Antiquity Rape has accompanied warfare in virtually every known historical era.
Women's historian Gerda Lerner writes, {{Blockquote In the
Ancient Near East, wartime sexual violence and the pillaging of women were widespread practices often driven by a combination of strategic subjugation and personal gratification. While royal records often omitted these details to focus on grand military triumphs, legal codes and prophetic literature confirm that women were systematically treated as "spoils of war".
Assyrian warfare often used intimidation in campaigns against foreign territories. When surrounding a capital city and demands of surrender proved futile, Assyrian forces resorted to attacking smaller nearby settlements, where buildings were burned and the inhabitants killed, mutilated, enslaved, or raped. The Hebrew Bible contains several narratives and laws that acknowledge or regulate sexual violence in the context of conflict. In
Numbers 31, the account of the war against the Midianites describes Moses ordering the execution of male captives and non-virgin women while sparing virgin girls for the Israelite soldiers a passage some scholars interpret as making
sexual use of captives a normative practice in war. Other texts, such as
Deuteronomy 21:10–14, establish specific regulations for taking a "beautiful woman" from among war captives as a wife; while some commentators view these as attempts to minimize brutality, modern critics argue they effectively endorse sexual slavery and genocidal rape. The
Greek and
Roman armies reportedly engaged in war rape, which is documented by ancient authors such as
Homer,
Herodotus,
Livy and
Tacitus. Ancient sources held multiple, often contradictory attitudes to sexual violence in warfare.
Haaretz writer and archaeologist
Terry Madenholm explains that rape did not only serve as an instrument of sexual gratification or a tool for anger relief management. For the Roman army, rape was more than just a weapon of terror; rape was regarded as the right of the victorious. It symbolized revenge, subjugation and the enslavement of the defeated.
Polybius describes Roman soldiers carrying out conquest rape, while Livy portrays rape as synonymous with the capture of a city. Women and children were not the only victims of ancient wars. Rape of adult men remains one of the most closely kept secrets possibly because it was incompatible with the notion of masculinity; being sexually submissive as a man was considered utterly unmanly, even for the ancient writers. In the Greco-Roman world a "true man" could play only an active role, and those who were submissive were stigmatized. Tacitus mentions Roman recruiting officers dragging off the most striking
Batavian boys to non-consensual sex (rape), saying it was one of the causes of the
Revolt of the Batavi. According to medieval historians, the
Avars—who invaded Eastern Europe during
Late Antiquity—harassed
Wendish women and kept them in bondage as
sex slaves: During
Late Antiquity, India also saw countless invasions by warriors from
Central Asia such as the
Kushans,
Hephthalites, and the
Hunas. The Huna invasions of the
Indian subcontinent helped hasten the decline of the
Gupta Empire. The Huna invaders conquered
Kashmir,
Punjab, and finally entered into the
Ganges valley, in the very heart of India, slaughtering, pillaging, looting, burning, demolishing, and raping. Many cities in India were wiped out by the onslaught of the invaders;
monasteries,
temples, schools, and libraries were not spared, causing immense cultural destruction to the Indian subcontinent. Accounts are consistent that the Huna warriors practiced mass rapes of women in India.
Middle Ages : many civilian inhabitants of Jerusalem were sold into sexual slavery after the
Siege of Jerusalem (1187). The
Vikings were Scandinavians who raided and colonized wide areas of Europe from the late 8th century to the early 11th century. Viking settlements in Britain and Ireland are thought to have been primarily male enterprises, with a lesser role for female Vikings. British Isles' women are mentioned in old texts on the founding of Iceland, indicating that the Viking explorers had acquired wives and concubines from Britain and Ireland. The Vikings' "rape and pillage" image is disputed, and it may have arisen due to "exaggeration and distortion" in the Middle Ages. Female slavery was common during the medieval
Arab slave trade, where prisoners of war captured in battle as well as commercial slave trade from non-Arab lands sometimes ended up in
sexual slavery as
concubine slaves in the
Arab world. Most of these slaves came from places such as
Sub-Saharan Africa (mainly
Zanj), the
Caucasus (mainly
Circassians), and Central Asia (mainly
Tartars). A famous incident was the
Siege of Jerusalem (1187), when Jerusalem was conquered by Muslim
Ayyubid Sultanate of Egypt under
Saladin. 15,000 of the Christian inhabitants of the city who could not pay the ransom were sold into
slavery in the Ayyubid Sultanate. According to
Imad ad-Din al-Isfahani, 7,000 of them were men and 8,000 were women and children. Contemporary Muslim sources describe the rape and enslavement in sexual slavery of non-Muslim women and girls after the fall of Jerusalem: Before the
Jurchens overthrew the
Khitan, married Jurchen women and Jurchen girls were raped by
Liao Khitan envoys as a custom which caused resentment by the Jurchens against the Khitan.
Song Dynasty princesses committed suicide to avoid rape or were killed for resisting rape by the
Jin. The Mongols, who established the
Mongol Empire across much of Eurasia, caused
much destruction during
their invasions. Documents written during or after
Genghis Khan's reign say that after a conquest, the Mongol soldiers looted, pillaged and raped. Some troops who submitted were incorporated into the Mongol system in order to expand their manpower. These techniques were sometimes used to spread terror and warning to others. The Mongols invaded Hungary (Pannonia) and penetrated Austria almost to Vienna in 1241–1242. To the south of Vienna, they reached the Austrian town of Wiener Neustadt and devastated the countryside around the town, where, according to Frenchman Ivo of Narbonne, they tortured and ate Austrian civilians before the Mongols eventually retreated to Hungary. Similar accounts of Ivo of Narbonne's description of Mongol rape and cannibalism appear in
Chronica Majora by
Matthew Paris. However, some modern historians have suggested that medieval European sources often rhetorically depict the Mongols and other steppe peoples using barbaric tropes, which may exaggerate or misrepresent accounts of practices such as cannibalism.
