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Lisa Sharlach
APSA 2004
Rebel Women in States of Emergency: South Africa and Peru
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. . . we have created another culture for ourselves -- a refuge in which women’s words are
believed -- and we can experience the truth of ourselves in words and images. This is a
place of the mind, but still a place, made by bent and strained words, so that now, our
words do not have to be so bent, so strained. Now, writing from this place, I want more
than the mere unmasking or naming of atrocity. I have lived in a free place, and my head
is filled with different visions. I am trying to think of a world in which rape would be a
foreign concept (Griffin 1971, 24).
Second-wave feminists such as Susan Griffin exposed, or, in their words, broke
the silence surrounding, the taboo subject of rape. Activist writers such as Susan Griffin
(1971), Susan Brownmiller (1975), Angela Davis (1985) and others brought to light the
use of rape as a perpetuation of political inequality. Over thirty-five years after the initial
explosion of study on rape in women’s studies, however, there is still within political
science a silence concerning rape that is only beginning to be broken. In this essay,
therefore, I explore the state’s utilization of rape as a tactic of terrorism and torture during
states of emergency in the cases of both apartheid South Africa and Peru from 1980 until
1992. I propose that this rape is part of a strategy to maintain the subordination of
disadvantaged social groups.
The use of sexual violence as torture or terror is disturbingly and increasingly
common. In the recent strife in Liberia, unpaid state troops, as well as marauding
insurgents, raped Liberian girls (and, in the North, boys). Some of the rape may have
been opportunistic, but it had a political effect. As in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the war
there a decade ago, news of the campaign of terror by soldiers caused residents of
neighboring towns to flee their homes. (Human Rights Watch 2003). In Sudan, there is
strong evidence from human rights observers that Northern Sudanese militias, backed by
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Jim Brown of Samford University’s Department of History was invaluable to me in reviewing the section
on apartheid South Africa. Donald Rothchild, Miroslav Nincic, Jeannette Money and Scott Gartner, all of
the University of California-Davis’ Department of Political Science, provided extensive comments on this
research when I was in graduate school. It was originally part of my doctoral dissertation, Sexual Violence
as a Political Weapon (2001). U.C. Davis’ Pro Femina Research Consortium and the I.G.C.C. (Institute on
Global Conflict and Cooperation) provided funding.
Convention