Further Resources

According to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of an ethnic, national, or religious group and/or ''deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part'' constitute genocide. Rape certainly may cause serious physical and/or mental injury to the survivor, and also may destroy the morale of her family and ethnic community. However, this Convention does not explicitly state that sexual violence is a crime of genocide. The Convention should be expanded to include mass rape, regardless of whether the victims are raped on the basis of racial/ethnic, national, or religious identity.

Award-winning documentary Rising Silence preserves the testimony of some of the 200,000 women abducted during the country’s war of independence.

The use of rape was common during the 1971 war in Bangladesh. Six days after the war ended, the new government publicly declared that any woman raped in the war was a birangona or ‘war heroine’. There exists a public memory of wartime rape through various literary, visual and testimonial forms, ensuring that the raped woman endures as an iconic figure. However, women’s experiences of wartime sexual violence are often explained through the limited lenses of silence, voice, shame, honour, gender, patriarchy, stigma, trauma and ostracisation, which help to create the figure of the horrific raped woman – meaning that birangonas are often assumed to have a horrific life trajectory. This can undermine the very resilience that characterises many of the women who were raped. In contrast, this chapter focuses on generative resilience, as offering a different narrative of sexual violence that emphasises women’s abilities to continue to live with and pass on the experiences of sexual violence in ways that are uniquely relational. It is this contextualised and social ecological understanding of resilience that needs to inform adaptive peacebuilding, in order to foster a nuanced understanding of the effects of rape as a weapon of war.

Review of The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971 by
Nayanika Mookherjee, Durham/London: Duke University Press, 2015; pp xxiv + 325, $26.95

Rape, commonly used as a weapon of war, was long seen as an inevitable by-product of battle. Recent research finds that war itself is gendered and that the implications and consequences of violence in battle differ for women and men. Against this backdrop, this article explores the issue of wartime rape during Bangladesh’s liberation movement against Pakistan in 1971. It examines the discourse surrounding the women who were raped in wartime and, after independence, awarded the title of “birangona” or “war heroine.” It explores the representation of the birangona in the postwar Bangladeshi media, the media’s role in challenging or reinforcing the discourse, and the implications of these for war heroines who lacked agency.

The author of the book, The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971, replies to responses to her work and offers an analysis of the pitfalls of reframing the birgangonas as "freedom fighters."

Tarfia Faizullah’s poems wrestle with the mass rapes of Bangladesh’s 1971 Liberation War.