On Forensics and Sexual Violence in Conflict

War and terror are not episodes of Law & Order.

Photo by Immo Wegmann on Unsplash

This week, the New York Times published a devastating investigation into Hamas’s use of sexual violence in its Oct. 7 attack. The Times reporters interviewed eye witnesses, trauma therapists of survivors who understandably don’t want to talk to the press, emergency personnel who recovered some of the bodies, and medical personnel who examined some of the dead. The conclusion is clear and unequivocal: Hamas militants, and possibly other men as well, committed many acts of sexual violence on Oct. 7.

There is a pervasive and disturbing problem with so much as discussing this conflict: If you express empathy for human suffering on either side, you're immediately accused of hating the other / wanting the other to suffer / enabling the other's suffering. Ergo, talking about Hamas rapes means you’re helping to justify an obscene war, or feeding stereotypes of Arab men as violent rapists. I’ve written about the evidence of sexual violence on Oct. 7, and every time I mention Oct. 7 sexual violence on social media, there’s outrage: You’re justifying mass murder; this is White Feminism; the rapes never happened.

Similarly, every time I’ve written about the plight of Palestinian civilians, I’ve gotten angry pushback: What about Hamas, and what about the Israeli women who were raped on Oct. 7? Why are you ignoring them, or justifying Hamas’s violence?

I utterly reject these lines of thinking. The truth matters, and it is unreasonable, irresponsible, deeply misogynist, and ultimately self-defeating to demand that reports of sexual violence in conflict be tamped down or denied to serve a greater political aim — just as it is disgraceful to default to whataboutism when it comes the soaring Palestinian civilian death toll and the utter Hell on earth in which Gazans are now living.

It is true that Oct. 7 sexual violence has been used as a cudgel by people who want to turn eyes away from the suffering in Gaza or justify the brutality of this war; it’s also true that Oct. 7 sexual violence has been downplayed or entirely denied by people who want to believe Hamas are anti-colonial liberators, not run-of-the-mill misogynist fundamentalists, who seem to think any attack on Israelis is legitimate, or who simply don’t want to recognize Israeli suffering.

Despite a now-significant body of evidence documenting Oct. 7 sexual violence, denialism remains rampant, and comes almost entirely from the American left and global pro-Palestinian factions. Far-left pseudo-journalists with large followings and zero experience reporting on sexual violence in conflict continue to opine about the “Hamas rape hoax.” At the center of their argument: Where’s the forensic evidence?

That same question can be heard from those who concede that sexual violence probably happened, but blame Israel for failing to collect forensics, and additionally argue that sexual violence is being used to distract from Israeli brutality in Gaza and to justify the killing of Palestinian civilians, most of them women and children.

There isn’t much in the way of forensic evidence because we’re talking about a terrorist attack, not an episode of Law & Order SVU — or even a stranger-rape in a well-resourced city in a peacetime nation. The crucial thing to understand here is that sexual violence in conflict is virtually never documented the way sexual violence might be documented on the cop shows you’ve seen or in the true crime podcasts you’ve listened to or at your local police precinct. If you want to understand the evidence at hand, and why some evidence may not be at hand, it’s critical to understand that the Israeli recovery and medical teams treated the places where people were attacked on Oct. 7 as war zones and the aftermath of terror attacks, not as standard crime scenes in which a primary goal is to identify a perpetrator. Yes, these attacks were crimes. But they were acts of terror and war — and the evidence of them looks very much like the evidence long used to document violence as tools of terror and war.

I’m not an expert on sexual violence in conflict. But it is an issue I’ve reported on and researched a fair bit over the past decade, covering violence against women in conflicts and crises in Myanmar, Congo, Colombia, Honduras, Uganda, South Sudan, and others I have interviewed, at this point, dozens if not hundreds of women who experienced rape and other forms of sexual violence in war, while fleeing to safety, in refugee camps after a war, or in the midst of other crises. I have corroborated their stories in various ways: I have spoken with NGO workers, health workers, and therapists who aided or worked with them; examined their UN, travel, medical, and other documents; interviewed others who experienced similar attacks or witnessed them; seen scars on their bodies; met the babies they conceived in rape; read reports from human rights groups documenting patterns of violence in particular places.

But I have never — not once — seen forensic evidence of any of these attacks.

That isn’t because I didn’t ask for it. It’s because, overwhelmingly, when it comes to sexual violence in conflict, forensic evidence is not gathered.

Plenty of other evidence is available. But the stuff you see on Law & Order — sperm samples, hair samples, DNA — that is exceedingly rare.