The Pros And Cons Of Military Peacekeeping

J.D Student, Stella Cernak, in her excerpt in the Michigan Journal of Gender & Law, discusses recent media attention of intra-military sexual assault and rape in the United States Armed Forces. Cernak’s purpose is to bring awareness of the nature of gender crimes in the military. Not only in the U.S but all armed forces worldwide. She adopts an informative tone to bring clarity and awareness to the audience reading. She uses real life examples and cases that will trigger the readers to see that she understands what they are going through in hopes of victims to continue their fight for a change.

Rape and sexual assault are major issues in the military. The purpose of this essay is to discuss the issue of rape and sexual assault in the military. The number of attacks for rape and sexual assault in the military are at an all-time high. Women have recently been allowed to fight on the front line. While this may be a huge achievement for women-kind, for this woman, it is a very scary thought. I am a women with female relatives, with female friends. I may be forced to join the military one day if a war breaks out and women are needed to protect the country. I would be happy to serve my country if I did not have to be scared of my fellow soldiers.

Sexual Abuse is known to occur among any relationship, race, sex, and gender, including male victims and homosexual couples. When rape is committed, authorities do what’s possible in order to seek justice. However, when the authoritative ones are those whom commit the crime, it is nearly impossible to seek justice. In the military forces, rape is the main issue among the soldiers and the authority figures. Although men are victimized in several cases, women constantly suffer from unjustified rape. Participating in sexual assaults are led due to external theories of gender construction, such as the Social-Learning Theory, supporting the influence of patriarchy (Barbara F. McManus, pt. 3). Male authorities allow corruption of the military forces against rape, initiating obstacles towards the justice for women.

Recruitment and use of children in war is one of the six grave violations against children in situations of conflict. Currently, there are over 300,000 child soldiers being exploited in battle, while six million have been gravely injured or are now permanently disabled. Additionally, there are about 20 million boys and girls that have been displaced and are refugees in surrounding countries due to the gross violations of conflict and human rights. The role of children in armed conflict is not restricted to direct participation in warfare, but includes boys and girls in support functions that ultimately are a bigger risk and hardship than combat.

Investigative journalism is important given that most of their work centers on interviews of aid workers, community leaders, and women combined with fieldwork in Eastern Congo. I used investigative journalism because it is a relatively unbiased source. The importance of unbiased is critical in this project given there are issues with the reporting from international aid organizations working in the region. The stress on unbiased is because of international aid organizations refusal to believe that their data reporting is inaccurate. International aid organization is biased in their refusal to understand if their data is inaccurate. The problem is that most individuals working in Congo know that data collection is typically not accurate. Inaccuracies are due to difficult conditions for data collection, such as poor infrastructure. Interesting, given difficult conditions, international aid organization made the assumptions that the data is likely higher, however, with no evidence to support that claim. Ultimately, I am using the research, reporting, and investigative journalism to show how women and communities were able to convince international aid organization that mass rapes were a more serious problem to gain access to international

The Human Rights Watch recommends that the UN should verify the profiles of peacekeepers prior to their deployment. They should be trained on the UN’s zero tolerance plan and ensure that MINUSCA’s Conduct and Discipline and OIOS teams (who are under-staffed), are receiving necessary resources in response to the issue of sexual violence.

One of the worst precursors to a rape situation is the power imbalance that is experienced throughout the military. This disparity closely ties together the concepts of militarized masculinity and sexual violence in war. The hierarchal structure is there for a purpose but is abused in this regard. The chain of command opens a very easy way for the commanding officers, who have a considerable amount of control over their subordinates, to take advantage of them, as well as the power that soldiers often find they have over civilians during times of war. This is considerable because since 1945, most wars have been civil in nature. “Many militaristic cultures emphasize the physical and social traits of a soldier in opposition to femininity” (Via

True credits sexual violence during and after wartime to the fact that “soldiering masculinities” are encouraged (True, pg. 44). Any weapons are seen as fair game even if they are ones that are human rights violations. These violations include domestic violence sexual violence, forced pregnancy and marriage, trafficking, and much more (Unit 6 Lecture, 2018). However, the victims of these violations stem much further than just the civilian women and children in conflict zones. Instead, they are also the women within the military. An astonishing thirty percent of women in the military have been raped of sexually assaulted (Invisible War, 2013).

