Rape as Governance
When the State Enters the Body
Across empires and centuries
They called it order. It sounded like boots on stone and the careful clearing of a throat before a decree. Somewhere between the torchlight and the ledger, the crowd learned where law ended and the body began. The lesson did not require blood to be convincing. It required permission. When authority announced that violation was allowed, even necessary, the message arrived intact. The victim’s name would be forgotten. The policy would not.
This was not chaos. This was choreography. Rape, practiced not as crime but as instrument, moved through history with a bureaucrat’s patience. It wore uniforms and vestments. It spoke in proclamations and whispers. It did not need to invent cruelty. It only needed to repurpose desire as a tool of rule.
The Method — Policy Without Apparatus
Unlike racks and wheels, rape as governance requires no hardware. Its apparatus is administrative. A border is crossed. A city is declared taken. A population is reclassified. The act follows as a clause, not a frenzy. Soldiers are instructed to take what has been conquered. Captains look away. Priests rationalize. Judges postpone.
The process repeats with unsettling consistency. First comes designation: the enemy is dehumanized, feminized, rendered violable. Then comes license: explicit orders or tacit immunity. Timing matters. The violence often arrives immediately after surrender or during house-to-house “security,” when fear is fresh and witnesses are few. The purpose is not gratification alone. It is to write conquest on the body, to make memory inescapable, to break lineage and trust.
From antiquity to modernity, empires understood the efficiency. In the sack of cities, rape announced permanence. In colonial campaigns, it established hierarchy. In civil wars, it fractured communities from the inside. The method scales easily. It adapts. It leaves no single inventor to blame and no machine to dismantle.
The Human View — Choreography of Power
For the victim, the experience is a collapse of categories. The familiar turns hostile. Time dilates. Sound becomes granular. The mind inventories exits that do not exist. Shame arrives early and uninvited, a second assault that lingers longer than bruises. Survival does not feel like victory. It feels like unfinished business.
For the perpetrator, especially when shielded by authority, the psychology is antiseptic. Orders abstract responsibility. Uniforms distribute guilt. The act becomes proof of belonging, a grim initiation into the fraternity of power. Some comply to avoid suspicion. Others to curry favor. A few because permission is intoxicating.
For witnesses, there is the paralysis of sanctioned atrocity. Neighbors learn the price of protest. Children learn what silence costs. The community absorbs the lesson that bodies are negotiable under pressure. The violence radiates outward, altering how people walk, speak, marry, remember.
The Society Behind It — Law, Faith, and Theater
Rape as governance thrives where spectacle and denial coexist. Publicly, leaders speak of order and salvation. Privately, the act does the work that speeches cannot. It deters rebellion without martyrdom. It punishes without trials. It erases without graves.
Faith has been enlisted to launder the deed. Victims are blamed for tempting, for belonging, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, which is to say the conquered place at the conquered time. Law participates by omission. Amnesties appear. Evidence goes missing. Statutes arrive too late to matter.
The theater is essential. Even when unseen, the rumor travels. It teaches obedience more effectively than gallows because it targets the future: fertility, kinship, continuity. Rape governs by threatening tomorrow.
Historical Record — From Sacks to Systems
The pattern is old. Classical accounts of city sacks normalize sexual violence as spoil. Medieval chronicles speak of “license” granted to troops after breaches. Early modern campaigns refined the practice, balancing plunder with discipline, violation with plausible deniability.
In the twentieth century, the scale did not diminish. It industrialized. During the 1937 capture of Nanjing, mass sexual violence accompanied massacre, embedding terror into occupation memory. In the 1990s, rape was wielded systematically during the Bosnian War, with detention camps designed to make violation routine and reproductive. Survivors testified decades later to a policy that required no paperwork to be unmistakable.
Colonial archives whisper the same logic. Indigenous women were targeted to fracture resistance and reengineer societies. In each case, the victims’ names are scarce. The policy’s fingerprints are everywhere.
Myth & Memory — What We Tell Ourselves After
Later cultures struggle to narrate this violence without turning it into aberration. Films imply chaos where there was policy. Textbooks footnote what should be centered. Survivors are asked to represent statistics and to carry silence simultaneously.
Myths proliferate to soften culpability. The “undisciplined troops.” The “fog of war.” The “bad apples.” Yet the recurrence across armies, ideologies, and centuries argues for design over accident. Memory persists not because the act was rare, but because it was effective.
Modern echoes appear in courtrooms and headlines. Delayed justice. Collective amnesia. The uneasy relief when a verdict absolves the living rather than honors the dead. We prefer the fiction that cruelty surprises us.
The endurance of the story reveals a species skilled at inventing tools and justifying their use. When law enters the body, it leaves scars that outlast constitutions.