulse to bond with the male group becomes a kind of perverse inflaming energy inciting to rape. Lust is only a subsidiary drive.
And sometimes, young men in war may commit rape in order to please their elders, their officers, and win a sort of father-to-son approval. The rape is proof of commitment to the unit's fierceness. A young man willing to do hideous things has subordinated his individual conscience in order to fuse with the uncompromising purposes of the group. A man seals his allegiance in atrocity.
It should be possible to draw a graph predicting the level of rape that would occur in a battle context according to the officers' degrees of tolerance or disapproval. The greatest number of rapes would happen if 1) the soldiers were under direct orders to commit rape. Slightly fewer would take place if 2) there were fully articulated official approval of rape, as with the Soviets entering Germany in 1945. The levels would descend with 3) tacit $ official approval of rape, 4) official neutrality on the subject, 5) tacit official disapproval, 6) spoken official disapproval, 7) direct orders not to rape or 8) a written code of conduct prohibiting rape and mandating punishment for such behavior.
Even armies operating under conditions 7 and 8 may commit numerous rapes. Rapes increase geometrically if the soldiers feel that civilian women are implicated in the war against them. American soldiers in Viet Nam committed an unknowable number of rapes, including those attending the massacre at My Lai, in part when the units were incompetently or viciously led, but also in part because it was hard for the Americans to distinguish officially friendly Vietnamese civilians from the Viet Cong.
Dr. Richard Mollica is the director of the refugee-trauma program of the Harvard School of Public Health and director of the Indochinese Psychiatry Clinic at St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Brighton, Massachusetts. He and his colleagues have worked with some 3,500 refugees, half of them Cambodians. The subjective meaning of rape in war, Mollica suggests, is created by the historical and cultural traditions that surround the deed. "Every society and subculture has a different way of dealing with rape," he says. In some societies the taint of rape is indelible and toxic. In Indochina, as in many areas with traditional societies, rape means the loss of a woman's sexual purity, the highest gift she can give her husband. The Cambodians have a folk saying: "A woman is cotton, a man is a diamond. If you throw cotton in the mud, it's always soiled. But if you throw a diamond in the mud, it can be cleaned."
On the other hand, some women from Nicaragua and other parts of Latin America were proud of being raped in war because their political beliefs told them that they had given their bodies to the revolution. Rape as sacrifice: the crime creates a living martyr.