We are very lucky to have Julia speak to us because she's been parachuted into such a fast moving and very uncertain first year office and so forth,
mostly on some of these other figures today for a variety of reasons.
But co-researcher Julia, they've been working together on this particular subject, so seminal.
And so these are the values that are going to get for nine year olds anyway.
But Julian is a Wellcome Trust Dphil student researching instructions in the Ethiopian State Department of
Reproductive Health Forces researchers to buy their lunch and make locomotion practices for girls in 43,080.
She had an NSC, his African studies here at Oxford and served six years of professional experience working with UNICEF,
UNFPA and versus the NGOs on the issue of contemporary women's rights and reproduction on set across South America and sub-Saharan African countries,
telling us over lunch about the work of actuaries in Ethiopia.
And so his direct fieldwork experience to get the teeth into, perhaps she would answer questions about some interesting interesting as well.
I'm sure this is a very pretty difficult emotive subject.
But, you know, thank you both very last minute to some of the stories.
Thank you so much. No, pleasure's all mine. I really do apologise to those who are expecting David Anderson today, though.
I know he's a very dynamic speaker and I'm sorry to be the last man standing, but I did co-author the paper with David.
He was most present today and I was also one of the principal researchers on the larger legal case that you may or may not have read about,
but that's what this research came out of.
But just to give you a bit of background about the case, it was brought forward to the High Court in London by four elderly Kenyan claimants,
all of whom had been unduly tortured under the hands of the British colonial government at the time of the Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s.
So the case ended in July of last year when the High Court found that the British government
was responsible for human rights abuses carried out by colonialists in Kenya 70 years ago,
including torture and rapes. This is a really landmark case and stipulated for the first time compensation packages for victims in Kenya.
So those have been agreed, but the particulars will still be ironed out.
So I was one of the principal researchers on the claimant's case and I, along with several other colleagues,
spent many months of tedious labour combing through the hundreds of thousands of pages
of new evidence surrounding British activities in Kenya during the Melmotte period.
And so though this evidence itself is also another large story,
it's a specific room of documents that is called the hands of disclosure, and it's sort of a presentation in itself.
Needless to say, David Anderson and other historians were quite instrumental on these documents being brought to light.
They in their own research, they recognised a huge gap in official literature from this period and noticed existing
Foreign Office records that allude to other documents have been not available.
The files were then released under the pretence of being merely misplaced since the early 1960s.
And so, having been through the length of them, I can tell you that they are quite grisly in their detail of rape, torture,
cover ups and gross mismanagement in the Colonial Office at the time of the NAMA rebellion in Kenya and also other colonial sites, including Cyprus.
And but this is just about Kenya. So with the hassle of disclosure and the court case, there's clearly a great deal of back story to this talk.
And but today I'm going to narrow the focus specifically to the issue of sexual violence and prosecution of sex crimes,
including rape and indecent assault at the time of the Mau Mau.
My own academic and professional background, as you heard, involves issues of women's rights,
health and violence in Africa, both contemporary and historical.
So over the course of the legal case research, Dave engaged me specifically to work on issues of rape and sexual violence in the hands of documents.
We singled out the issue of singled out the use of rape and its prosecutions, period, for several reasons.
First, well, besides the fact that there's a lot of a large number of cases documented.
But aside from that, there's a surprising gap in scholarship on the use of rape and sexual violence in late colonial and post-colonial conflicts,
either in Africa or elsewhere. Also,
the conversations about instances and prosecution of rape and sexual violence in wartime have
been somewhat clouded by discourses arising from the Balkans and Rwandan conflicts of the 1990s.
The Balkans was a particular watershed for the discussion of rape in wartime because it was the
first conflict which rape was considered a separate and distinct war crimes to be prosecuted.
That's related to the particular nature of rape in this conflict. News on all sides is a legitimate weapon of mass humiliation and punishment.
In the Rwandan genocide,
there was also a similar explosion of the use of rape by the Hutu militias and again discourses on the use of rape as a weapon of war.
Similar to the Balkans, conversations were unearth and expanded.
But what is problematic about these discourses is the way in which they have been applied retroactively to all wars and conflicts.
The Balkans pattern of rape as a weapon of mass destruction is indeed not applicable to every conflict, including the memo.
