[Recenzija] : Henry, Nicola. War and rape: law, memory and justice

Abstract

With the women’s rights movements, sexual violence turned from a private and peripheral experience into a politicised issue.These developments shed new light on war crimes, too. Nicola Henry in her book War and Rape tells the silenced side of wars. Via analysis of the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, and the International Criminal Tribunal for the FormerYugoslavia and International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, Henry illuminates the legal developments and practices that led to recognition of wartime rapes as a crime. The author argues that both the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals failed adequately to address sexual violence. Crimes of rape still constituted ‘blasphemy’ (p. 48) in heroic war narratives. The Tokyo trial has listed rape crimes in its indictment; yet it succeeded basically in making wartime rapes known to the world.[...]