"...[I]s it really necessary to distort the facts so much to gain public attention? We should not need to suggest that nearly every Liberian woman was raped to care about the actual, dire situation facing many Liberian women."

Rape is common during wartime, but even within the context of the same war, some armed groups perpetrate rape on a massive scale while others never do. In Rape During Civil WarDara Kay Cohen examines variation in the severity and perpetrators of rape using an original dataset of reported rape during all major civil wars from 1980 to 2012. Cohen also conducted extensive fieldwork, including interviews with perpetrators of wartime rape, in three postconflict counties, finding that rape was widespread in the civil wars of the Sierra Leone and Timor-Leste but was far less common during El Salvador's civil war.

"When militias are first reported to rape and sexually assault civilians, state forces reportedly increase their own sexual violence. In other words, governments don't outsource violence against civilians; they model it. They may influence militia behavior through training or through more informal diffusion — or both. Studies show that when governments train militias, militias are more likely to target civilians both with sexual violence and other kinds of violence."

"...[A]rmies that rape should be publicly named and shamed, a tactic that research shows significantly ameliorated the severity of genocides and state-sponsored killing in the last several decades. If a soldier is widely identified as a rapist, or a commander is known around the world to tolerate rape, the shame and threat to their reputation may dissuade their peers — particularly those who seek international legitimacy — from raping."

Existing research maintains that governments delegate extreme, gratuitous, or excessively brutal violence to militias. However, analyzing all militias in armed conflicts from 1989 to 2009, we find that this argument does not account for the observed patterns of sexual violence, a form of violence that should be especially likely to be delegated by governments. Instead, we find that states commit sexual violence as a complement to—rather than a substitute for—violence perpetrated by militias.

The Belfer Center is proud to announce that our own Dara Kay Cohen was the co-recipient of the American Political Science Association's 2014 Heinz I. Eulau Award for her article in the American Political Science Review, "Explaining Rape during Civil War: Cross National Evidence (1980–2009)." The Heinz Eulau prize is awarded annually for the best article published in the American Political Science Review and for the best article published in Perspectives on Politics in the calendar year. The award committee included Edward D. Mansfield (University of Pennsylvania), Nathan Monroe (University of California at Merced) and Laura Stephenson (University of Western Ontario).

"For policymakers to develop effective policies, they will require a clear understanding of the ways that rape and other forms of sexual violence have varied across time, space and perpetrator group. As social scientists, we are committed to tracking these forms of variation, which are essential to understanding where — and helping us test theories of why — rape has occurred in recent conflicts."

Which armed groups have perpetrated sexual violence in recent conflicts? This article presents patterns from the new Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict (SVAC) dataset. The dataset, coded from the three most widely used sources in the quantitative human rights literature, covers 129 active conflicts, and the 625 armed actors involved in these conflicts, during the period 1989–2009.

Why do some armed groups commit massive wartime rape, whereas others never do? Using an original dataset, the author describes the substantial variation in rape by armed actors during recent civil wars and tests a series of competing causal explanations.

Much of the current scholarship on wartime violence, including studies of the combatants themselves, assumes that women are victims and men are perpetrators. However, there is an increasing awareness that women in armed groups may be active fighters who function as more than just cooks, cleaners, and sexual slaves. In this article, the author focuses on the involvement of female fighters in a form of violence that is commonly thought to be perpetrated only by men: the wartime rape of noncombatants.