And it is important to nuance the discussion of sexual violence and war so as
not to obscure the histories through generalised and anachronistic language.
So again, this is one of the reasons why we undertook this work.
So with this preamble in mind, let me launch into our own investigation of prosecution of rape in Myanmar,
and perhaps we could discuss some of the larger arguments about conflict and rape in wartime more generally in the Q&A.
So in the most recent court case, to go back to this narrative,
one of the four elderly Kenyan claimants in court was a Kikuyu woman named Jane Morrow.
Jane's personal testimony describe incidents of sexual abuse.
Jane was only 15 years old, 15 years old in 1954 when she was accused of being a mama sympathiser.
And along with other villages, she was taken into account for interrogation.
She was then pinned to the floor by four African guards who held her thighs apart while another guard
forced a glass bottle into her vagina using the sole of his boots to direct the bottle deeply into her.
The pain was excruciating and Jane realised the bottle had been heated.
When this ordeal came to an end, she was compelled to sit and watch as the other young women incarcerated were subjected to the same torture.
So this was the first time that such a story of sexual crimes in the
counterinsurgency against the Myanmar rebels had been laid before a British court.
But for Kenyans, the detail of these claims is all too familiar. In 1998, the publication of political activists one boy, Aki Otieno,
his memoirs had caused a stir with her revelation of her brutal multiple rape at the hands of a British police officer in a detention camp in 1960.
Oceana's experience echoed earlier accounts from the 1950s.
In his biographical account of the rebellion,
Myanmar forest fighter Krishna JAMA poignantly recalled his return to his home in the area after the war,
only to find that his wife had been raped by a member of the local African militia.
But you see your home guard and had born an illegitimate child.
This trope was even taken up by a distinguished Kenya fiction writer who you may known to about a young girl whose rebel hero in a grain of wheat.
Kono returns home to similar circumstances. More recently, from 2002 onwards,
the collection by the Human Kenya Human Rights Commission of testimony on colonial abuses brought to light a growing catalogue of rape accusations.
Similar accounts being highlighted in Caroline Elkins monograph on the story of the British detention camps in Kenya, published in 2005.
Elkins quotes from the oral testimonies of several Kikuyu women who related their
experience of rapes and other sexual assaults while in custody of security personnel,
including events very similar to those of Jane Mara. This paper provides the first documentary evidence from Kenya in the 1950s that
both corroborates and enlarges upon these legal and oral testimonies and memoirs.
Accusations of rapes and sexual assaults by state security personnel are littered throughout the handful of disclosure,
with 9000 files in total, approximately 500 of the files deal specifically with the the way the British dealt with the Kenyan rebellion.
A significant number of these files relate to the investigation and prosecution of allegations against the security forces between 1953 and 1959,
including cases of rape and sexual crimes. So the documentary evidence is quite powerful and important precisely because it relates to
cases where investigations and sometimes prosecutions were initiated by the state at the time.
So the existence of these cases may at first appear surprising.
Legal attitudes to rape in colonial Kenya in the 1950s were generally unsympathetic to prosecution, as they were also in Britain at this time.
While examining these papers for the information they can give us on the character and extent of social sexual crimes,
we must also ask how is it that such cases were brought to the attention of legal officers?
All these assaults were committed upon civilian Kikuyu women by African and British agents of the colonial state.
So the decision to prosecute related to the discipline and control of the security forces more than an interest for the protection of the victim.
As we shall see, the colonial states sought to escape court hearings wherever possible by denying and deflecting evidence,
generally preferring to avoid legal remedies for the colonial authorities.
Rape was, quote, a difficult charge and how they set it themselves among victims to the new outcome.
Suggests reluctance on the part of African women to seek formal prosecution.
This being reinforced by the circumstances of the conflict in which the victims were usually
stigmatised as supporters of the NAMA rebels while the perpetrators were servants of the government.
The evidence on these cases thus provides a unique insight as to the way that rape was treated in a colonial context during the 1950s.
And as to the small but growing literature of that addresses the question of how sexual crimes crimes are or are not prosecuted in wartime.
So to go to what Britain's counterinsurgency campaign was in Kenya,
a brief introduction was enough to between October 1952 and then ended with the ending of the state of emergency that had been occurred in 52.
