Rape as a weapon of war: From Bosnia and Rwanda to the atrocities of Nanjing - how women and girls have become the victims of sexual violence in conflicts throughout history

Rape as a weapon of war: From Bosnia and Rwanda to the atrocities of Nanjing - how women and girls have become the victims of sexual violence in conflicts throughout history

For centuries, women and girls have been raped by soldiers as part of a systematic campaign of sexual violence - and they continue to be. 

In the ten months since Russia invaded Ukraine, hundreds of women have been raped, tortured and beaten by Russian soldiers - often while their husbands and families were forced to watch.

Horrific testimonies - including how Russian soldiers gang-raped a 22-year-old Ukrainian mother, sexually abused her husband and made the couple have sex in front of them before raping their four-year-old daughter - have shown how Vladimir Putin's men have used rape as a weapon of war.

In the last century alone, millions of women have been systematically raped during war - in Bosnia in 1992, Rwanda in 1994, China in 1937 to name but a few instances.

Systematic mass rape campaigns use forced impregnation as a tool to ethnically cleanse a nation and psychologically traumatize generations of people.

The true scale of wartime rape - and now in Ukraine - will continue to remain unknown as many women remain silent about their experiences for fear of being stigmatised. 

The children born as a result of this wartime rape are often stigmatised themselves as they become a 'living reminder of the conflict', academics say.

Here, MailOnline looks at how rape has been used as a weapon of war in five conflicts.

 

Nanjing, China, 1937

It has been 85 years since Japanese soldiers captured the Chinese city of Nanking during the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. 

In what has become known as the 'Rape of Nanking', Japanese soldiers raped, tortured and slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians during a six-week bloodbath from December 13, 1937.

Japanese soldiers raped at least 20,000 women and girls - many of whom were mutilated and murdered -, and slaughtered at least 300,000 civilians. 

There were 40 military brothels in the city alone where Japanese soldiers would rape women and girls as young as 12 years old.

One of the darkest chapters in China's history, the carnage was part of the Second Sino-Japanese War and bore witness to a multitude of atrocities, including killing contests, mass rape, the bayoneting of children and babies as well as the looting of homes. 

The rampage of murder and rape in Nanking - China's capital at the time - continued for months and has become an enduring symbol of the savagery of Japanese occupation for Chinese citizens.

Decaying bodies filled the streets and the safety zone which was established for the protection of civilians was ignored. The safety zone was about the size of Central Park.

Rwanda, 1994

In Rwanda, nearly one million people - one tenth of the country's population - were killed and 500,000 were brutally raped in 100 days of horrific abuse in 1994.

During the genocide, an estimated 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and the moderate Hutus who tried to protect them were killed by Hutu extremists, led by the Rwandan army and a militia known as the Interahamwe.

Rwanda's genocide was ignited on April 6, 1994, when a plane carrying President Juvénal Habyarimana was shot down and crashed in the capital, Kigali, killing the leader, who like most Rwandans was an ethnic Hutu. 

Rwanda's Tutsi minority was blamed for the crash, igniting revenge attacks targeting Tutsis across the country of 12 million people. 

During the genocide, political and military leaders encouraged rape to further destroy the Tutsi ethnic group, which today makes up just 14 per cent of the population. 

An estimated 500,000 women sexually abused in a systematic policy of ethnic cleansing.

Hutus also released AIDS patients from hospitals in order to form 'rape squads' to infect Tutsi women. As a result, thousands of survivors and their children born from wartime rape are infected with the HIV/AIDS virus and suffer long-term effects.

The wartime rape survivors are still affected by the horrific abuse, with many suffering from PTSD as a result of the violence they endured.

Bosnia, 1992 - 1995 

During the three-year Bosnian war, which began in 1992, up to 50,000 women and girls were subjected to sexual violence as part of a military campaign of ethnic cleansing.

Paramilitary units and the Bosnian Serbian army expelled the non-Serb population, destroyed their homes and separated families while forcing thousands into detention camps where many were tortured and later executed.

