On the anniversary of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and the ensuing war in Gaza, scholars from Brandeis and Bar-Ilan universities will come together to examine how international law addresses sexual violence in war and why some deny it has happened in Israel and globally.
Organizers say the “Brandeis–Bar Ilan Conference on Conflict Related Sexual Violence and the Legacy of October 7” aims to situate the events in Israel and Gaza and in other war zones within the evolving legal framework around conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), which is a crime under international human rights law.
“It’s exploring the possibilities of accountability [for perpetuators] and justice for victims,” said Lisa Fishbayn Joffe, director of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, which is convening the conference with The Dinah Project at the Rackman Center, Faculty of Law, Bar Ilan University, Israel.
The conference will examine how norms governing conflict-related sexual violence “were or were not applied in the context of the offenses of Oct. 7 and against hostages that were held afterwards,” Fishbayn Joffe said. Sessions will also look at possibilities for implementing remedies for women who were subject to CRSV in Israel and Gaza, as well as in war zones around the world.
“Up until the 1990s, rape in war was just a fact of life,” Fishbayn Joffe said. “It was just a terrible thing that happened, but it was not something that was tracked. It was not something that international human rights law offered remedies for.”
With the atrocities committed in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, though, legal experts began to secure recognition of rape and sexual violence in war as crimes that could be prosecuted under international law.
The conference itself came out of ongoing conversations between Fishbayn Joffe and Ruth Halperin-Kaddari and her colleagues at Bar Ilan University about the production of knowledge about what happened on Oct. 7 and the reaction afterwards. The recent release of the Dinah Project report was one catalyst. Another was a growing body of scholarship: what happened in terms of sexual violence on Oct. 7 and afterward; how international law around CRSV applies in this context; and how denialism has emerged and been amplified in political, media and activist spaces.
It was time to convene a public conference “to look at this new scholarship and consider what it tells us,” Fishbayn Joffe said.
Keynote speaker Dr. Alice Edwards, who until earlier this year served as the UN special rapporteur on torture, will begin by discussing the emergence of recognition of crimes of a sexual nature in international law, the provision of remedies, and the challenges of seeking their effective application in the context of Oct. 7 and the war that came afterward.
A panel on international perspectives on combat related sexual violence will trace how this shift occurred, mapping the emergence of CRSV as a legally recognized category and a focus of advocacy. It will also offer a broader history as a framework for understanding the response to the incidents of Oct. 7 in that context.
Some of that response, including from segments of the international human rights and women’s movements, was silence and denial, a subject to be addressed by an international panel moderated by Fishbayn Joffe.
A panel on radical ideologies and joint responsibility will examine the beliefs and doctrines that animated the perpetrators of the Oct. 7 attacks and how those ideologies might factor into legal accountability.
Finally, a panel of Dinah Project members will look at that group’s report, “A Quest for Justice: October 7 and Beyond,” consider its findings and recommendations, focus on concrete legal strategies to implement them, and possibly criminally prosecute the perpetrators.
The conference builds on longstanding work at the institute. A Harvard-educated lawyer, Fishbayn Joffe has directed the institute’s Project on Gender, Culture, Religion and Law, which looks at questions around women’s rights under Jewish and secular law, for nearly two decades.
Immediately after the Hamas attacks of Oct. 7, Fishbayn Joffe teamed up with Harleen Singh, an associate professor of literature and women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Brandeis, to lead a session at a campus teach-in on how sexual violence in war came to be recognized as a crime under international law and why that recognition mattered.
Fishbayn Joffe emphasized that the lessons drawn in Israel could help shape responses far beyond that conflict. The conference is designed to widen the lens on CRSV, she said, placing Oct. 7 within a longer struggle to take women’s experiences in war seriously and to translate recognition into action.
“I hope it will set the phenomenon of conflict-related sexual violence in a broader context,” she said. “That this has been part of a project seeking to recognize the experience of women in war, really for the last 50 years, and treat that with the kind of seriousness and sobriety that it deserves.”Θ
The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute’s free “Brandeis–Bar Ilan Conference on Conflict Related Sexual Violence and the Legacy of October 7” will be held Oct. 6-7 at Brandeis University in Waltham. For more information, visit brandeis.edu.
Contact reporter Brett M. Rhyne at brett@jewishjournal.org.
