War-time Sexual Violence and Gender in the Long Run

No other form of violence targets gender identities and norms as much as sexual violence. What are the effects of victimization and exposure to sexual violence on gender norms? How enduring are these effects, and how are they transmitted across generations? We seek to answer these questions by examining two of the most extreme cases of known mass wartime sexual violence in Europe: widespread rape following the Soviet occupation of Germany after World War II, and systematic sexual abuse during the Bosnian war in the early 1990s. Using original survey data from three postwar generations spanning 80 years in eastern Germany (n=2,500) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH, n=2,000), we examine individual attitudes and perceived social expectations regarding the appropriate roles of men and women. Exposure to wartime sexual violence is high in our sample, with 12% of respondents in Germany and 8% in BiH reporting that a close family member had suffered rape or other forms of sexual violence. Consistent with classic feminist research on the topic, we find that wartime sexual violence reinforces patriarchal gender norms within victims' families. This effect is plausibly driven by social disruption, deteriorating mental health, and high levels of domestic violence within victims' families, as confirmed by additional analyses on family members (n=600 in each country). We validate our results with a list experiment and with an instrumental variable approach, instrumenting self-reported exposure to wartime sexual violence with births nine months after the Soviet invasion. Our findings confirm the cynical logic of using wartime sexual violence as a weapon to undermine the social fabric, and underscore the importance of interventions to mitigate negative consequences among victims and their descendants.