Our purpose in this special volume is to shed light upon women's wartime experiences, and to make sense of their coping strategies in the face of the innumerable atrocities committed against them. The war in question is that which accompanied the break-up of the Former Yugoslavia, and it is one with which I am all too familiar, having spent the past four years in Holland researching women's treatment at the hands of the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague. Needless to say, exposure to the effects of war has provided both me and the contributing authors with a new perspective on the relationship between justice and recovery, and the impact of enormous and repeated trauma on helpers and victims. Moreover, one might argue that analysis of this conflict makes manifest issues that are of vital significance to feminist psychotherapists in particular, and to those working in the healing professions more generally.
Wars Make Visible the Declared
and Undeclared Wars Against Women
Violence against women is magnified during armed conflicts, in the process exposing the artificiality of the boundary between "wartime" and
"peacetime" violence. Indeed, one might even go so far as to say that attacks upon women in conflict zones are simply one more manifestation of the
"undeclared" war upon women everywhere.
Challenging the Erasure of Women's Victimization ill Wartime To a large extent, war crimes committed against women have been marginalized, trivialized or ignored by the International Tribunals charged with Address correspondence to: Sara Sharratt, PhD, P.O. Box 2292-1000, San Jose, Costa Rica.
[Haworth co-indexing entry note]: "Introduction." Sharratt, Sara. Co-published simultaneously in Women & Therapy(The Haworth Press, Inc.) Vol. 22, No. I, 1999, pp. 1-6; and: Assault on the Soul: Women in the Former Yugoslavia (ed: Sara Sharratt and Ellyn Kaschak) The Haworth Press, Inc., 1999, pp. 1-6.
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2 Assault on the Soul: Women in the Former Yugoslavia investigating them. In this way, challenging the erasure of women's experiences is central to the political struggle against male violence, whether in the detention camps of Bosnia-Herzegovina, or in the suburbs of Los Angeles. At a personal level, I have found few things more shocking than the juxtaposi-tion of clear evidence of atrocities committed against women on the one hand, and their absence from most accounts of the war in the Former Yugoslavia on the other.
It is generally accepted that the majority of casualties in armed cont1icts are women and children. While not wishing to suggest that contemporary jurisprudence has suddenly broken with its misogynist past and prioritized the interests of these groups, attention is increasingly being focused upon the rights of victims (see Odio), with impunity seen as an impediment both to justice and to peace. This is an important point, and one which feminist therapists would do well to bear in mind: atrocities, including rape, need to be publicly acknowledged as war crimes and their perpetrators punished rather than the victims, as is usually the case in instances of sexual violence (see McDonald; Viseur-Sellers). Thus, it makes sense for us to work with institutions that punish crimes against women, and push them towards strong forms of redress and unequivocal condemnation of rape and other manifestations of male violence.
Wars Make Explicit the Links Between Treatment and Advocacy Although feminist therapy and ethics have always placed great emphasis upon the integration of theory and practice, this becomes especially important in the context of armed cont1icts such as that of the Former Yugoslavia. How so? In short, an activist stance in the fight against impunity may very well have a direct impact upon collective and individual healing, to the extent that feminists are able to persuade International Tribunals to recognize rape as the war crime and torture that it is. If we are successful in doing so, this could, as Nancy Kelley states, " ... change things for women all over the world"
(Chesler, 1996, p. 56), as well as helping us overcome powerful feelings of helplessness and despair (see Scheft1er and Mi.ichele).
War Crime Tribunals Force the Perpetrator to Take Center-Stage By focusing attention upon those responsible for war atrocities, International Tribunals provide a basis for the public repudiation of perpetrators and the acts they have committed. In this way, justice becomes a way of expedit-ing individual and collective recovery.