The Consequences of Silence over Conflict-Related Sexual Violence

• In Event: Gender Dynamics and Rights Issues

Abstract

The October 7 attacks in Israel by Hamas, followed by Israel’s retaliation, have garnered global attention and have drawn a range of reactions from the international community. Global human rights and women’s rights organizations, however, have largely stayed silent around one pressing issue – sexual violence. Despite immediate evidence of severe violations – including rape, gang rape, and sexual mutilation – against unarmed Israeli women, it took some human rights and women’s rights organizations weeks to release statements of condemnation, while others never did. Many statements only surfaced after publicized displays of anger from feminist groups in Israel and their allies in the US, who initiated a social media campaign featuring the hashtag #MeToo_Unless_Ur_a_Jew, and who called the international community’s weeks of silence “deafening.” What are the consequences of human rights and women’s rights organizations’ silence over conflict-related sexual violence? Scholars of human rights have largely focused on the implications of “naming and shaming,” or publicly condemning human rights violations, but have not yet explored the politics of silence, the deliberate decision not to condemn despite political pressure to do so. Building on the literature on shaming, we argue that just as actors who engage in foreign criticism may face strategic (Terman and Byun 2022) and ethical (Buzas and Bassan-Nygate 2024) costs and considerations, silence may also carry reputational and normative implications. Silence could be exceptionally costly in the context of conflict-related sexual violence, given the prevailing public consensus around such violations and the public outrage they can provoke (Cohen and Hoover Green 2012). We propose examining the consequences of silence over conflict-related sexual violence by employing a set of survey experiments in Israel and the U.S. Through analyzing public reactions to women’s and human rights organizations’ reluctance to condemn sexual violence by Hamas and other armed actors, we plan to identify the downstream effects of silence. Specifically, we will examine its effect on the public’s norms and beliefs about conflict-related sexual violence as well as the consequences for the reputation, legitimacy, and the public’s willingness to donate to organizational actors who stay silent. Overall, this research aims to develop a novel theory by linking insights from the literature on gendered politics of victimization with works on shaming, providing new empirical findings from the timely case of sexual violence in the Israel-Hamas war.

Authors

• Lotem Bassan-Nygate, Harvard University

• Dara Kay Cohen, Harvard University