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. For FemRes, 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.