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Originally Posted by cyrnel
These cases are common throughout history, but to me the stereotype itself falls into the "power" category. Soldiers in rape & pillage mode, so close to the edge of survival. They're one moment from taking a life, with peer-pressure, opportunity, little chance of retribution. Where do they rate rape as an evil after seeking out and killing enemy combatants? How much of the rabid behavior is encouraged or condoned by the command structure in their dehumanizing of the enemy and with their retribution propaganda?
Not to excuse it one bit, but I can believe there are extreme tensions and passions involved.
Also, I doubt many victims resist to their full abilities with armed enemy soldiers standing around. Survival takes priority. In the studies already mentioned, don't many rapists state they took a lack of physical resistance as a form of consent? As reinforcement that "she was asking for it"?
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Honestly, I don't have the time to digg up the things I've read about this to make a particularly in depth post on the subject, but I wanted to touch on this soldier issue a bit.
The issue of rape is far more complicated than stating "it's about power," or "it's not about power, it's about sex." A lot can be (and has been) learned about rape by observing primates in the wild. Primates who, by the way, act very much like their human counterparts, right down to waging "war" and committing rape. Nonetheless, primates who act out of instinct.
Rape has always been a part of human life, just like it is a part of the lives of many other animals. The fatal mistake, then, when dealing with rape is not recognizing that it ultimately has roots in who we are
as animals. Breaking it down to "rape is about power," is nice and all, but it conveniently ignores that rape is something that comes from deep within our animal nature, not from a deviation in our "civilized" nature. Generally speaking, people do not want to admit that rape is natural - that it is part of the human animal. Doesn't mean it's a good thing - murder is also natural - but it does change how we look at it as a society and how to prevent it.
So, why rape? There is most certainly a power aspect to rape: the "conquering" of another person. But sex is also a very fundamental part of it as well. In short, the human animal is driven to rape not only in order to conquer someone in an emotional sense (stealing their sexuality), but to conquer someone in a physical sense (violently impregnating her). Which brings us to rape as it pertains to soldiers. Primates in the wild have been observed to rape the females of other tribes with whom they are at "war," in effect diluting the blood of the other tribe with the blood of their own tribe. Wars waged by humans obviously have aspects beyond the basic animal causes, but it is still ultimately a more complicated version of the same thing our animal cousins do. As such, it is not uncommon for conquering soldiers to rape the females of conquered lands. There are human aspects which make the issue more complex of course, but the drive ultimately seems likely to come from the need to spread our own seed - not just in the familial sense, but in the tribal sense as well.
This evolutionary view, then, does not deny that there is a significant power aspect to rape, but when broken down to its core it is rooted in the drive to reproduce. As such, the solder rape stereotype doesn't affirm or deny the "rape is about power" statement, but it does reveal that there is far more at play than what we as a society are comfortable discussing. Namely, it reveals that rape is not just a deviant behavior, but a deviant behavior which is, in some way, a fundamental part of the human animal, much like theft and murder (also things which are observed in the wild - primates do not always kill for food, and sometimes it is very brutal).