Lawmakers put violence against women on the agenda for 2015

With alarming frequency in 2014, reports of rape and rape culture emerged — from college campuses to U.S. military barracks to the battlefields of Syria. Just as unsettling is the growing awareness of how infrequently rape is reported or acknowledged, let alone prosecuted. That could start to change in 2015, when a number of decisions will put rape and other forms of violence against women on policymakers’ agendas in international law, at universities, on Native American reservations and in the armed forces.

The International Criminal Court in the Hague (ICC) is expected to reach a decision early next year on charges of rape against former warlord and Congolese vice-President Jean-Pierre Bemba, for crimes allegedly committed during a coup in the Central African Republic in 2002-2003. This is the first time the court is prosecuting rape as a weapon of war and the first time that male victims' testimonies were included in the proceedings. 

The ruling on Bemba will set an important precedent, but it may be difficult for the ICC to act on reports of similar atrocities committed during the conflict in Syria and Iraq, since neither country is a member of the court. Hundreds of Yazidi women in Iraq were reportedly raped this year by fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. In Syria, the United Nations reported on rape used as a weapon in President Bashar Al-Assad’s Damascus torture chambers. At the next round of peace talks on Syria in Geneva, which could be held in early 2015, Syrian women who were excluded from participating in the first round will renew their demand for a seat at the table to bring these issues to light.

In United States, college students have taken the lead in exposing what campus activists call rape culture, in which sexual violence is normalized and victims are blamed for their assaults. One in five students experiences assault on campus, according to a 2007 study, but only a fraction of those incidents is reported.

The White House launched a task force on campus sexual assault in January, which provided schools with a model for reporting and confidentiality. That set the stage for California’s “yes means yes” law, passed in August, which applies to all public universities in the state and requires affirmative consent, placing the burden of proof on the alleged perpetrator rather than the victim. New Jersey is considering a similar law for its public colleges. Meanwhile, the federal cases against dozens of colleges for possible civil rights violations in their handling of sexual assault cases will continue into 2015. The U.S. Department of Education revealed in May that it was investigating 25 colleges for Title IX violations; the number is now 86.

Advocates say that reporting of sexual assaults is already rising, an indication that more victims are willing to come forward. Providing financial assistance to survivors of sexual assault, who often miss classes and drop out of school following the trauma, will also be an activists’ agenda in 2015.

On Native American reservations, one in three women is sexually assaulted, but until recently, tribal courts could not hear those cases when the act was committed by a non-Native. This year’s reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act includes a provision to try non-Indians for certain cases at three tribes. By March 2015, the provision will take effect for all U.S. tribes. That may test the limits of tribal courts, which often lack sufficient resources to prosecute sexual assault. Crimes committed outside the contexts of domestic violence, the violation of a protection order or dating violence remain out of reach of the tribal courts, so a large portion of gender-based crimes on reservations, including rape by strangers, may still go unpunished.

In the military, where an estimated one in three female recruits is sexually assaulted during service, only 11 percent of those assaults are reported, mainly because the victims fear retaliation. Congress passed a bill in December giving them greater say in the handling of their cases, but keeps prosecution of sexual assault within military ranks. Activists are pushing to remove sexual assault prosecution from the chain of command, and the Military Justice Improvement Act, a proposal from Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., would do just that. It failed to pass in March but could come to another vote next year.