In 19 January, 1960. So this was against the Myanmar rebellion and has been called the Dirty War.
And it was an estimated 20 to 30000 casualties on the side of the Kikuyu at the height of the campaigns in 1955.
Besides those deceased, over 70,000 Kenyans had also were also held in British prisons and detention camps.
The vast majority being incarcerated without charges having been brought against them.
So Britain concentrated efforts directly among the 1 million Kikuyu speakers of Kenya's central mountain province and Mount Kenya region,
including civilians who are called the passive wing of the NAMA rebellion.
Draconian laws give the police and other security services wide discretionary powers to detain and interrogate suspects,
a process known in Kenya by euphemism of screening.
This led to the reports of random and widespread violence against civilians, including sexual assaults.
From the very earliest months of the conflict.
So the members of the security services active in Kenya emergency can be divided into three separate groups the military,
the police and the home guard. The military was British army regiments who had been deployed to Kenya's work alongside the King's African Rifles,
which was a regiment of African rank and file serving under British officers.
A third military force formation, the Kenya Kenya regiment was made up of 300 or so recruits from the European white settler community,
also playing a prominent role in intelligence gathering and in commanding African auxiliary forces engaged in security, including the Kenya police.
Lastly, the Home Guard was a force of loyal, quote unquote, loyal human.
In 1953 amounted to over 25,000 members.
But by 1954, the British strategy was to pick Kikuyu loyalists against Kikuyu rebels.
The Home Guard was heavily involved in prosecuting the war against civilians, punishing rebels and their alleged supporters alike.
Within the new documentary evidence available, there are many detailed and previously unknown allegations of rape and sexual
assaults made against each wing of the British security services in Kenya.
So to give you an idea of what some of these complaints look like, I'll briefly narrate three different examples of types of allegations.
The first, from May 1953, describes complaints made regarding the, quote, many abuses of the Kikuyu horn home guard,
including rapes of women while they conducted screening of the Long Diani division of the Rift Valley Province.
The official response acknowledged that abuses had taken place but failed to address the specific allegation of rapes.
At the same time, the complainant, a preacher with the local moral rearmament movement in the district,
was privately informed that among the Africans who had told him about these events were some of the suspects, some suspected of man activities.
This is to become a familiar pattern with accusations of rape being dismissed or represented
as malicious efforts to undermine African staff within the colonial administration.
The lone Diana complaint was amongst a larger body of similar allegations that resulted in an internal investigation into the conduct
of the Kikuyu Home Guard in the screening camps and the issuing of instructions to keep tighter control over screening teams.
But rapes were never formally investigated. Another report from January 1955 two women where assaults in the home guard camp at Macadamia in Nairobi.
Objects being inserted into their vaginas in an act of torture and humiliation.
These assaults were perpetrated by a group of Kikuyu women, then living with home guard at the camp.
Investigators describe the assailants as prostitutes who had, quote, thrown their lot in with the government.
Information supplied by these women had been used in security operations and this accounted for their presence under the protection of the Home Guard.
The case did actually come to court and the assailants were convicted by the local magistrate.
Evidence produced at this hearing showed that Chief Kioko, commander of the Home Guard at Masada,
was well aware of the sexual abuse of female mama suspects.
And this was common practice at the camp.
After this incident, Chief Kioko was transferred from Agodi to rural Meru and given the rank of Sergeant Major and a new home guard.
So the last the third example comes from early 1956,
when two women alleged that they had been raped in a labour camp in Machakos district by the African headmen in command of the camp.
Initial investigations revealed that other home guard and tribal police had also raped young girls at the camp.
Yet despite acknowledging that, quote, the headmen took full advantage of the sexual opportunities at his position,
and the temptation of a number of girls presented him with colonial officials elected
not to prosecute because of difficulties establishing the question of consent.
The accused men claimed that the women had consented or the men simply denied the assaults.
With contradictory accounts, lack of medical evidence and no other witnesses willing to give the prospects for conviction remain slim.
So these examples are typical of the many references to such cases in the hands of
disclosure that begin to illustrate the range of issues raised by rape allegations.
I'm going to deal for the rest of the talk with sort of a more coherent picture from the cases
that were formally reported to the Chief Security Complaints Coordinating Committee or the CCXI.