Rogerius of Apulia's account of devastation and slaughter the Mongols wrought upon Europeans during the Mongol invasion of Hungary and Transylvania is in his book
Carmen Miserabile. In 1302, the army of
Mamluk Sultan Al-Nasir Muhammad, who was of
Kipchak Turkic descent, crushed a
Bedouin rebellion in
Upper Egypt and "slew mercilessly every Bedouin in the land and carried off their women captive". G. W. Murray said that "This drastic solution of the Bedouin question removed the pure Arab descendants of the Conquerors from the scene and so enabled the Beja to preserve themselves as an African race practically uninfluenced by Arab blood, while leaving the desert edges of Upper Egypt free for settlement by the Western Bedouin." The army was led by the
Oirat Mongol Mamluk
Sayf ad-Din Salar and
Circassian Mamluk
al-Baibars al-Jashnakir (Beibars). During
Timur's invasion of Syria, in the
sack of Aleppo (1400),
Ibn Taghribirdi wrote that Timur's Tatar soldiers committed mass rape on the native women of Aleppo, massacring their children and forcing the brothers and fathers of the women to watch the gang rapes which took place in the mosques. Ibn Taghribirdi said the Tatars killed all children while tying the women with ropes in
Aleppo's Great mosque after the children and women tried to take refuge in the mosque. Tatar soldiers openly raped gentlewomen and virgins in public in both the small mosques and the Great Mosque. The brothers and fathers of the women were being tortured and mutilated while forced to watch their female relatives get raped. The corpses in the streets and mosques resulted in stink permeating Aleppo. The women were kept naked while being gang raped repeatedly by different men.
Ibn Arabshah witnessed the slaughters and rapes Timur's Tatar soldiers carried out. Mass rapes were also recorded in Timur's
1401 Sack of Damascus. The
fall of Constantinople in 1453 was a scene of mass atrocities in form of rape, followed by enslavement of women, girls and young boys in sexual slavery, and contemporary witnesses describe the pillage committed by the troops of the Muslim Ottoman army of Sultan
Mehmet II. Contemporary witness reported how the marauding Ottoman soldiers raped and captured civilians inside the
Hagia Sophia cathedral itself, where they: :"trussed up... maidens whom the sun had not looked upon, maidens whom even their fathers had scarcely seen, and dragged away; and if they tried to resist, they were driven onward with blows. Each rapacious Turk was eager to lead his captive to a safe place, and then return to secure a second and a third prize. The plunderers, the avengers sent by God, worked with force and speed, and in one hour everyone there had been tied up, ... women with their headcloths. Then long chains of captives could be seen leaving the church and its shrines, being herded along like cattle or flocks of sheep, weeping and wailing, with no one to show pity for them." Women and girls were taken captive and dragged to the soldier's camps: "Many of the lovelier maidens... were almost torn to death as their captors quarreled over them. Soon a long procession of ill-assorted little groups of... women bound tightly together was being dragged to the soldiers' bivouacs, there to be fought over once again." In accordance with
Islamic law around
slavery in Islam, the non-Muslim war captives could be sold on the slave market to a life of
sexual slavery in the form of
concubinage in Islam, and according to Nicolas de Nicolay, slaves were displayed naked at the city's slave market, and young girls could be purchased.
Early modern period Ottoman expansion into Christian lands In the
Ottoman Empire, the practice of taking Christian captives as slaves, including as
sex slaves (
concubinage in Islam), was a notable aspect of the empire's expansionist and military activities, particularly in the
Balkans and
Eastern Europe, since by
Islamic law on war prisoners, it was
halal (legitimate) to enslave
kafir (non-Muslim) from
dar al-Harb (non-Muslim lands) in war with
dar al-Islam (the Muslim world). There are many testimonies that rape often preceded the enslavement of non-Muslim women by the Ottomans. During the
fall of Constantinople in 1453,
George Sphrantzes says that people were raped inside
Hagia Sophia.
Critobulus described the enslavement and sexual abuse committed by the Ottoman troops inside the Hagia Sophia: The elder refugees in the Hagia Sophia were slaughtered and the women raped. During the
Siege of Vienna in 1529, the Ottoman troops pillaged the countryside around Vienna and took many surviving civilians as slaves. Peter Stern von Labach described it: Approximately 20,000 people are estimated to have been captured and kidnapped in to slavery, of which few ever returned: the Ottomans reportedly preferred young boys and girls and members of the clergy. The
Ottoman dynasty, as was the custom in many Islamic dynasties, used female slaves for the reproduction of heirs, and the sultans therefore routinely awknowledged paternity of the sons of their slave concubines, which resulted in the concubines becoming manumitted via the
umm walad principle upon the death of their enslaver and could gain significant influence within the imperial court when their sons succeeded to the throne, although their initial capture and enslavement were marked by coercion and violence. The practice contributed to the demographic and cultural changes in the
Ottoman Empire, as many of these enslaved women converted to Islam and their offspring became integrated into Ottoman society.
Conquest of the Americas During the Spanish conquest and subsequent colonisation of the Americas, sexual violence against Indigenous women was documented as a frequent occurrence. Early accounts from the Caribbean, including journals from the expeditions of
Christopher Columbus, describe the commodification and rape of
Taíno women, who were distributed among the crew or sold. In his own writings, Columbus noted the profitability of this trade, stating that "a hundred castellanos are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm" and observing that there was a high demand for girls aged nine to ten. In the regions of Mexico and Peru, the overthrow of the Aztec and Inca Empires involved systemic violence that included the widespread rape of Indigenous women. Records from the Spanish mission system in
California and the Southwest further document sexual violence. Franciscan missionaries, including
Junípero Serra and Luis Jayme, wrote letters to colonial authorities detailing the conduct of Spanish soldiers stationed at
presidios. These reports described soldiers forcibly seizing
Kumeyaay and other Indigenous women for sexual purposes, Jayme reported that soldiers at every mission had "scandalized all the Gentiles" through "continuous abuses," specifically noting the frequent rape of young native girls. Despite official prohibitions by the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church against the mistreatment of "neophytes," enforcement was often ineffective due to the remote nature of the frontier and the dependence of the missions on military protection.
Sack of Rome During the
Sack of Rome in 1527, troops of the Holy Roman Emperor
Charles V committed extensive sexual violence against the city's inhabitants. The soldiers, primarily Spanish and German mercenaries, engaged in widespread
rape and sexual abuse of women.
