Women as War Criminals PDF Download

Author: Izabela Steflja
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503627578
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 122

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Book Description
Women war criminals are far more common than we think. From the Holocaust to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans to the Rwandan genocide, women have perpetrated heinous crimes. Few have been punished. These women go unnoticed because their very existence challenges our assumptions about war and about women. Biases about women as peaceful and innocent prevent us from "seeing" women as war criminals—and prevent postconflict justice systems from assigning women blame. Women as War Criminals argues that women are just as capable as men of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. In addition to unsettling assumptions about women as agents of peace and reconciliation, the book highlights the gendered dynamics of law, and demonstrates that women are adept at using gender instrumentally to fight for better conditions and reduced sentences when war ends. The book presents the legal cases of four women: the President (Biljana Plavšic), the Minister (Pauline Nyiramasuhuko), the Soldier (Lynndie England), and the Student (Hoda Muthana). Each woman's complex identity influenced her treatment by legal systems and her ability to mount a gendered defense before the court. Justice, as Steflja and Trisko Darden show, is not blind to gender.

Author: Izabela Steflja
Publisher: Stanford Briefs
ISBN: 9781503613430
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
"Women war criminals are far more common than we think. From the Holocaust to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans to the Rwandan genocide, women have perpetrated heinous crimes. Few have been punished. Women who have committed war crimes go unnoticed because their very existence goes against our assumptions about war and about women. Biases that contend that women are peaceful and innocent prevent us from "seeing" women as war criminals. They also work to prevent post-conflict justice systems from assigning women blame. We argue that women are just as capable as men in committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. They are also uniquely adept at using gender instrumentally to fight for better conditions and reduced sentences when war ends. We examine four legal cases to demonstrate this: the President (Biljana Plavšić), the Minister (Pauline Nyiramasuhuko), the Soldier (Lynndie England), and the Student (Hoda Muthana). The intersection of gender, the ideological commitment, age, race, nationality, religion, rank, and institutional membership of these women influenced their treatment by legal systems and their ability to mount a gendered defense of their actions. The political context and motivations of the courts that handled their cases also shaped the legal outcomes. Justice, ultimately, is not blind to gender"--

Author: Kelly Dawn Askin
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004642412
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 473

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Book Description
This book examines laws and customs of war prohibiting rape crimes dating back thousands of years, even though gender-specific crimes, particularly sex crimes, have been prevalent in wartime for centuries. It surveys the historical treatment of women in wartime, and argues that all the various forms of gender-specific crimes must be prosecuted and punished. It reviews the Nuremberg and Tokyo War Crimes Tribunals from a gendered perspective, and discusses how crimes against women could have been prosecuted in these tribunals and suggests explanations as to why they were neglected. It addresses the status of women in domestic and international law during the past one hundred years, including the years preceding World War II and in the aftermath of this war, and in the years immediately preceding the Yugoslav conflict. The evolution of the status and participation of women in international human rights and international humanitarian law is analyzed, including the impact domestic law and practice has had on international law and practice. Finally, this book reviews gender-specific crimes in the Yugoslav conflict, and presents arguments as to how various gender-specific crimes (including rape, forced prostitution, forced impregnation, forced maternity, forced sterilization, genocidal rape, and sexual mutilation) can be, and why they must be, prosecuted under Articles 2-5 of the Yugoslav Statute (i.e., as grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions, torture, violations of the laws of war, violations of the customs of war, genocide, and crimes against humanity). The author, a human rights attorney, academic, and activist, spent three years researching both the treatment of women during periods of armed conflict and humanitarian laws protecting women from war crimes.

Author: Christine Warren
Publisher: St. Martin's Paperbacks
ISBN: 142991761X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
Christine Warren "Devil's Bargain" Supernatural bounty hunter Lilli Corbin made a pact with the Prince of Hell: She agreed to recover a book of prophecies. When she learns it could trigger the apocalypse, Lilli is forced to make the ultimate choice: save her soul, or the man she loves? Marjorie M. Liu "The Robber Bride" Welcome to a post-apocalyptic world where women are fed on for their life forces. Now it's up to Maggie, one of the last female survivors, to hunt down and destroy an army of darkness... Caitlin Kittredge "Down in the Ground Where the Dead Men Go" Ava is a demon slayer who needs help from mage Jack Winter to reach the demon underworld—a place of dark seduction...and, maybe, one of no return. Jenna Maclaine "Sin Slayer" London 1889. Jack the Ripper is killing off the city's vampire population, and now it's up to Cin Craven to hunt him down—and save the infected Michael, the love of her undead life.

