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17 Harv. Women's L.J. 5 (1994)
Rape, Genocide, and Women's Human Rights

handle is hein.journals/hwlj17 and id is 13 raw text is: RAPE, GENOCIDE, AND WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS* CATHARINE A. MACKINNON** Human rights have not been women's rights-not in theory or in reality, not legally or socially, not domestically or internationally. Rights that human beings have by virtue of being human have not been rights to which women have had access, nor have violations of women as such been part of the definition of the violation of the human as such on which human rights law has traditionally been predicated. This is not because women's human rights have not been violated. The eliding of women in the human rights setting happens in two ways. When women are violated like men who are otherwise like them-when women's arms and legs are cut and bleed like the arms and legs of men; when women, with men, are shot in pits and gassed in vans; when women's bodies are hidden with men's at the bottom of abandoned mines; when women's and men's skulls are sent from Auschwitz to Strasbourg for experiments-these atrocities are not marked in the his- tory of violations of women's human rights. The women are counted as Argentinian or Honduran or Jewish-which, of course, they are. When what happens to women also happens to men, like being beaten and disappearing and being tortured to death, the fact that those it happened to are women is not registered in the record of human atrocity. The other way violations of women are obscured is this: When no war has been declared, and life goes on in a state of everyday hostilities, women are beaten by men to whom we are close. Wives disappear from supermarket parking lots. Prostitutes float up in rivers or turn up under piles of rags in abandoned buildings. These atrocities are not counted as human rights violations, their victims as the desaparecidos of everyday life. In the record of human rights violations they are overlooked en- tirely, because the victims are women and what was done to them smells of sex. When a woman is tortured in an Argentine prison cell, even as it is forgotten that she is a woman, it is seen that her human rights are * Copyright @ 1994 by Catharine A. MacKinnon. This lecture also appears in MASS RAPE: THE WAR AGAINST WOMEN IN BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA (Alexandra Stiglnayer ed., 1994), published by the University of Nebraska Press. ** Professor of Law, University of Michigan Law School. Earlier versions of this material were delivered at the United Nations World Conference on Human Rights, Vienna, on June 17, 1993, and at the Zagreb University Law School, Zagreb, on June 25, 1993. The intellectual and research collaboration of Natalie Nenadic and Asja Armanda, all the women of Kareta Feminist Group, and the survivors made this work possible.

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