Our aim is to illuminate the persistent problem of evidence in cases of sexual violence in conflict zones by investigating the relationship between archival practices and processes of legal redress. This special issue consists of six essays, with contributors drawn from the disciplines of history and law. In temporal terms, the cases range from the seventeenth century to the late twentieth century; spatially, they address conflicts in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the United States. The case studies each offer an overview of “their archive,” explain its creation and limitations, and address its political logic and uses. As we interrogate archives, where evidence of sexual violence is located, it is critical that we note three things. First, to understand the nature and political construction of the archive. Second, to use this insight to interpret and assess the nexus of power relations within which historical and contemporary actors operate. Finally, to remember the inescapable limits of the evidence that shape the pursuit of justice, past or present.

As part of the seventeenth colonial conflagration, known as “Wars of the Three Kingdoms,” incidents of sexual violence—stripping, castration, mutilation, rape, gang rape, and reproductive violations—occurred against women and some men across Ireland. The historical and legal evidence for this violence was recorded in witness statements that form part of an archive, known as the “1641 Depositions.” This article examines this extraordinary archive, now housed in Trinity College Dublin and published online, especially the witness testimony provided by Protestant women. It explores how sexual violence was reported and then politicized. Though testimony that related to sexual violence was rarely used in the courtroom, Protestant propagandists—from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries—manipulated these accounts to instill fear and justify retribution.

This article offers a forensic analysis of one key archive of sexual violence: The official record of a congressional investigation of the Ku Klux Klan and federal trials of Klan members in the years immediately after the American Civil War. The 13 volumes constitute the single most important source of victim testimony on white supremacist violence and are used widely by historians. It also presents daunting problems of interpretation particularly with respect to sexual violence. This analysis challenges historians’ traditional accounts of the Klan as overly reliant on the Republican party narrative that it constituted the terrorist arm of the Democratic party intent on suppressing black men’s new constitutional right to vote.

As I argue here, the Klan’s campaign of terror aimed at something far more, as the routine deployment of sexual violence against women reveals. Sexual regulation was the very core of white supremacy. The representation of the Klan in the official record—its signature acts, motives, and victims—was shaped not by the patterns of the violence itself but by the objectives of the investigation in the battle over public opinion and political strategy. In time and place, I argue, the narrow framing of Klan violence around electoral politics involved real costs to black women victims of the Klan with respect to the protection of their civil and political—or human—rights.

The essay deals with the rape component of the Muslim Turkish massacres of Christian Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians during the years between 1894 and 1924 and the pertinent archival sources. During the three bouts of massacre, amounting to staggered genocides, in 1894–1896, 1915–1916 and 1920–1924, in which the Muslim Turks, under Ottoman imperial governments and, subsequently, under Ataturk’s Nationalist/republican rule, murdered some two million Christians, tens of thousands of Christian women were raped and/or forcibly abducted to Muslim households and Islamized. While almost all Turkish official records of these events have been destroyed or slicked away, archives in the West - US, German, French and British state archives and archives of missionary societies then operating in Asia Minor - are open to researchers and abound with materials that describe and analyze the massacres and the rapes and abductions that accompanied them. The essay lays out what happened and why, and how researchers have traced what happened.

The article interrogates testimonies of sexual violence against women, like rape, abduction, forced conversion, and forced marriage, during the partition of India in 1947. Unlike sites of violence such as Rwanda, there were no commissions set up either by the successor governments in India or Pakistan or by international agencies to investigate the massacres. Partition violence does not easily fit into the usual frames of genocide or ethnic cleansing used in academic writing on conflict. In the absence of identifiable perpetrators and villains of the partition violence, members of a community were perpetrators wherever they dominated and victims where they were few. The archive for this article consists of statements by survivors and observers of the massacres to the local authorities; for example, army officers and social workers supervising the “recovery” of abducted women or running refugee camps. Interviews were conducted with survivors of the partition many years later, which are generally marked by silence about sexual violence. Questions arise about the meager testimonies and the bias in the archive regarding selection, collection, and publication. Ethical issues abound, including the selective appropriation of testimonies for political ends. Were women silent because disclosure would invite stigma, or is it that trauma is expressed by silence? And finally, how do survivors move toward closure?

In total, 75,000 to 250,000 Asian civilians died building the Thailand-Burma Death Railway under Japanese military orders during the Second World War. Among these were women whose experiences remain overlooked or marginalized in histories about the Death Railway. This microhistory of the Kudo Butai war crimes trial draws on recent scholarship on the relational and structural aspects of victimization and agency to study the sexual abuse and broader experiences of women on the railway. It focuses on the experiences, strategic acts, and survival choices of the following women who appear in trial records: the nineteen-year-old orphan sexually tortured to death, “Siamese lady friends” of some defendants, and the Chinese dresser’s wife who helped POWs. By identifying the relational and structural conditions contributing to sexual violence on the railway, this study demonstrates that the overwhelming experience of women under Japanese military occupation was one of the widespread vulnerability to sexual violence.

The International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda Akayesu trial, which led to the precedent-setting conviction for rape as a constituent act of genocide, offers guidance for scholars uncovering “hints” of sexual violence in armed conflict (SVAC) in legal archives. This includes consideration of: the strategic importance of SVAC testimony within the overall archive, indictment or mandate of a proceeding; euphemisms related to SVAC and how they intersect with societal attitudes toward SVAC and its victims; question framing, follow-ups, and interventions by judges or other stakeholders. Review of SVAC evidence should be attentive to the following indicators of potentially more widespread sexual atrocities: recurring acts of SVAC committed across official, public, and private spaces; the absence of areas of refuge; acts of public sexual violence, including those that have a performative dimension; occurrence of SVAC in the context of pervasive physical insecurity and fear for survival within a climate of impunity for the perpetrators; commission of SVAC as part of a sequence of crimes leading up to, and including, the death of the victim; targeting of SVAC victims based on their ethnicity or identity; experience of SVAC within a maelstrom of ethnically or identity-based violence; and the existence of supplementary sources documenting SVAC that are external to the trial record.