Eighty Years' War During the second half of the
Eighty Years' War, Brabantian towns such as
Helmond,
Eindhoven and
Oisterwijk were repeatedly subjected to pillaging, arson, and rape committed by both the rebel
Dutch States Army and the royal Spanish
Army of Flanders.
Münster rebellion Some women were gang-raped by the Bishop's soldiers during the defeat of the Anabaptist
Münster rebellion in 1535.
Thirty Years' War During the
Sack of Magdeburg, many Imperial soldiers supposedly went out of control. The invading soldiers had not received payment for their service and demanded valuables from every household they encountered. There were reports of gang rapes of minors and torture.
Wars of the Three Kingdoms A significant number of women were gang-raped by
Royalist and
Irish Confederate troops under
General Montrose who sacked
Aberdeen in Scotland in 1644.
Second Manchu invasion of Korea In the
Second Manchu invasion of Korea when
Qing forces invaded the Korean
Kingdom of Joseon, many Korean women were subjected to rape at the hands of the Qing forces, and as a result they were unwelcomed by their families even if they were released by the Qing after being ransomed.
Manchu invasion of Xinjiang The
Ush rebellion in 1765 by
Uyghur Muslims against the
Manchus of the
Qing dynasty occurred after Uyghur women were gang raped by the servants and son of Manchu official Su-cheng. It was said that "Ush Muslims had long wanted to sleep on [Sucheng and son's] hides and eat their flesh" because of the rape of Uyghur Muslim women for months by the Manchu official Sucheng and his son. The Manchu Emperor ordered that the Uyghur rebel town be massacred, the Qing forces enslaved all the Uyghur children and women and slaughtered the Uyghur men. Manchu soldiers and Manchu officials regularly having sex with or raping Uyghur women caused massive hatred and anger by Uyghur Muslims to Manchu rule. The
invasion by Jahangir Khoja was preceded by another Manchu official, Binjing, who raped a Muslim daughter of the Kokan aqsaqal from 1818 to 1820. The Qing sought to cover up the rape of Uyghur women by Manchus to prevent anger against their rule from spreading among the Uyghurs. During the
Revolt of the Altishahr Khojas, Manchu soldiers under Qing Manchu general
Zhaohui stationed in a barracks in Karasu (Black water or Heishui 黑水 in Chinese) in Yarkand cooked and ate Uyghur Muslims after butchering them. If the Manchu soldiers caught a married Uyghur Muslim couple, the Manchus would eat the Uyghur man while gang raping the Uyghur woman and then cook and eat her after.
Dutch Formosa Dutch colonial forces in Taiwan raided Liuqiu island in 1636 and 1642, enslaving the population. The women and children became servants and wives for the Dutch officers. Multiple
Taiwanese aboriginal villages in frontier areas rebelled against the Dutch in the 1650s due to acts of oppression, such as when the Dutch ordered that aboriginal women be turned over to them for sex. During the 1662
Siege of Fort Zeelandia in which Chinese
Ming loyalist forces commanded by
Koxinga besieged and defeated the
Dutch East India Company and conquered
Taiwan, Dutch male prisoners were executed. Surviving women and children were enslaved, and a number of them were sold to Chinese soldiers to become their wives or concubines. A teenage daughter of the Dutch missionary
Antonius Hambroek became a concubine to Koxinga. Memory of the fate of the women and of Hambroek's daughter has been kept alive through the subsequent historiography of the period, whence it has stoked various dramatised and fictionalised retellings of the story.
Russian invasion of the Amur Cattle and horses in the hundreds were looted and 243 ethnic
Daur Mongolic girls and women were raped by Russian Cossacks under
Yerofey Khabarov when he invaded the Amur river basin in the 1650s. The
Albazinians were told to marry
Solon Evenki widows by the Board of Rites. Mongol and Manchu women were married by the Albazinians. The wives married by the Albazinians were former jailed convicts.
American Revolutionary War British soldiers and
German mercenaries accompanying them raped American women and girls during the
American Revolutionary War. Eyewitness testimonies and contemporary newspapers reported multiple instances of rape committed by British and German soldiers, often alongside other atrocities such as looting and the destruction of property. A
Continental Army colonel described British rampages as involving "murder, rape, rapine, and violence." In 1776, The
Pennsylvania Evening Post detailed the rapes of girls as young as ten and thirteen by British soldiers and reported women being taken to British camps for "sexual purposes".
Four Days of Ghent During the
Four Days of Ghent (13–16 November 1789), part of the
Brabant Revolution, Patriot rebels tried to capture the city of
Ghent from a weak
Imperial Army garrison, which sought to retain the
Austrian Netherlands for the
Habsburg Monarchy. After the first day of fighting was over, and the night fell, plundering started. Primarily the Imperial troops, most notably the "Clerfayt" Regiment, badly misbehaved by robbing, raping and killing. Both Imperial and Patriot sources report an astonishing lack of discipline amongst the Imperial soldiers, and that their crimes committed against civilians at the early stages of combat was a crucial factor in motivating the civilian population of Ghent to side with the rebels. The jihadist Islamist Saudi
Nasir al-Fahd mentioned the Ottoman enslavement of Saudi women and girls in his book attacking the Ottomans,
The Ottoman State and the Position of the Call of Sheikh Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab on it, published in 1993.
Circassian genocide Cossacks raped Muslim Circassian women. Russians raped Circassian girls during the
1877 Russo-Turkish war from the Circassian refugees who were settled in the Ottoman Balkans.
Indian Rebellion of 1857 During the
Indian Rebellion of 1857, known as "
India's First War of Independence" to the Indians and as the "Sepoy Mutiny" to the British, Indian
sepoys rebelled en masse against the
East India Company's
rule over India. Incidents of rape committed by Indian sepoys against British women and children were reported in the
English press, particularly after British civilians fell into Indian hands after sieges such as at
Cawnpore. However, after the rebellion was suppressed, detailed analyses by the
British government concluded that although Indian sepoys had engaged in massacres of British civilians after they captured them, there had never been one single instance of war rape committed by the sepoys. One such account published by
The Times, regarding an incident where 48 British girls as young as fourteen and ten had been raped by the Indian sepoys in Delhi, was criticised as an obvious fabrication by
Karl Marx, who pointed out that the story was written by a clergyman in
Bangalore, while the rebellion was mostly confined to the
Punjab region. As British troops suppressed the rebellion, angered by reports of massacres and rapes of British civilians, reprisals were often carried out against Indian civilians, particularly at Cawnpore. Indian women were often a target of rape by the enraged soldiers.