Author: Christina Lamb
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN: 150119917X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
From Christina Lamb, the coauthor of the bestselling I Am Malala and an award-winning journalist—an essential, groundbreaking examination of how women experience war. In Our Bodies, Their Battlefields, longtime intrepid war correspondent Christina Lamb makes us witness to the lives of women in wartime. An award-winning war correspondent for twenty-five years (she’s never had a female editor) Lamb reports two wars—the “bang-bang” war and the story of how the people behind the lines live and survive. At the same time, since men usually act as the fighters, women are rarely interviewed about their experience of wartime, other than as grieving widows and mothers, though their experience is markedly different from that of the men involved in battle. Lamb chronicles extraordinary tragedy and challenges in the lives of women in wartime. And none is more devastating than the increase of the use of rape as a weapon of war. Visiting warzones including the Congo, Rwanda, Nigeria, Bosnia, and Iraq, and spending time with the Rohingya fleeing Myanmar, she records the harrowing stories of survivors, from Yazidi girls kept as sex slaves by ISIS fighters and the beekeeper risking his life to rescue them; to the thousands of schoolgirls abducted across northern Nigeria by Boko Haram, to the Congolese gynecologist who stitches up more rape victims than anyone on earth. Told as a journey, and structured by country, Our Bodies, Their Battlefields gives these women voice. We have made significant progress in international women’s rights, but across the world women are victimized by wartime atrocities that are rarely recorded, much less punished. The first ever prosecution for war rape was in 1997 and there have been remarkably few convictions since, as if rape doesn’t matter in the reckoning of war, only killing. Some courageous women in countries around the world are taking things in their own hands, hunting down the war criminals themselves, trying to trap them through Facebook. In this profoundly important book, Christina Lamb shines a light on some of the darkest parts of the human experience—so that we might find a new way forward. Our Bodies, Their Battlefields is as inspiring and empowering is as it is urgent, a clarion call for necessary change.

Author: Miriam Gebhardt
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509511237
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
The soldiers who occupied Germany after the Second World War were not only liberators: they also brought with them a new threat, as women throughout the country became victims of sexual violence. In this disturbing and carefully researched book, the historian Miriam Gebhardt reveals for the first time the scale of this human tragedy, which continued long after the hostilities had ended. Discussion in recent years of the rape of German women committed at the end of the war has focused almost exclusively on the crimes committed by Soviet soldiers, but Gebhardt shows that this picture is misleading. Crimes were committed as much by the Western Allies - American, French and British - as by the members of the Red Army, and they occurred not only in Berlin but throughout Germany. Nor was the suffering limited to the immediate aftermath of the war. Gebhardt powerfully recounts how raped women continued to be the victims of doctors, who arbitrarily granted or refused abortions, welfare workers, who put pregnant women in homes, and wider society, which even today prefers to ignore these crimes. Crimes Unspoken is the first historical account to expose the true extent of sexual violence in Germany at the end of the war, offering valuable new insight into a key period of 20th century history.

Author: Matthew Talbert
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 019067587X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
In 2005, US Marines killed 24 unarmed Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha, including several children. How should we assess the perpetrators of this and other war crimes? Is it unfair to blame the Marines because they were subject to situational pressures such as combat stress (and had lost one of their own in combat)? Or should they be held responsible for their actions, since they intentionally chose to kill civilians? In this book, Matthew Talbert and Jessica Wolfendale take up these moral questions and propose an original theory of the causes of war crimes and the responsibility of war crimes perpetrators. In the first half of the book, they challenge accounts that explain war crimes by reference to the situational pressures endured by military personnel, including peer pressure, combat stress, and propaganda. The authors propose an alternative theory that explains how military personnel make sense of their participation in war crimes through their self-conceptions, goals, and values. In the second half of the book, the authors consider and reject theories of responsibility that excuse perpetrators on the grounds that situational pressures often encourage them to believe that their behavior is permissible. Such theories of responsibility are unacceptably exculpatory, implying it is unreasonable for victims of war crimes to blame their attackers. By contrast, Talbert and Wolfendale argue that perpetrators of war crimes may be blameworthy if their actions express objectionable attitudes towards their victims, even if they sincerely believe that what they are doing is right.