An estimated 100,000 people were killed and between 20,000 and 50,000 Bosnian women were raped -  many in special rape camps - by Serbian soldiers as a tool of warfare.

The women - who were mainly Muslim Bosniaks - were imprisoned in gyms, abandoned houses and concentration camps where they were raped with objects, such as guns and broken glass bottles.

The Serbian commanders ordered their troops to rape the Bosnian women as part of a strategy of ethnic cleansing. Several victims recalled how Serbian soldiers told them: 'It is better to give birth to Chetniks [Serbians] than to Muslim filth'. 

It is not known how many children were born as a result of the wartime - and they have since become known in Bosnia as the 'invisible' children due to the stigma surrounding their birth in a patriarchal society. 

The ethnic cleansing and genocidal campaigns in Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s led to an understanding of 'rape as genocidal', with rape being declared a 'tool of warfare' by the United Nations.

Germany, Second World War, 1945 

Russian soldiers raped two million German women during their occupation of eastern Germany at the end of the Second World War in 1945.

Hundreds of women at Ravensbruck, the Nazi concentration camp exclusively for women, were also raped by the Red Army soldiers as they arrived to 'liberate' the camp.

Ravensbruck survivors have detailed how thousands of women were gassed by the SS guards - 2,500 were killed over one weekend as the Red Army closed in on the Nazis. 

But there were still thousands left at the camp on April 30, 1945, when the surviving women heard Russian artillery. 

The women - realising that the SS guards had fled - prepared a red banner to hang across the camp gates for who they thought would be their saviours after years of horrific torture.

But the Russian soldiers brought a fresh horror and raped thousands of women. 

The advancing Red Army had been carrying out mass rapes of German women ever since it had crossed the German border - but the soldiers also raped starving concentration inmates, many of whom were Russians. 

In the book 'If This Is A Woman: Inside Ravensbruck, Hitler's Concentration Camp For Women' by Sarah Helm, Nadia Vasilyeva, a nurse detailed how the Russian soldiers 'at first greeted us as sisters but then they turned into animals'.

'I was little more than a corpse,' said Ilse Heinrich, 'and then I had to undergo that!' 

Pregnant women were also raped at the concentration camp by the Red Army soldiers. 

Another prisoner said the Russian soldiers demanded payment for their liberation.   

She said: 'The Germans never raped us because we were Russian swine, but our own soldiers did. Stalin had said that no soldiers should be taken prisoner, so they felt they could treat us like dirt.'

Ethiopia's Tigray region, present day 

Thousands of women and girls, including those as young as eight-years old, are being raped by Ethiopian soldiers and allied forces in the country's Tigray region.

Sexual violence in the region is being used as a weapon of war to both humiliate the women and their Tigrayan ethnic group, with some victims reporting being gang-raped over several days. 

No one knows the real toll during the two-year conflict, as most of the health facilities across the region of 6 million people were looted or destroyed.

Women have described being held for days or weeks while being raped multiple times, usually by several men. Others told Amnesty International they were raped in front of family members.

The soldiers would also rape pregnant women. The victims said they had nails, gravel and shrapnel shoved into their varginas. They said they were raped by Ethiopian soldiers and their allies from Eritrea.

UN-backed investigators said in September that they have found evidence war crimes and crimes against humanity by Ethiopian government forces, Tigray forces and Eritrea's military — including rape, murder and pillage — over the nearly two-year war centering on Ethiopia's northern Tigray region.

Eritrean troops have fought alongside Ethiopia's federal military against Tigray's former ruling party since hostilities resumed in the region on August 24 2022 after a lull in fighting.   

Thousands of people have been killed and hundreds of thousands of people have been forced from their homes in the mountainous region of about 5 million. 

The conflict, which began nearly two years ago, has spread from Tigray into the neighboring regions of Afar and Amhara as Tigray's leaders try to break the blockade of their region.