Mémoire
| Résumé : | Sexual violence has been a constituent part of armed conflicts for several millennia, whether these conflicts were perpetrated with swords, spears, machetes or firearms. Women, children and even men from all types of age throughout history have suffered the horror and consequences of such violence. In an effort to understand this phenomenon and based on the study of the Rwandan genocide, this research aims to understand the factors that have contributed to the development of norms conducive to the engagement of combatants in such violations of human rights and international humanitarian law. Based on the theory of conflict-related sexual violence as a practice as developed by Wood (2014), this research tends to establish a correlation between the occurrence of conflict-related violence and ten related conditional factors, without however overpredicting them. These factors, which are divided into several major levels of analysis, are: (H1) The more macro-level contextual conditions decline, the more incidents of sexual violence will occur; (H2) The more intragroup dynamics are instituted in the armed group, the more incidents of sexual violence will occur; and (H3) The more frustrated an individual in the armed group feels, the more it will engage in sexual violence. These three main categories of independent variables are translated here into different sub-variables that were compared and analyzed through different databases and case transcripts from the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. To do so, macro-level factors were analyzed using a quantitative method, and meso- and micro-level factors were analyzed using a qualitative one. These three hypotheses are then confirmed to varying degrees, depending on the sub-variables included in each. The results then demonstrate a continuum and interpenetration between each of the variables established above, while at the same time providing an additional analytical key to future research and policy on the study and prevention of conflict-related sexual violence. |
