We had faced a similar problem when word first started coming out about sexual atrocities as genocide in the 1990s. There too, traditional ways of denying sexual violence against women were imported to do their work of denial. So, for instance, mass rapes were referred to as ‘excesses’ and the rape concentration camps as ‘bordellos’ or ‘brothels’ and the like. Feminism gave us a way to break out of this euphemistic and obfuscating language and to name the reality of what was taking place as genocidal sexual atrocities. This in turn made it possible for us to pursue a legal initiative that established an international precedent.
Feminism can also help us come up with a more adequate understanding of the pornography aspect of genocide. This breaks the traditional approach which hides pornography’s harms to women by miscasting those harms as private and benign. With this better conceptual framework in hand, we may bring pornography that is connected to genocide to bear on international legal proceedings, perhaps at The Hague War Crimes Tribunal, or at a case that could be brought at the International Criminal Court or in a civil suit of the kind we initiated in New York. We might thereby get pornography’s role in genocide recognized as it needs to be.
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