The Complexity of Comfort Women.

Joane Nagel’s article, “Rape and War: Fighting Men and Comfort Women”, explores the relationship between rape and war. What she finds is a direct correlation between rape and wars over the past few decades. She calls this connection an ethnosexual phenomenon. She explains this phenomenon to be a new form of warfare that uses sex as a weapon against individuals of a different ethnicity, especially women. Nagel comes to this conclusion after recognizing that in majority of the rape cases reported during the war times that she studies the victims (usually women) are of the opposite ethnicity than the soldier; in fact the victims are members of the ethnicity that these fighting men are in opposition with.
A major strength of Nagel’s argument is her diverse presentation of war time rape cases. By presenting this information she shows that these behaviors are not exclusive to one group of people. In fact she reports cases not just from around the world but also she reports crimes spanning over a large period of time. Her examples begin as early as 1938 in China and are as recent as the 1990s. In addition to this her examples are from a variety of cultures and countries from Africa to Asia to Europe.
One major weakness of the article was Nagel’s defense of the men that were raping these women, girls and men. I found her attempt to portray them as victims as an excuse for their behavior. I do respect her effort to try to understand the thought process of these men and to empathize with them. However, her emphasis of the environment of the soldiers and not the individual responsibility of them weakened her argument.
The rape of women during war is a form of sex as social control. Social control is the ability of social mechanisms to regulate individual and group behavior by using rewards and punishments. By using forceful sex as a means of war fare sex then takes on a strong, degrading and fearful message to the victim being raped. One example of this is how in many of the cases presented the goal of the rape was to impregnate local women with the seed of the enemy. This was one of the primary goals in Bosnia in the early 1990s. Serbian men were raping Muslim and Croatian women so that they would bear the enemy’s children, what they called “little Chetniks” (Nagel, 588). Another example of this social control is that of the Rape of Nanking that took place in China from 1938 to 1939 where according to Nagel a reported 80,000 Chinese women and girls were raped in during the conflict between Japan and China. Furthermore, the Japanese went on to create camps to keep what they called “comfort women” (Nagel, 588) as sex slaves. In both of these cases the primary goal is to create a consequence (by using sex) to the opposing community by having control over the women, wombs, girls and in cases the boys and other men of their enemy.
I found women’s evolving roles during war and in relation to soldiers very interesting and simultaneously disturbing. When I think of women in war I think of nurses and patriotic mothers. Although women have always served a sexual purpose during war (especially local women) this article’s exploration of those negative roles such as women as comfort women (sex slaves) and as rape victims shines light on yet another way women have been exploited in patriarchal societies.