Boxer Rebellion During the
Boxer Rebellion, the
Yihetuan committed several massacres of foreign civilians (motivated by their
anti-Christian and
anti-Western sentiment) but were said to avoid raping women. The majority population of the hundreds of thousands of people living in the inner "Tartar" city of Beijing during the Qing were Manchus and Mongol bannermen from the Eight Banners after they were moved there in 1644. During the
Boxer Rebellion in 1900, western and Japanese soldiers mass raped Manchu women and Mongol banner women. Indeed, it appeared common practise for the invading soldiers to capture women, regardless of class or creed, to rape them. This was done by forcing them to work as sex slaves in rape-manors they had established in the Beijing hutongs (alleys formed by siheyuan residences). This excerpt from the "Miscellaneous Notes about the Boxers", written by Japanese journalist Sawara Tokusuke, describes one such rape-manor: Sawara also reports on the seven daughters of the Manchu bannerman Yulu of the
Hitara clan, the Viceroy of the province of Zhili (present day Hebei). Yulu was on good terms with the invaders. He was a man who always sought to create good impressions, and due to this, the British Consul at Tianjin offered him asylum on board of one of Her Majesty's ships for his loyalty to the British (Fleming 84). Later in the war Yulu perished in the battle for Yangcun. When Beijing fell, the Allies abducted all seven of his daughters and then sent them to the Heavenly Palace in Beijing where they were violated repeatedly. Then they were held captive as sex slaves for the soldiers in one of the rape-manors mentioned above (Sawara 268). Another story relays the fate that befell the women of Chongqi's household. Chongqi was a nobleman from the Mongolian
Alute clan and scholar of high standing in the Imperial Manchu court. He was also the father-in-law of the previous Emperor. His wife and one of his daughters, much like Yulu's daughters, were captured by the invading soldiers. They were taken to the Heavenly Temple, held captive and were then brutally raped by dozens of Eight Nations Alliance soldiers during the entire course of the Beijing occupation. Only after the Eight Nations Alliance's retreat did the mother and daughter return home, only to hang themselves from the rafters. Upon this discovery, Chongqi, out of despair, soon followed suit (Sawara 266). He hanged himself on 26 August 1900. His son, Baochu, and many other family members committed suicide shortly after (Fang 75). Many Manchu bannermen in Beijing supported the Boxers in the Boxer Rebellion and shared their anti-foreign sentiment. The Manchu bannermen were devastated by the fighting during the First Sino-Japanese War and the Boxer Rebellion, sustaining massive casualties during the wars and subsequently being driven into extreme suffering and hardship. The forces of the
Eight-Nation Alliance, upon their capture of
Beijing, went on violent rampages against Manchu civilians, looting, raping, and murdering numerous civilians they came across. The number of women who committed suicide numbered in the thousands. A western Journalist, George Lynch, said "there are things that I must not write, and that may not be printed in Great Britain, which would seem to show that this Western civilization of ours is merely a veneer over savagery." Manchu banner garrisons were annihilated on 5 roads by Russians as they suffered most of the casualties. Manchu Shoufu killed himself during the battle of Peking and the Manchu Lao She's father was killed by western soldiers in the battle as the Manchu banner armies of the Center Division of the Guards Army, Tiger Spirit Division and Peking Field force in the Metropolitan banners were slaughtered by the western soldiers. Baron von Ketteler, the German diplomat was murdered by Captain Enhai, a Manchu from the Tiger Spirit Division of Aisin Gioro Zaiyi, Prince Duan and the Inner city Legation Quarters and Catholic cathedral were both attacked by Manchu bannermen. Manchu bannermen were slaughtered by the Eight Nation Alliance all over Manchuria and Beijing because most of the Manchu bannermen supported the Boxers in the Boxer rebellion. The clan system of the Manchus in Aigun was obliterated by the despoliation of the area at the hands of the Russian invaders.
Russo-Japanese war It was reported in 1905 that many Russian women were raped by Japanese troops causing widespread venereal disease in many Japanese troops after the
Russo-Japanese War.
German South-West Africa In
German South-West Africa during the
Herero rebellion against
German rule (and the subsequent
Herero and Namaqua Genocide),
German soldiers regularly engaged in gang rapes before killing the women or leaving them in the desert to die; a number of
Herero women were also violently forced into involuntary
prostitution.
Xinhai revolution In October 1911, during the
Xinhai revolution, revolutionaries
stormed the Manchu quarter of
Xi'an. Most of the city's 20,000 Manchus were killed. The Hui Muslim community was divided in its support for the revolution. The Hui Muslims of Shaanxi supported the revolutionaries, while the Hui Muslims of Gansu supported the Qing. The native Hui Muslims (Mohammedans) of Xi'an (Shaanxi province) joined the Han Chinese revolutionaries in slaughtering the Manchus. Some wealthy Manchus survived by being
ransomed. Wealthy Han Chinese enslaved Manchu girls and poor Han Chinese troops seized young Manchu women as wives. Hui Muslims also seized young Manchu girls and raised them as Muslims. A British missionary who witnessed the massacre commented that "Old and young, men and women, children alike, were all butchered ... Houses were plundered and then burnt; those who would fain have laid hidden till the storm was past, were forced to come out into the open. The revolutionaries, protected by a parapet of the wall, poured a heavy, unceasing, relentless fire into the doomed Tartar (Manchu) city, those who tried to escape thence into the Chinese city were cut down as they emerged from the gates."