The papers of this committee are amongst the most important sources revealed in the House of Disclosure.
Initially set up in mid-January 1954 as a watch committee to, quote,
receive complaints and ill treatment by members of the security forces and to direct such complaints to the appropriate authorities.
The cases that come from the minutes of the ICC all follow through in investigation and prosecution.
If there was a prosecution or no case,
so we can start to delineate patterns of prosecution or lack of prosecution by dealing with these cases specifically.
So the minutes of the first seven meetings of the SEC are missing.
But from 26th April 1954, until the disbandment of the committee in November 1959, we have a full record of the cases reported.
The Deputy Public Prosecutor and Undersecretary of Defence both attended the CFC.
The minutes were widely circulated copies going to all senior officials in Nairobi,
including the governor and other members of the war council, senior legal officials and ministers.
Copies of them as also came back to London for the attention of the Secretaries of State of the Colonies.
So important that the records of the cases are.
I really need to emphasise that there have been no means represent representative
of a complete account of all accusations made against the security forces.
Only those that had first been formally notified to the Criminal Investigations Department, CID, then came to the CFTC.
In many instances, rape allegations were not the reason for the initial CID investigations,
but only emerged as inquiries through together a more complete picture of the circumstances of the event.
So this tends to suggest that charges were only rarely brought to the side.
Moreover, there are allegations of abuses from within. The detention camps emerged at the time and letters written by detainees and since
activists in Kenya and in Britain who then sought to publicise this events.
Only one such complaint thought of the sexual abuse of a detainee at the women's reception camp in yet found its way to Ccxi.
This was because there was no formal bureaucratic requirement to report complaints from the camps to any specified authority.
In contrast with unexplained death accounts, death in the camps which was required to be notified to the police.
So the experience of women detainees is quite a separate issue altogether.
And while I also investigated the cases of camp based violence, which are numerous,
we decided to keep these narratives separate because of the different nature of the crimes that the perpetrators and prosecution.
So dealing then with the non camp related incidences of sexual assaults.
The court papers now available to us record 56 separate sexual crimes spanning 1954 to 1959.
The details of which I have on a table which I'm going to pass out.
Sorry, I don't have slides, but I do have this table. Yeah.
Yeah. Thank you. That I. Yeah. You have to share.
Everybody can have one, unfortunately. Yeah.
So I evident from this table before you or what was swiftly come before you.
All the crimes that were reported were perpetrated by employees of the Kono administration or members of the security forces.
There are 23 in cases which involve members of the Kenya police.
Another three cases related to the Kenya Police Reserve and three to officers of the prison service.
Tribal police were accused in six cases and home guard and ten.
In another case, the accused was a screening officer. Then the final case, the affiliation of the accused, was not recorded military units.
So that first section, British Army King's African Rifles and the Kenya regiment featured in nine of the cases.
So the incidence of reported cases shows a decline. Towards the end of the period, all but three cases occurred between 1954 and 1957.
So in terms of outcomes, we know that from the 56 investigations,
only 29 cases were prosecuted and that at 2024 cases it was decided there was insufficient evidence to merit prosecution.
In three cases, the records are incomplete and we do not know the outcome.
So that's just gives you an idea of the table. So any interpretation of the sentencing patterns from the Ccxi papers is complicated by a highly
significant change in the sexual offences legislation that was introduced in the emergency.
So it must be mentioned in 1926 in Kenya,
white settler anxieties about the threat posed to white women in Kenya from sexual assault by
black males that the colonial government introduced legislation making rape a capital offence,
meaning that such cases could only be heard before the Supreme Court.
The penal code stipulated that rape was punishable by death or life imprisonment.
The latter extended only even to those found guilty of attempted rape. Must make a little note here, though, that that is only rape of white women.
Rape of black women was considered. The just treatment was three years imprisonment, but it still had to be tried at the Supreme Court.
So that stood. But the treat, the punishments would be different.
There were still disputes about the relevance of the Penal Code and had been passed in 1926.
In 1950s colonies, however, and in 1955, the Kennedy administration quietly amended the penal code to lessen the penalties for rape.
So since passing the is also made, made it to the Supreme Court to not have to hear all rape allegations.
