This set of research projects documents the particular vulnerabilities faced by children born of rape and sexual exploitation in conflict zones, how they might be better protected, and why the human rights and humanitarian affairs community has been slow to address their specific needs during and after violent conflicts.
Sexual violence and exploitation occur in many conflict zones, and the children born of such acts face discrimination, stigma, and infanticide. Yet the massive transnational network of organizations working to protect war-affected children has, for two decades, remained curiously silent on the needs of this vulnerable population. Focusing specifically on the case of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Carpenter shows that the social construction of rights claims is contingent upon the social construction of wrongs. According to Carpenter, this pathology prevents the full protection of children born of war.
Born of War examines the human rights of children born of wartime rape and sexual exploitation in conflict zones worldwide. Detailing the multiple impacts of armed conflict on these children's survival, protection and membership rights, the case studies suggest that these children constitute a particularly vulnerable category in conflict zones. They often face risks such as discrimination, infanticide, loss of health care, education and other rights guaranteed to all children under international law.
In recent years, aggrieved groups around the world have routinely portrayed themselves as victims of human rights abuses. Physically and mentally disabled people, indigenous peoples, AIDS patients, and many others have chosen to protect and promote their interests by advancing new human rights norms before the United Nations and other international bodies. Often, these claims have met strong resistance from governments and corporations. More surprisingly, even apparent allies, such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and other nongovernmental organizations, have voiced misgivings, arguing that rights "proliferation" will weaken efforts to protect their traditional concerns: civil and political rights.
A proliferating literature in IR theory documents the impact of transnational advocacy networks on global public policy making. We know little, however, about the process by which advocacy networks select issues around which to mobilize in the first place. This paper aims to develop a framework for analyzing variation in issue emergence by comparing two prominent issues in the transnational network around children and armed conflict (child soldiers and girls in war) to an issue absent from this advocacy sphere (the protection needs of children born as a result of wartime rape). This variation is not easily explained by extant hypotheses about issue emergence, which suggests the need for rigorous research on both positive and negative outcomes in global agenda setting. I conclude with several suggestions toward that end.
During the war in the former Yugoslavia, women of all ethnic backgrounds were raped and many gave birth to children as a result of this violence. Although numerous journalists wrote about the pregnancies and the babies during the war, almost no attention has been paid to these children as such by human rights organisations during or since. Given the purported agenda-setting role of the global media in drawing attention to new human rights problems, this case represents an interesting puzzle and a site for exploring the interrelationship between gendered, nationalist and rights-based frames in the global media's representations of atrocity. This article explores how these representations both figured in gendered constructions of genocide and negatively affected the prospects of human rights attention to the children in their own right.
This paper unpacks the discursive politics that lay behind the marginalization of children as victims of human rights abuses in the former Yugoslavia. To this end this paper will begin by examining the literature in which forced impregnation was articulated as a distinct crime and next attempt to identify the discursive devices through which forced impregnation was presented as a gender issue only. It will then argue that the plight of war-rape orphans escaped notice because the legal discourse that articulated forced impregnation as a distinct crime was framed in such a way as to: 1) marginalize the children as subjects of human rights law and 2) identify them with the perpetrators rather than the victims of genocide. Secondly this paper will attempt to bring to light the situation of war-rape orphans and the legal framework in which to assess their plight and to suggest redress.