World War I propaganda poster printed during World War I, depicting the
fate of Belgium. The rape of the young girl representing
Belgium is implied. Rapes were allegedly committed during the
German advance through
Belgium in the first months of the war. After the war, the historian
Harold D. Lasswell dismissed the rape allegations as
propaganda in his 1927 Freudian-oriented study, "Propaganda Technique in the World War". In September 1914, the French government set up a commission, that was also seen in Belgium to investigate reports of rape committed by German soldiers, however as historian Ruth Harris has documented the investigations were more to fuel narratives of nationalism and cultural hatred towards Germany. The individual stories of the women that were impacted were used to justify the war and to market it to the civilians.
Bavarian Soviet Republic Manfred Freiherr von Killinger related how, during the defeat of the
Bavarian Soviet Republic, he ordered a female Communist sympathizer to be whipped "until there was not a white spot left on her backside".
Armenian genocide Rape was widespread during the
Armenian genocide, which was committed by the Ottoman Turks. During the
death marches of Armenian civilians through
Anatolia in 1915, Turkish soldiers frequently raped and killed Armenian women and children. In many cases, Turkish civilians also participated in these crimes. Although Armenian women attempted to evade sexual violence, suicide was frequently their only recourse. Women were displayed naked in Damascus, and were trafficked as sex slaves, serving as a significant revenue for accompanying soldiers.
World War II The sometimes widespread and systematic occurrence of war rape of enemy and allied civilians by soldiers has been documented. During World War II and in its immediate aftermath, war rape occurred in a range of situations, ranging from institutionalized sexual slavery to war rapes associated with specific battles.
Asia ,
Burma. 8 August 1945. A young
ethnic Chinese woman from one of the
Imperial Japanese Army's "comfort battalions" is interviewed by an
Allied officer.
Imperial Japanese Army The term "
comfort women" is a euphemism for the estimated 200,000, mostly Korean, Chinese, Vietnamese, Burmese, Japanese, Taiwanese and Filipino women who were forced to serve as sex slaves in Japanese military brothels during World War II.
Chuo University professor Yoshiaki Yoshimi states there were about 2,000 centers where as many as 200,000 Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Taiwanese, Burmese, Indonesian, Timorese, Papuan, Micronesian, Dutch and Australian women were interned and used as sex slaves. There were comfort women stations in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, North and South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, New Guinea, the Kurile Islands, and Sakhalin. In the
Nanjing Massacre,
Japanese soldiers sexually assaulted Chinese women who were trapped in the city of
Nanjing when it
fell to the Japanese on 13 December 1937. The
International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated that 20,000 women and children were raped or otherwise sexually assaulted during the first month of the occupation.
Iris Chang estimated that the number of Chinese women raped by Japanese soldiers ranged from 20,000 to 80,000. The Japanese forced Vietnamese women to become comfort women—and, with Burmese, Indonesian, Thai and Filipino women—they made up a notable portion of Asian comfort women in general. Japanese use of Malaysian and Vietnamese women as comfort women was corroborated by many different testimonies. In Java, the Japanese heavily recruited Javanese girls as comfort women and brought them to New Guinea, Malaysia, Thailand and other areas foreign to Indonesia besides using them in Java itself. When recruiting these girls, the Japanese would lie to the Javanese telling them that their girls would become waitresses and actresses. The Japanese destroyed many documents related to their rape of Indonesian Javanese girls at the end of the war, so the true extent of the mass rape is uncountable, but testimony witnesses records the names and accounts of Indonesian Javanese comfort women. In one instance, the Japanese tried to disguise the Javanese comfort girls they were raping as red cross nurses with red cross armbands when they surrendered to Australian soldiers in Kupang, Timor. In Bali, the Japanese sexually harassed Balinese women when they arrived and started forcing Balinese women into brothels for prostitution, with Balinese men and Chinese men used as recruiters for the Balinese women. All of the brothels in Bali were staffed by Balinese women. Melanesian women from
New Guinea were also used as comfort women. Local women were recruited from
Rabaul as comfort women, along with a small number of mixed
Japanese-Papuan women born to Japanese fathers and Papuan mothers. Around 100 Micronesian women from island of Truk in the Carolines were also used as comfort women. J. F. van Wagtendonk and the Dutch Broadcast Foundation estimated a total of 400 Dutch girls were taken from the camps to become comfort women. Japanese soldiers raped Indonesian women and Dutch women in the Netherlands East Indies. Many of the women were infected with STDs as a result. Suharto silenced public discussion in Indonesian on Japanese war crimes in Indonesia in order to stop anti-Japanese sentiment building up but it happened regardless when the movie Romusha came out in 1973 and the Peristiwa Malari (Malari affair) riots broke out in Indonesia in 1974 against Japan. Suharto also sought to silence discussion on Japanese war crimes due to Indonesia's own war crimes in East Timor after 1975, but Indonesians started talking about Indonesian comfort women in the 1990s following the example of Korea. Mardyiem, a Javanese Indonesian comfort woman talked about what happened to her after Indonesian comfort women were interviewed by Japanese lawyers, after decades of being forced to stay silent. Three major revolts happened against Japan by Indonesians in Java. Japanese forced Indonesians of West Java in Cirebon to hand over a massive quota of rice to the Japanese military with Japanese officers using brutality to extract even more than the official quota. The Indonesians in Cirebon rebelled twice and targeted Indonesian collaborator bureaucrats and Japanese officers in 1944. Japan killed a lot of Indonesian rebels while crushing them with deadly force. In Sukmana, Singapurna, the Tasikmalaya regency, the conservative religious teacher Kiai Zainal Mustafa told his followers that in the month when Muhammad was born they would gain divine protection when he gave a sign. In February 1943, Japanese Kempeitai caught wind of what was happening and came to the area but the roads were blocked to stop them. The Indonesian villagers and students began to fight the Japanese and seized the sabre of the Japanese chief to kill him. More Japanese arrived and 86 Japanese and 153 Indonesian villagers died in the fighting. The Japanese then arrested Zainal and 22 others for execution. Supriyadi lead a Peta mutiny against the Japanese in February 1945. Japanese raped Malay comfort women, but UMNO leader Najib Razak blocked all attempts by other UMNO members like Mustapha Yakub at asking Japan for compensation and apologies. The threat of Japanese rape against
Chitty girls led Chitty families to let Eurasians, Chinese and full-blooded Indians to marry Chitty girls and stop practicing endogamy. Japanese soldiers raped Indian Tamil girls and women that were forced to work on the Burma railway. This led to Japanese soldiers contracting venereal disease such as
chancroid,
syphilis and
gonorrhoea.
