Sexual violence by force of arms against women in Syria

This paper aims to “.. [examine] crimes of sexual violence in Syria from a feminist analytical gender-perspective, and in doing so, seeks to influence the scope of addressing sexual violence in Syria and the approaches therein, in order to move from description of the issue to analyzing its gender effects. It is therefore not limited to listing the forms of sexual violence, their occurrences and the parties involved, nor to monitoring “individual” effects on women, but rather goes further to examine structural (socio-cultural, economic, and political) dimensions, monitoring the effects of sexual violence on the political and social positionality and status of women, on the one hand, and linking it to the political economy of war and sexual violence, and its effects on the perpetuation of women’s “inferior” political status, on the other.”