Sexual and gender-based violence takes place across the peacetime-wartime continuum: regardless of the nation, the context, the social or political backdrop, or the time in history. From being seen as a by-product of war to being understood as a war tactic, the prevalence of sexual violence is more than mere statistics. The Conflict Related Sexual Violence (CRSV) Observatory maps sexual violence across the peacetime-wartime continuum both in contemporary times and across history.

 

This database carries individual conflict mapping reports that record broad overviews of the conflict history, chronicle the occurrence of sexual violence, and identify how sexual violence was used as a specific war strategy. Each mapping report is accompanied by the image of fabric from the region, in order to drive home the fact that CRSV destroys the fabric of society. Individual survivor stories and graphic accounts have not been included within the current mapping exercise to avoid instrumentalization.

 

This page will be updated periodically with reports and is a working digital database. The dropdown menu under "Case Reports" above presents the cases as classified into different categories based on the purpose for which CRSV was deployed. In all contexts, however, opportunistic sexual violence and forms of violence within the "private" spaces of life - such as domestic violence, for example - that did not have anything to do with the war, may have prevailed, too. We do not have clear data on the number of such incidents although the subsistence of violence across the peacetime-wartime continuum establishes this reality.

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