French Army Vietnamese civilians were robbed, raped and killed by French soldiers in Saigon when they came back in August 1945. Vietnamese women were also raped in North Vietnam by the French like in Bảo Hà,
Bảo Yên District,
Lào Cai province, and Phu Lu, which caused 400 Vietnamese who were trained by the French to defect on 20 June 1948. Buddhist statues were looted and Vietnamese were robbed, raped and tortured by the French after the French crushed the Viet Minh in northern Vietnam in 194[?]–1948 forcing the Viet Minh to flee into Yunnan, China, for sanctuary and aid from the Chinese Communists. A French reporter was told by Vietnamese violate notables, "We know what war always is, We understand your soldiers taking our animals, our jewelry, our Buddhas; it is normal. We are resigned to their raping out wives and our daughters; war has always been like that. But we object to being treated in the same way, not only our sons, but ourselves, old men and dignitaries that we are." Vietnamese rape victims became "half insane".
Australian Army A former prostitute recalled that as soon as Australian troops arrived in
Kure in early 1946, they "dragged young women into their jeeps, took them to the mountain, and then raped them. I heard them screaming for help nearly every night".
United States Army A large number of rapes were committed by U.S. forces during the
Battle of Okinawa in 1945. The Judge Advocate General's office reports that there were 971 convictions for rape in the U.S. military from January 1942 to June 1947, which includes a portion of the occupation. Individual instances of rape by members of the
United States Army in Japan were reported while
their forces were stationed in post-war Japan, such as the
Yumiko-chan incident and the
1995 Okinawa rape incident. Some historians state that mass rapes took place during the initial phase of the occupation. For instance, Fujime Yuki has stated that 3,500 rapes occurred in the first month after American troops landed. Tanaka relates that in Yokohama, the capital of the prefecture, there were 119 known rapes in September 1945. At least seven academic books and many other works state that there were 1,336 reported rapes during the first 10 days of the occupation of
Kanagawa Prefecture. Walsh states that this figure originated from Yuki Tanaka's book
Hidden Horrors, and resulted from that author misreading the crime figures in their source. The source states that the Japanese Government recorded 1,326 criminal incidents of all types involving American forces, of which an unspecified number were rapes.
Soviet Army During the
Soviet invasion of Manchuria, Soviet and Mongolian soldiers attacked and raped Japanese civilians, often encouraged by the local Chinese population who were resentful of Japanese rule. The local Chinese population sometimes even joined in these attacks against the Japanese population with the Soviet soldiers. In one famous example, during the
Gegenmiao massacre, Soviet soldiers and armed local Chinese rioters raped and massacred over one thousand Japanese women and children. Property of the Japanese were also looted by the Soviet soldiers and Chinese. Many Japanese women married themselves to local Manchurian men to protect themselves from persecution by Soviet soldiers. These Japanese women mostly married Chinese men and became known as "stranded war wives" (). According to British and American reports, Soviet
Red Army troops also looted and terrorized the local people of
Shenyang located in
Manchuria. A foreigner witnessed Soviet troops, formerly stationed in Berlin, who were allowed by the Soviet military to go into the city of Shenyang "for three days of rape and pillage". The Soviet Army's reputation in the region was affected for years to come. Konstantin Asmolov of the Center for Korean Research of the
Russian Academy of Sciences dismisses Western accounts of Soviet violence against civilians in the Far East as exaggeration and rumor and contends that accusations of mass crimes by the Red Army inappropriately extrapolate isolated incidents regarding the nearly 2,000,000 Soviet troops in the Far East into mass crimes. According to him, such accusations are refuted by the documents of the time, from which it is clear that such crimes were far less of a problem than in Germany. Asmolov further asserts that the Soviets prosecuted their perpetrators while prosecution of German and Japanese "rapists and looters" in WWII was virtually unknown. Japanese women in Manchukuo were repeatedly raped by Russian soldiers every day including underage girls from the families of Japanese who worked for the military and the Manchukuo rail at Beian airport and Japanese military nurses. The Russians seized Japanese civilian girls at Beian airport where there were a total of 1000 Japanese civilians, repeatedly raping 10 girls each day as recalled by Yoshida Reiko and repeatedly raped 75 Japanese nurses at the Sunwu military hospital in Manchukuo during the occupation. The Russians rejected all the pleading by the Japanese officers to stop the rapes. The Japanese were told by the Russians that they had to give their women for rape as war spoils. Soviet soldiers raped Japanese women from a group of Japanese families that were with Yamada Tami that attempted to flee their settlements in 14 August and go to Mudanjiang. Another group of Japanese women that were with Ikeda Hiroko that on 15 August tried to flee to Harbin but returned to their settlements were raped by Soviet soldiers.
Europe British Army Italian statistics record eight rapes and nineteen attempted rapes by British service members in Italy between September 1943, when the
invasion of Sicily occurred, and December 1945. Although far from the scale of those committed by American, German or Soviet soldiers, rapes and other forms of sexual assault were committed by British forces in
Allied-occupied Germany during the last months of World War II. Though a high priority for the
Royal Military Police, some commanders proved reluctant to prosecute their men. There were also reports of sexual assaults committed by British soldiers in
Belgium and the
Netherlands after their liberation from German occupation, and a number of men were convicted of these crimes while fraternizing with
Dutch and
Belgian families during the winter of 1944–45. Italian soldiers also committed rapes in Yugoslavia and France during World War II, and the
Italian participation on the Eastern Front was marked by numerous instances of sexual exploitation and rape by Italian troops.