So the passing of the law, the death penalty, had only rarely been handed down in rape cases,
most recently in 1950, when three Africans hanged for the rape of an elderly white woman.
Again, this would only be for a white woman. From December 1955.
Rape allegations no longer needed to go before the Supreme Court and could be heard before
magistrate and the lower court applying a much lower tariff of penalties to those convicted.
So I think it's very important to mention that rape was lessons at this time.
So the 17 rape cases in which convictions recorded by the CC cc in nine cases, the sentences were handed down before the change.
These cases, heard before the end of 1956 were certainly not prosecuted with the full force of law.
And the change in legislation might be seen to reflect the reluctance of Supreme
Court judges to hand down harsh sentences for rape in the context of wartime.
And also, again, go back to this racial distinction between victims.
The reduction in the rate of conviction from 1956 also perhaps suggests that magistrates, too,
in addition to the Supreme Court judges, were unwilling to tackle such cases with much vigour.
So returning to the table, I'd like to discuss the wider context of the rape allegations reflected in these figures from the CSC papers.
For three categories of security services the military, home guard and the police.
Because of limited time today I'm only going to discuss in detail the handling of rape charges against members of the military,
which historically had the most complex attitude to the investigation of rape cases
in the early phase of the emergency from October 1952 through to December 1953.
Abuses by the security forces were widespread Kikuyu women fleeing into Nairobi at night, November 1952,
to avoid the flare up of conflict in rural areas, told the first stories of rape and assault by police officers from the military.
By March 1953, intelligence reports candidly admitted that soldiers were involved in, quote,
inevitable pilfering and molesting of women in operations against the civilian population.
When General Erskine arrived in Kenya in June 1953 to take command of the military,
he was shocked by this ill discipline and issued a warning to his soldiers that allegations made against them would be properly investigated.
This turned out to be a hollow claim. Erskine's principal aim was to protect the reputation of the army, and while that did imply preventing abuses,
it also involved minimising the adverse publicity such cases attracted and the negative effects that they had upon service morale.
Erskine therefore secured an agreement from the Attorney General that cases involving
soldiers would be heard before military courts and would not go before civilian magistrates.
The extent to which the military then pursued these investigations would not be
subject to scrutiny other than the processes of cases being reported to the Ccxi
military reluctance to open up rape allegations to criminal investigation was
vividly seen in the McLean inquiry into the conduct of the British army in Kenya,
held in closed sessions in Nairobi in December 1953.
The terms of reference of this inquiry were restricted to the period of Erskine's command,
meaning that Lieutenant General Sir Kenneth McLean was barred from investigating any reported incident that took place before June.
July 1983, soldiers giving evidence to McClane had to be repeatedly reminded of this general restriction.
Moreover, the McClane inquiry refused to pursue the mentions of rape that were made in evidence,
even telling one witness, quote, That is not the sort of thing we are concerned with.
So despite the fact that the Army categorise rape as a serious offence, bracketing it alongside murder and manslaughter,
a senior officer in the military police told the McLane Inquiry that in Kenya, the army treated rape as a minor crime in the same category as theft.
Whenever rape was committed along with other offences, it was usual for the rape charges to be ignored,
especially if those other offences were deemed more serious. This was most glaring in the notorious case of Tukur in June 1953,
when raped by African soldiers of the King's African Rifles and their two British officers,
led to a confrontation with villagers in which 222 Kikuyu were killed.
Compensation was paid to the families of the deceased, but no public mention was made of the rates that had ignited the incident,
and the military took active steps to suppress information about the event being released.
This features the handling of rape allegations by the military.
Explain why so few were referred to the Ccxi only nine cases being reported over a six year period.
The majority of these cases, six in all, arose in 1954, four being allegations of gang rape by African soldiers of the King's African rifles.
These gang rape cases all followed a similar pattern of investigation.
Each would be reported first through the city and then passed on to military authorities, who then showed a remarkable reluctance to proceed.
Repeated requests from the CCRC for reports on investigations were ignored or excuses offered.
These investigations lay within the military without resolution for periods greater than six months and in one case, for more than a year.
In all four gang rape cases, military investigators ultimately declared that there was insufficient evidence to identify the culprits,
and so the cases were all dropped without judicial action. However, a fifth case of gang rape also from 1954 was handled very differently.
