ABSTRACT
Sexual violence: an everyday “domestic” occurrence and a seemingly ever present feature of international conflict. In the latter, a wide range of authoritative sources, including the United Nations, suggest the incidence of sexual violence is immense; the figure of one in three or four women will suffer this form of violence in a lifetime is regularly quoted (World Health Organization 2016). To stem what Ban Ki-moon (in UN News Centre 2014) has dubbed a “scourge,” calls for action and policy are profuse and are supported by an increasing number of UN Security Council Resolutions as well as national initiatives. The incidence of sexual violence has also drawn increasing attention from high-profile celebrities. These celebrities, who once directed their (and “our”) colonial gaze to poverty and HIV/AIDS, now home in on specifically conflict-related sexual violence. Most often the “poster-child” of this attention has a female face, one clearly presented as deserving of humanitarian compassion (see Kapoor 2013; Zalewski and Sisson Runyan 2015).
