The experiences of women in the Second World War with sexualised violence show that some suffering was gender-specific. According to the sources, sexualised violence against Jewish women and girls was not a by-product of the war, but the war itself, organised and controlled by those who denied Jews their right to exist.
Perpetrators: Who and Why? The war-time Ukraine could serve as a focus and lens through which questions of sexual victimization and sexual agency of Jewish women during the Shoah could be studied. Sexual assault occurred in different locations, including Jewish homes, streets, and prisons, killing sites, and hiding places. In hundreds of ghettos and camps e. Sexual violence during the Holocaust in Ukraine, like everywhere in Nazi-dominated Europe, was gendered first of all in terms of sexes of the perpetrators and the victims.
There is no convincing evidence that they were under orders to rape women, as it happened during genocides in Rwanda or former Yugoslavia. What drove those men to become rapists? Today, there are numerous ideas attempting to explain the motivations behind sexual crimes during wartime and genocide.
Gender based violence is one of the most widespread human rights violations in the world. How does it present in armed conflicts, can we recognise it, who suffers the most, and what can we do about it?
One of the more productive theories is the multifactorial model wherein multiple factors, when combined, provoked sexually violent behaviour in men. Sexual humiliation of the Jewish body was an inevitable consequence of the dehumanizing Nazi racial theories.