This concerned three British soldiers of the Royal Engineers who are prosecuted by courts martial and convicted,
each being sentenced to six years imprisonment. These were the harshest sentences handed on to any person convicted of rape during the Kenyan
emergency and in marked contrast to the delays in the four king's African rifles gang rape cases.
Only eight weeks elapsed between the notification of this case and the sentences of the convicts.
Evidently, the army could move swiftly, even when it wanted to.
The remaining military rape case from 1954 was an allegation against an individual soldier of the Kenya regiment, a white settler.
The case was also rapidly processed there,
being only four weeks between the notification of the case and the court martial hearing at which the soldier was eventually acquitted.
The archive documents do not offer any explanation for the differences in processing
the four King's African rifles cases and the two concerning British accused from 1954.
But there is an obvious racial distinction. Those cases involving white soldiers were heard through the military courts,
while those involving black African soldiers were the subject delaying prevarication and ultimately deflection.
The reason for this almost certainly lies in the contrast between the prevailing attitudes of the locally recruited King's African rifles,
whose commanders dismissed rape as a trivial offence. What's in their skin sought to protect the British army regiments from further reputational
damage by ensuring that such cases involving British soldiers were properly investigated.
It is difficult, therefore, to avoid the conclusion that the pattern of prosecutions,
how the racial aspect rape allegations made against African rank and file were processed in a different way than
those made against white soldiers of all ranks because different standards of behaviour were applied by the military.
This view is borne out by the remaining three cases involving military personnel spanning 1955 and 1957.
The first, from May 1955, saw a soldier of the row engineers accused of sexual assault against a child at the town of Thika.
Again, this case against a British soldier was rapidly investigated over a period of five
weeks and the decision taken not to prosecute because of contradictory evidence.
One month later, an officer of the Kenya regiment was convicted for court martial after another very speedy investigation by military officers.
He was convicted of indecent assault and discharged after six months of detention in the
final military case reported by the Complaints Coordination Committee from January 1957.
An African private from the King's African rifles was convicted of the attempted
rape of a civilian woman as she was leaving the Lang'ata military camp.
This case having occurred in a non operational context and the civil jurisdiction coming after the
changes made to the penalties for rape in Kenya went before the Magistrate's Court in Nairobi.
Where the conflict received a custodial sentence of 12 months.
Remarkably,
this is the only case recorded of the conviction of rape or sexual assault of an African in the military during and during Kenya's emergency.
So in the case of the Home Guard, well presented frequently in oral testimonies collected moral members of the
Home Guard were rarely prosecuted or even investigated as evident in the table,
with only ten cases brought against home grown members.
It is evident that, similar to instance of rape in the Algerian war in the 1950s, as described by Rafael Branch,
these local militiamen were seen to have not only ample opportunity for sexual crimes,
but also a higher degree of impunity in each of the hunger cases presented the CFTC.
There is a considerable degree of delay, deflection and even suppression of investigations.
There is a common view that prosecutions of Home Guard members were more harmful than helpful, damaging the morale of security services.
Prosecutions could undermine the counterinsurgency campaign, especially among African auxiliaries.
Further squandering investigations and prosecution efforts.
In January 1955, Governor Ali Abdullah barely halted all allegations made against members of the colonial administration by declaring general amnesty.
So aside from the Home Guard and military, the last group prominent on the table is the police.
These police were largely made up of local recruits, and the care of the rape cases brought against the police is remarkably consistent.
Nearly all of these alleged assaults occurred within the police station or in police vehicles.
The women having been apprehended on some minor offences or on suspicion.
The majority of the allegations concerned rape by two or three police officers together, similar to home guard cases.
Tactics of delay and deflection are evident in the police cases of the 14 allegations recorded for 1955 and 1956.
11 went to trial while from nine to 7 to 9, only three out of the 14 alleged assaults were prosecuted.
There's another element to the poor numbers of prosecutions in this instance of rape.
It is very likely that the Kikuyu families of the victims of rape at the hands of Kikuyu home guards
and police perpetrators may have used social remedies as a preferred alternative to legal procedures.
Historian Tabitha Noble describes rape and other forms of sexual assault as having known and well understood social remedies within Kikuyu society.