Author: Aya Gruber
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520973143
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Many feminists grapple with the problem of hyper-incarceration in the United States, and yet commentators on gender crime continue to assert that criminal law is not tough enough. This punitive impulse, prominent legal scholar Aya Gruber argues, is dangerous and counterproductive. In their quest to secure women’s protection from domestic violence and rape, American feminists have become soldiers in the war on crime by emphasizing white female victimhood, expanding the power of police and prosecutors, touting the problem-solving power of incarceration, and diverting resources toward law enforcement and away from marginalized communities. Deploying vivid cases and unflinching analysis, The Feminist War on Crime documents the failure of the state to combat sexual and domestic violence through law and punishment. Zero-tolerance anti-violence law and policy tend to make women less safe and more fragile. Mandatory arrests, no-drop prosecutions, forced separation, and incarceration embroil poor women of color in a criminal justice system that is historically hostile to them. This carceral approach exacerbates social inequalities by diverting more power and resources toward a fundamentally flawed criminal justice system, further harming victims, perpetrators, and communities alike. In order to reverse this troubling course, Gruber contends that we must abandon the conventional feminist wisdom, fight violence against women without reinforcing the American prison state, and use criminalization as a technique of last—not first—resort.

Author: Carla Del Ponte
Publisher: Other Press, LLC
ISBN: 1590515374
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 510

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Book Description
Carla Del Ponte won international recognition as Switzerland's attorney general when she pursued cases against the Sicilian mafia. In 1999, she answered the United Nations' call to become the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda. In her new role, Del Ponte confronted genocide and crimes against humanity head-on, struggling to bring to justice the highest-ranking individuals responsible for massive acts of violence in Rwanda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, and Kosovo. These tribunals have been unprecedented. They operate along the edge of the divide between national sovereignty and international responsibility, in the gray zone between the judicial and the political, a largely unexplored realm for prosecutors and judges. It is a realm whose native inhabitants–political leaders and diplomats, soldiers and spies–assume that they can commit the big crime without being held culpable. It is a realm crisscrossed by what Del Ponte calls the muro di gomma –"the wall of rubber"– a metaphor referring to the tactics government officials use to hide their unwillingness to confront the culture of impunity that has allowed persons responsible for acts of unspeakable, wholesale violence to escape accountability. Madame Prosecutor is Del Ponte's courageous and startling memoir of her eight years spent striving to serve justice.

Author: Jessica Stern
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062971174
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
An investigation into the nature of violence, terror, and trauma through conversations with a notorious war criminal by Jessica Stern, one of the world's foremost experts on terrorism. Between October 2014 and November 2016, global terrorism expert Jessica Stern held a series of conversations in a prison cell in The Hague with Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian Serb former politician who had been indicted for genocide and other war crimes during the Bosnian War and who became an inspiration for white nationalists. Though Stern was used to interviewing terrorists in the field in an effort to understand their hidden motives, the conversations she had with Karadzic would profoundly alter her understanding of the mechanics of fear, the motivations of violence, and the psychology of those who perpetrate mass atrocities at a state level and who—like the terrorists she had previously studied—target noncombatants, in violation of ethical norms and international law. How do leaders persuade ordinary people to kill their neighbors? What is the “ecosystem” that creates and nurtures genocidal leaders? Could anything about their personal histories, personalities, or exposure to historical trauma shed light on the formation of a war criminal’s identity in opposition to a targeted Other? In My War Criminal, Jessica Stern brings to bear her incisive analysis and her own deeply considered reactions to her interactions with Karadzic, a brilliant and often shockingly charming psychiatrist and poet who spent twelve years in hiding, disguising himself as an energy healer, while also offering a deeply insightful and sometimes chilling account of the complex and even seductive powers of a magnetic leader—and what can happen when you spend many, many hours with that person.