To explore the legacy of rape as a tool in war Nancy Toping Bazin’s and Jane Harmovit Lauter’s philosophy of domination is important to know. The philosophy of domination is the underpinning of all patriarchal institutions from domestic institutions, to government, and the military. Another usefully theory is one succinctly described by Katrina Lee Koo in “Confronting a Disciplinary Blindness: Women, War and Rape in the International Politics of Security”. Koo says, “the nation, the state, allies, and enemies intersect with gendered identities…sexual enslavement is politicized violence against women’s bodies that is both state-sanctioned and premeditated” in effect, during war time there is an intersection of gender with religion, ethnicity, nationality and anything else that represents the opposing side as an “other”. In this sense an assault on the women of a nation is a direct assault on their state, their culture, their religion, their ethnic group as well as the men in it. In her essay “Revisiting the Issue of Korean ‘Military Comfort Women’: The Question of Truth and Positionality” Hyunah Yang says, “by invading women’s bodies, rape attempts to possess the enemy’s property and leaves a rift in the most fundamental ground of the symbolic system that sustains the enemies group identity…belief that the woman’s body is a field underpinning the family, ethnic group, and/or nation” (61). During the comfort system the Japanese army was not only in control of the Korean

Waking up to clean clothes, food, clean water, and a family is of always good, but waking up to no family, no food, and dirty water is the life of a child soldier. In some parts of the world, such as Afghanistan, Colombia, India, Iraq, Libya, Mali, Pakistan, Thailand, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen, there is the tremendous dispute over the poor innocent child soldiers. Research has shown that child soldiers are repeated sexual assault can also lead to infection, disease (including HIV/AIDS), uterine deformation, menstrual complications, sterility, and death, as well as to “shock, loss of dignity, shame, low self-esteem, poor concentration and memory, persistent nightmares, depression, and other post-traumatic stress effects.”(Steel). This is one

The current military system is outdated and very non-effective. The land of the free has failed to follow just a simple and current course of action such as forensics and evidence which has contributed to lots of corruption. In the military is the only place that you can be convicted of adultery just by rumors, but this really would never happen in the case of a rape case.

accompanying an armed conflict groups and is captured by government forces, they are usually treated with intense brutality as enemies rather than as children. Contrary to international standard that a child soldiers should be treated first and foremost as sufferers of war in need of care and assistance for rehabilitation, some have been detained solely on the basis of their alleged association with armed groups, or for desertion and other military offences while in armed forces (Child Soldier Global Report 2008). As it is observed, assistance for children in need tends to be the last priority of the all parties in war, which result in unsatisfactory acts against children that contradicts international standards that that support the rights

Child soldiering is a problem that the United Nations wants to solve. To prevent the use of child soldiers the United Nations engages with governments and armed groups in order to find a solution that satisfies everyone. In child soldiering, the United Nations looks for the development of political structures over time in order to find the roots of child soldiering. The political structure of the country provides a large amount of information i.e. political power of citizens, political awareness, and political knowledge. Politics inform people about their rights and duties. However due to the persistent lack of solid political structure, the citizens of concerned countries are not politically aware and thus cannot object to the use of child soldiers. In fact, political structures and political awareness have an impact on social behaviour. Groups that acquire power with the use of violence can easily transmit their beliefs to the population (Dyck). Therefore, the acceptance and practice of child soldiering can be explained by the fragile political structures, lack of political power and social behaviour over

The present Chapter introduces main concepts, theories and literature in relation to wartime sexual violence including the definition of gender based violence, sexual violence and wartime sexual violence. It presents a review of current theories and literature explaining the prevalence of sexual violence in armed conflicts but focuses on feminist and gender equality theories placing wartime sexual violence within a broader concept of Gender Based Violence. Some feminist authors consulted are Dubravka Zarkov (1997, 2007), Cynthia Enloe (1990, 1994, 2000), Judith Butler (1999), R.W. Connell (2005), and Skjelsbæk (2001). The main argument this Chapter is that wartime sexual violence is a form of gender based violence which underlying causes

The research aims to investigate the critical relationship between the British military and service women. In order to reach these objectives, the researcher analyses the legal policies that recognise that men and women are different, which might also explain the gender based culture of military organisations. Furthermore, the study examines the relationship between male dominated culture and sexual harassment practices, which have been suggested to accomplish and maintain masculinity and gender differences between men and women.