German Army Rapes were committed by Wehrmacht forces on Jewish women and girls during the
Invasion of Poland in September 1939; they were also committed against Polish, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian women and girls during mass executions which were primarily carried out by the
Selbstschutz units, with the assistance of Wehrmacht soldiers who were stationed in territory that was under the administration of the German military; the rapes were committed against female captives before they were shot. Only one case of rape was prosecuted by a German court during the military campaign in Poland, and even then the German judge found the perpetrator guilty of (committing a shameful act against his race as defined by the
racial policy of Nazi Germany), rather than rape. Jewish women were particularly vulnerable to rape during
The Holocaust. Rapes were also committed by German forces stationed on the
Eastern Front, where they were largely unpunished; the overall number of rapes is difficult to establish due to the lack of prosecutions of the crime by German courts, however, it is estimated to have occurred on a very large scale. The Wehrmacht also established a system of military brothels, in which young women and girls from occupied territories were forced into prostitution under harsh conditions. In the
Soviet Union women were kidnapped by German forces for prostitution as well; one report by the
International Military Tribunal writes "in the city of
Smolensk the German Command opened a brothel for officers in one of the hotels into which hundreds of women and girls were driven; they were mercilessly dragged down the street by their arms and hair." German soldiers committed rapes in Yugoslavia. According to the German soldiers committed 772 acts of rape during the
Axis occupation of Serbia. During punitive operations on the Croatian island of
Brač, German soldiers committed rapes alongside arson and massacres, as reprisals for casualties among their troops. Yugoslavian women were reportedly placed into brothels, and a 1941 document from the
Osijek archives discussing plans for multiple brothels in Osijek, as well as the required sanitation procedures, has also been found. Although on a smaller scale than on the Eastern Front, German soldiers also committed rape on the
Western Front and in German-occupied countries in Western and Northern Europe. Reports of rape by German soldiers emerged from Czech, France, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Belgium. In his book "
Sex Crimes Under the Wehrmacht", author David Raub Snyder stated that a large number of Italian, French, and even German women were raped by Wehrmacht soldiers during the war. He argued that there is no evidence to suggest that non-Slavic women were spared from rape by German soldiers any more than Slavic women. He also noted that the lenient sentences imposed on German soldiers charged with rape were not unique to the
Eastern Front, as many courts also handed down light punishments in cases involving the rape of non-Slavic women, including French, Italian, and German women. During the
German occupation of the British Channel Islands, some German soldiers were charged with rape. According to professors of
Regional State Archives in Hamar, following
German invasion of Norway and during the
German occupation of Norway, German soldiers committed numerous rapes against Norwegian women at gunpoint with impunity, while the local police ignored the reports of the rapes. During the
Distomo massacre, German soldiers engaged in mass rape, torture, and mutilation against local Greek women and girls in the village.
French Colonial Army French
Moroccan troops, known as
Goumiers, committed rapes and other atrocities in Italy after the
Battle of Monte Cassino and in Germany. In Italy, the
mass rapes committed after the Battle of Monte Cassino by Goumiers,
colonial troops of the
French Expeditionary Corps, are known as . According to Italian sources, more than 7,000 Italian civilians, including women and children, were raped by Goumiers. French
Senegalese troops too, known as
Senegalese Tirailleurs, who landed on the island of
Elba on 17 June 1944, were responsible for mass rapes, though their behaviour was considered less brutal than that of the French North African troops in continental
Italy.
US Army Secret wartime files made public in 2006 revealed that
American GIs committed at least 400 sexual offenses in Europe, including 126 rapes in the United Kingdom, between 1942 and 1945. A study by Robert J. Lilly estimates that at least a total of 14,000 civilian women in Britain, France and Germany were raped by American GIs during World War II. It is estimated that there were at least 3,500 rapes by American servicemen in France between June 1944 and the end of the war and one historian has claimed that sexual violence against women in liberated France was common. In the 2007 publication
Taken by Force, sociology and criminology professor J. Robert Lilly estimates US soldiers raped at least 11,040 women and children during the occupation of
Germany. Many armed soldiers committed gang rapes at gunpoint against female civilians and children.
Red Army During the war, German, Polish, Romanian, Hungarian and Serbian women were victims of mass rapes committed against them by Soviet soldiers. Polish sources claim that mass rapes were committed in Polish cities that had been taken by the
Red Army. It is reported that in
Kraków, the Soviet occupation was accompanied by the mass rape of Polish women and girls, as well as the plunder of all private property by Soviet soldiers. Reportedly the scale of the attacks prompted communists installed by the Soviets to prepare a letter of protest to
Joseph Stalin, while masses in churches were held in expectation of a Soviet withdrawal. At the end of World War II,
Red Army soldiers are estimated to have raped around 2,000,000 German women and girls.
Norman Naimark, a historian and fellow at the conservative
Hoover Institution, writes in
The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 that although the exact number of women and girls who were raped by members of the Red Army in the months preceding the capitulation, and in the years following it, will never be known, their numbers are likely to be in the hundreds of thousands, quite possibly as high as the two million victims estimated by Barbara Johr, in . Many of these victims were raped repeatedly. Atina Grossman in her article in
October describes how until early 1945, the abortions in Germany were illegal except for medical and eugenic reasons and so doctors opened up and started performing abortions to rape victims for which only an affidavit was requested from a woman. It was also typical that women specified their reasons for abortions as being mostly socio-economic (inability to raise another child), rather than moral or ethical. A female
Soviet war correspondent described what she had witnessed: "The Russian soldiers were raping every German female from eight to eighty. It was an army of rapists." The majority of the rapes were committed in the Soviet occupation zone and an estimated two million German women were raped by Soviet soldiers. According to historian William Hitchcock, in numerous cases women were victims of repeated rapes with some women being raped as many as 60 to 70 times. A minimum of 100,000 women are believed to have been raped in
Berlin, based on surging abortion rates in the following months and on hospital reports written at the time, Female deaths resulting from rapes committed by Soviet soldiers stationed in Germany are estimated to total 240,000.
