Women as Wartime Rapists

Laura Sjoberg’s Women as Wartime Rapists studies a small but analytically consequential group: women who perpetrate, command, facilitate, or participate in sexual violence during armed conflict. Through cases including Nazi Germany, Serbia, and ISIS, she examines how law, journalism, scholarship, and popular culture make female perpetrators hypervisible as sensations while rendering their political agency conceptually invisible. Women who commit violence are often explained away as coerced followers, deviant monsters, or imitators of men. Each explanation protects the deeper assumption that femininity is incompatible with organized sexual aggression.

The book does not use women’s crimes to deny that wartime sexual violence is overwhelmingly structured through masculinized institutions and inflicted on women and marginalized people. Instead, it argues that accurate accountability requires analysis of femininities as well as masculinities. Gender shapes recruitment, authority, opportunity, targets, legal interpretation, and the stories told afterward; it does not mechanically determine who can harm whom. This matters to feminist anti-violence politics because an image of women as naturally innocent can erase victims of female perpetrators, obscure chains of command, and turn gender justice into protection of respectable womanhood rather than opposition to militarized domination.

Researching rare and stigmatized perpetrators poses serious evidentiary problems, and readers must avoid generalizing exceptional cases into a symmetrical picture of wartime rape or allowing them to become anti-feminist spectacle. Case selection, incomplete records, and contested definitions of participation complicate every conclusion. Sjoberg’s intervention is strongest when used to sharpen rather than flatten analysis: institutions, ideologies, and opportunities produce violence through gendered roles that can be inhabited in different ways. The book offers a demanding lesson in holding structural inequality and individual responsibility together without relying on myths of either female purity or inherent male brutality.

The chapter structure makes clear that Sjoberg is not assembling a catalogue of curiosities. The book places women’s participation in sexual violence within war, genocide, and the politics of gender, then uses the familiar assumption that rape between women is impossible to show why gender analysis cannot stop at a male-perpetrator/female-victim template. Later chapters move from public visibility to law: women may become sensational figures in news accounts while legal language still struggles to recognize their agency and responsibility. The discussion of genocidal rape also challenges the idea that sexual violence is merely battlefield disorder; it asks how gendered participation can intersect with organized campaigns and political aims. The cases matter not because perpetrator gender is irrelevant, but because gender works through power, command relations, and the purposes of war.

Sjoberg also marks the book’s limits: it is not a complete catalogue of women perpetrators, a census of all cases, a demographic profile, a general account of motive, or an exhaustive analysis of gender-specific consequences. Taking that boundary seriously prevents rare cases from being inflated into a symmetrical picture of wartime rape or survivors’ experiences from becoming props in an argument. Read it alongside Dara Kay Cohen’s Rape During Civil War: Sjoberg foregrounds how gender categories, law, and public narratives make perpetration visible or invisible, while Cohen examines how armed-group recruitment and social relations can shape patterns of violence. These approaches complement one another without being interchangeable.

One further distinction matters: “perpetrator” is not a single role. Direct assault, command, facilitation, and participation raise different questions about evidence and legal responsibility, even when media narratives collapse them into one shocking image. Keeping those differences visible prevents the book’s attention to women’s agency from becoming a claim that all participants acted alike, or that recognition of their responsibility diminishes the structural asymmetry of wartime sexual violence. It instead refuses to let presumed female innocence short-circuit accountability.