Both economic and moral impose the community sanction against those who infringe the accepted norms.
I cannot go explains when a rape occurred, quote, It was the clan that was perceived to be the aggrieved party to be appeased,
for the woman had no individual standing in the matter, cultural or legal.
But Claire Robertson concludes that rape in one country was principally considered a violation of property.
So in the 1950s, social remedies in the form of a tariff or compensation payable by those culpable to the family of the victims,
still remained open to and through the existence of accepted social remedies in cases
of rape may have deterred victims from seeking legal redress through the courts.
But the breakdown of social order that the emergency brought to Kikuyu areas made it unlikely that such sanctions could be enforced,
least of all of the victims. These were perceived to be rebels and therefore outcasts.
This is not a matter to which the archival documents speak at all,
but is clearly an issue that other research might address in deepening our understanding
of the response to rape and other sexual crimes in colonial central Kenya.
So I'll conclude the paper now by asking again some of these more general questions about
the relevance of this paper to wider discourses of conflict in place of sexual violence,
as a weapon in militarised forces, and the prosecution of rape in times of war.
While there has always been an awareness of rape prevalence in wartime,
it is really not until the 1990s that these kinds of adults were separately as a weapon of war.
In April 1946, when the International Military Tribunal for the Far East documented the infamous rape of 19 of December 1937,
they estimated that some 20,000 women had been the victims of systematic military race by the Japanese army.
The senior officials held responsible were charged for generality of alleged acts,
quote, carried out in violation of recognised customs and conventions of war,
including mass murder, rape and other barbaric cruelties, but not for specific sexual crimes.
The 1949 Geneva Convention was also explicit in enumerating rape as a distinct violation.
Article 27 stated that women are, quote, protected against any attack on their honour.
In particular, against rape and forced prostitution or any form of indecent assault.
This was seldom treated discreetly by lawyers and prosecuting war crimes over the following years until the 1990s.
Scholars, notably Cynthia and Lou, have shown how military common commanders have worked to manoeuvre rape victims into distinct civilian category.
Is the seek to minimise or exonerate the stigma attached to the crime.
The military deploy rape, she argues, to assist in their own military causes.
Segregation of rape perpetrators in Kenya.
It's a different institutional and racial categories, and that's be seen as an illustration of a most central argument.
The reluctance to prosecute rape in Kenya in the 1950s was not banned because of a lack of awareness of the significance of rape in wartime.
But it does fit with the broader pattern of denial from this period. Susan Brown Miller.
In her pioneering study of the Pakistan army's invasion of Bangladesh in 1971, where an estimated 300,000 civilian women were raped by soldiers,
she she's argue that contemporary evidence on rape and conflicts in the 20th century is not even difficult to come by.
Very often we have known about it at the time. In September 1945, Time magazine had candidly told its readers that in the Allied assault on Berlin,
quote, Our own army and the British army, along with ours, have done their share of looting and raping.
We, too, are considered an army of rapists. For the Vietnam War, too, after three decades of official amnesia.
We now have Gina Weaver's 2010 monograph on rape on the US Army.
Alarmed by American silence over these sexual crimes. Weaver nonetheless located volumes of testimony on America's dirty secret, including, quote,
the horrific and detailed accounts of sexual violence from U.S. Army veterans recorded in the Winter
Soldier investigation of January 1971 and logged on the Congressional Record later that year.
So as journalist and historian Nick Turse has observed, America has known these things all along.
So why then to take 40 years for them to be written about and discussed since the opening of rape discourses with the Balkans Rwandan conflicts?
Historians are thankfully reconsidering histories of the place and prevalence of rape and past wars.
But this does not change the fact of how poorly these kinds of prosecuted before 1990.
Also, as I mentioned at the start of this paper, we must be careful to not generalise discourses of rape based on a balkanised model.
Rape is not the same mass weapon of war in each and every conflict.
That does not mean that it does not occur or that its prevalence should be overlooked and trivialised.
There's no single explanation for how and when rape during wartime will be prosecuted.
Historical record from Kenya and elsewhere suggests that regardless of frequency, severity or even verifiability of victims claims,
wartime rape is often only prosecuted when it is politically or military expedient to do so.
So thanks. I'll now answer some questions.