Antony Beevor describes it as the "greatest phenomenon of mass rape in history", and he has concluded that at least 1.4 million women were raped in East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia alone. According to Natalya Gesse, Soviet soldiers raped German females who were anywhere from eight to 80 years old. Liberated female Polish and Soviet
Ostarbeiters were also raped. Antony Beevor estimates that up to half of all rape victims were victims of gang rapes. Naimark states that not only did each victim have to carry the trauma with her for the rest of her days, it also inflicted a massive collective trauma on the East German nation. Naimark concludes "The social psychology of women and men in the Soviet zone of occupation was marked by the crime of rape from the first days of the occupation, through the founding of the
GDR in the fall of 1949, until, one could argue, the present." Some 90% of raped Berlin women in 1945 contracted sexually transmitted infections, and 3.7% of all children born in Germany from 1945 to 1946 had Soviet fathers. The history of the Soviet rape of German women was considered a
taboo subject until after the dissolution of the USSR and East Germany. At the end of the war, Yugoslav communist leaders protested to Stalin about the large number of rapes committed by Soviet troops who had liberated parts of Yugoslavia. According to
Milovan Djilas, Stalin replied, "Can't he [Djilas] understand it if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle?" Soviet soldiers raped up to 800,000 Hungarian women according to
Fruzsina Skrabski who made a film about the rapes and many Hungarian women became infected with STDs and became pregnant from it. Soviet veterans admitted to Skrabski that they had sex with the Hungarian women but said it was consensual and not rape and that they received STDs from the women.
Korean War During 11 months of 1952 in the 110,000-man logistics branch of
Chinese Volunteer Army, there were 41 men charged with rapes. We Accuse! (Report of the Women's International Commission for the Investigation of War Atrocities in Korea) alleges several cases of rape by South Korean and US troops.
Algerian War Rape and other sexual violence against women was commonly used by French troops and opposing members of the
Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) during the
Algerian War.
Vietnam War Rape during the
Vietnam War included sexual violence and rapes directed against Vietnamese civilians by United States and South Korean troops. According to Sabine Cherenfant, "some children likely were conceived through consensual relationships" while "many children were conceived through rape".
Indonesia The Indonesian invasion of
East Timor and
West Papua caused the murders of approximately 300,000 to 400,000 West Papuans and many thousands of women raped. Research by the Papuan Women's Working Group together with the Asia Justice Rights (AJAR) found 4 out 10 have either experienced shootings, torture, sexual violence, arbitrary detention, husbands/family members lost or killed, husbands/family members detained, or property theft/damaging.
1971 genocide in Bangladesh During the
Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, numerous women were tortured and raped by the Pakistani army. Exact numbers are not known and are a subject of debate. Most of the women were captured from
Dhaka University and private homes and kept as sex-slaves inside the Dhaka Cantonment. Australian Doctor Geoffrey Davis was brought to Bangladesh by the United Nation and
International Planned Parenthood Federation to carry out late-term abortions on rape victims. He was of the opinion that the 200,000 to 400,000 rape victims was an underestimate. On the actions of Pakistan army he said "They'd keep the infantry back and put artillery ahead and they would shell the hospitals and schools. And that caused absolute chaos in the town. And then the infantry would go in and begin to segregate the women. Apart from little children, all those were sexually matured would be segregated ... And then the women would be put in the compound under guard and made available to the troops ... Some of the stories they told were appalling. Being raped again and again and again. A lot of them died in those [rape] camps". Bangladeshi women were raped during the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971 by the Pakistan army during night raids on villages. Pakistani sources claim the number is much lower, though having not completely denied rape incidents. One work that has included direct experiences from the women raped is
Ami Birangana Bolchi (
The Voices of War Heroines) by
Nilima Ibrahim. The word
Birangona (war heroine) is a title given, by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman after the war, to the women raped and tortured during the war. This was a conscious effort to alleviate any social stigma the women might face in the society. How successful this effort was is doubtful, though. In June 2005, the
United States Department of State organized a conference titled "South Asia in Crisis: United States Policy, 1961–1972" where
Sarmila Bose, published a paper suggesting that the casualties and rape allegations in the war have been greatly exaggerated for political purposes. This work has been criticized in Bangladesh and her research has been attacked by expatriate Bengalis. During the war Bengali nationalists also indulged in the mass rape of ethnic Bihari Muslim women, since the Bihari Muslim community had remained loyal to the cause of a united Pakistan. Anthony Mascarenhas, published a newspaper article in June 1971, in
The Sunday Times, London on 13 June 1971 titled "Genocide". The article was the first that exposed the brutal crackdown by the Pakistan army. It also highlighted the rape of Bihari women and other atrocities committed against them by Bengalis.
The Sunday Times editor
Harold Evans wrote "He'd been shocked by the Bengali outrages in March, but he maintained that what the army was doing was altogether worse and on a grander scale". Other documented instances of war rape include the
First Liberian Civil War, and
in East Timor during the occupation by Indonesia in 1975. It has been reported that in
Peru, throughout the 12-year
internal conflict, women were frequent victims of sustained war rape perpetrated by government security forces and the
Shining Path. Women who returned home were considered 'dishonoured' by their families.
Tigray War Myanmar civil war The
Myanmar Armed Forces has used multiple forms of sexual violence against civilians for decades, including rape, gang rape, coerced sex, forced marriage, and sexual slavery, and has been singled out by the
Secretary-General of the United Nations since 2012. Since the
2021 Myanmar coup d'état, the military has escalated its systemic use of sexual violence, especially against women and political prisoners. Survivors face societal and legal challenges in reporting their crimes.
2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine During the
2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, Ukrainian officials, rights groups, and international media reported growing evidence of sexual violence used by Russian military against Ukrainian women. Survivors of Russian occupation of the areas around Kyiv, such as
Bucha, reported gang-rapes, assaults taking place at gunpoint, and rapes committed in front of children.
Lyudmyla Denisova, Ukraine's Human Rights Commissioner, stated that sexual violence against civilians was weaponized by Russian soldiers as part of what she referred to as "genocide of Ukrainian people". According to Denisova, as of 6 April 2022, a special telephone helpline had received at least 25 reports of rape of women and girls from Bucha, aged between 14 and 24. The
Security Service of Ukraine posted a recording allegedly of a Russian woman encouraging her deployed partner to rape Ukrainian women as long as he uses protection. In October 2022, a UN official stated that Russia was using rape as part of its "military strategy", and that the actual number of victims was likely far higher than the official statistics.
2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel 2023 Israel–Hamas war ==Causes==