Flickr/Teymur Madjderey. Some rights reserved.The recognition of
wartime rape as a fundamental violation of international law has been a
hard-fought victory. Ending rape and other forms of sexual violence in war
ought to be a central aspiration of the international community. But the
struggle against rape has attained a kind of moral currency, put to use by
those lobbying for ‘lethal autonomous weapons’ (LAWs). And in doing so, the
politics of rape denunciation is fast becoming the politics of lobbyists,
vendors and military manufacturers seeking access to new customers and markets.
A recurrent
argument within the debate surrounding ‘lethal
autonomous weapons’ is the idea that taking humans out of the loop would make
war more humane. And in particular, it would end the occurrence of rape. This
‘robots-don’t-rape’ argument is premised on the assumption that robots are better at keeping to the
norms of war, and free from human inclinations towards lust and greed, panic
and rage.
This equation of
technological innovation with human progress is deeply problematic.
The
politics of rape denunciation is swiftly also becoming the politics of military
manufacturers seeking access to new customers and markets.
The instrumentalisation
of the ‘Very Worst Sex Crimes’ is nothing new: governments have for a long time
used the scourge of online child pornography to legitimate widespread
censorship and surveillance in cyberspace.
But the claim also
belongs to a broader category of arguments claiming that new military
technology can create better wars because they are pre-programmed, remotely
controlled, and ‘surgical’.
The argument that
drones limit collateral damage and contribute to ‘humane warfare’ because they
are surgically precise is by now familiar. Countless commentators argue that
cyber-war is preferable to conventional war because it is presumed to make war
less bloody. Following the same type of logic, autonomous robots are portrayed
as the vehicles for perfect legal compliance and perfect soldiering, which in
combination will produce ‘perfect combat’.
There
are important factual inaccuracies to this line of argument. First of all, the
1998 definition of rape in international law, as codified in the Rome Statute for the
International Criminal court is a broad one, according to which rape is not
reducible to forcible penetration of women committed by men. Rather, rape
occurs when:
“The
perpetrator invaded the body of a person by conduct resulting in penetration,
however slight, of any part of the body of the victim or of the perpetrator
with a sexual organ, or of the anal or genital
opening of the victim with any object or any other part of the
body.”
The ‘robots don’t
rape’ argument is based on misleading assumptions about the uses of
rape in conflict. This conceptualization of rape is accompanied by an implicit
understanding of motivation and rationale: that rapes in war are spontaneous
and unplanned and thus a breach of discipline. Research has showed us that, contrary to widespread belief, sexual
violence is not the male soldier’s appropriation of his ‘war dividend’; but is
used strategically against civilians as a weapon of war.
Sexual
violence is not the soldier’s ‘war dividend’; it is used as a weapon.
The indiscipline
argument can be turned on its head. If lethal autonomous weapons are programmed
to kill, they may also be programmed to carry out other forms of violence,
including rape. On account of possessing free will, a human soldier can refuse
to accept an illegal command to rape. A robot cannot.
What happens when
we accept the ‘robots-don’t-rape’ argument? We risk undermining hard-fought
gender battles, reducing wartime rape to an issue of uncontrolled and uncontrollable
male sexuality and penis-penetration of predominantly female victims. And we
fail to recognise it primarily as an act of violence, which may or may not be
deliberate, intentional, and programmed.
