Systematic Sexual Violence: A Public Policy Analysis

During the Serbian-Bosnian conflict of the early 1990¿s, twenty thousand Bosnian women were sexually assaulted. Several global organizations have concluded that these assaults were not isolated by- products of war but rather systematic and organized commissions of sexual violence. Based on qualitative analysis of reports documenting such assaults, this work asserts that the governing forces of Serbia employed systematic sexual violence as public policy in Bosnia during the conflict of 1992 to 1995. If systematic sexual violence can be explicitly recognized as public policy, it can be differentiated from other forms of sexual violence by its intent -- that is, its policy goals. Then, as with genocide, we can legally define systematic sexual violence by its intent rather than its scale. Occurrences of mass rape would no longer be necessary in order to trigger our attention to this policy of abuse.