There are horrors so deliberate they seem almost to belong to another century, or another species. The calculated use of sexual violence as a tool of political control is one of them.
History, though, is blunt. It keeps showing us the same thing: this is not an accident of war. It is a method.
For years, the West found comfort in a simpler story. Rape in wartime was treated as the ugly spillover of chaos, what happens when discipline collapses, and civilization briefly steps aside. That explanation was easier to live with because it implied disorder rather than design.
The record tells a different story.
Bosnia did not stumble into rape camps. Rwanda did not see the mass sexual assault of Tutsi women because thousands of men happened to lose control at once. ISIS did not create an organized market in Yazidi women by mistake.
In each case, sexual violence had a purpose. It humiliated, displaced, terrorized, and broke communities apart. It was aimed not only at bodies, but at memory, identity, and the bonds that hold people together.
International law eventually caught up. The tribunals in Arusha and The Hague recognized that rape can form part of genocide and crimes against humanity. The United Nations accepted that sexual violence can be used as a tactic of war.
Those conclusions did not come from theory. They came from survivor testimony, forensic evidence, and a pattern too repeated to dismiss.
My own encounters with this subject were unsettling.
During the years I spent moving within circles connected to the Islamic Republic of Iran, I heard conversations that revealed a colder understanding of power. Violence was not discussed only in terms of casualties or territory. It was discussed in terms of its ability to reshape societies from within. The thinking was psychological before it was military.
The logic was brutally efficient.
Break enough trust, and communities begin to fracture.
Inflict enough shame, and victims stop speaking.
Leave people carrying invisible wounds, and they become easier to intimidate than populations held together by confidence and solidarity.
No one needed to spell out an operational plan for the intention to be clear. Trauma itself was being treated as a weapon.
This is difficult for liberal democracies to grasp because our instincts are legalistic and material.
We count missiles, budgets, battalions, and border crossings. We measure strength in steel and fire. Authoritarian movements often measure something else: fear, humiliation, dependency, and silence.
In that calculation, the body becomes a means rather than an end.
That is why societies emerging from systematic sexual violence often look haunted in ways outsiders struggle to understand. Bridges can be rebuilt. Elections can be held. Currency can be stabilized. But families stay fractured, children inherit unspoken grief, and communities continue carrying burdens that no peace agreement can simply lift away.
Trauma has a long memory.
It settles into ordinary life. It changes what is said at the dinner table, who is trusted, and which truths are left in the dark.
The campaign against the Yazidis remains one of the clearest modern examples. ISIS did not merely permit sexual slavery. It cataloged it, regulated it, and wrapped it in ideology. Bureaucracy and barbarism moved together.
Political (in)convenience
The same lens should be used when examining the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023.
The United Nations Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict later concluded that there were reasonable grounds to believe conflict-related sexual violence had occurred during the attacks and against hostages.
The real issue is no longer whether these crimes took place. It is why so many institutions hesitated for so long before saying so, and what that hesitation reveals about our willingness to confront atrocity when it is politically inconvenient.
How does a movement reach the point where such conduct becomes thinkable?
Extreme acts rarely appear in isolation. They grow in environments where dehumanization becomes routine, and violence is praised rather than restrained. Over time, ideological conditioning can wear down moral boundaries until what once seemed unthinkable starts to look permissible.
That is not the same as collective guilt. Entire populations cannot be reduced to the crimes of armed factions. People retain agency, even under tyranny. But ideology is never irrelevant. Systems that reward hatred and sanctify brutality shape the moral climate in which choices are made.
The uncomfortable truth may be our own inconsistency.
The democratic world often responds to sexual violence with clarity until politics gets in the way. Then certainty wavers. Some victims are believed at once. Others are treated as though their suffering must pass an ideological test before it counts.
The crime is the same. Only the story around it changes.
That selectivity is itself a moral failure.
Perpetrators depend on silence, hesitation, embarrassment, and denial. They count on civilized societies finding the subject too ugly to face directly. They rely on journalists, diplomats, and academics deciding that certain facts are better left alone.
We should disappoint them.
The strategic use of sexual violence deserves the same seriousness we give to cyber warfare, economic coercion, or information operations. It is designed to do what bombs often cannot: corrode a society from the inside until trust collapses under the weight of fear and shame.
There is another reason to confront this subject plainly.
When rape in conflict is reduced to isolated criminality, we miss the architecture behind the atrocity. We miss the real target. Too often it is not the individual alone, but the family that breaks afterwards, the community that falls silent, and the next generation that inherits trauma without fully understanding where it came from.
Civilization likes to imagine that its greatest achievements are monuments, constitutions, or scientific breakthroughs.
I suspect they are simpler than that.
The refusal to turn another human being into an instrument.
The insistence that dignity survives ideology.
And the stubborn belief that some acts are so corrosive to our shared humanity that they must be exposed, prosecuted, remembered, and never explained away as the unfortunate mechanics of war.
The writer is the chief policy adviser of Stop The Hate UK.
