W hy do some armed groups commit massive wartime rape, whereas others never do? Using an original dataset, I describe the substantial variation in rape by armed actors during recent civil wars and test a series of competing causal explanations. I find evidence that the recruitment mechanism is associated with the occurrence of wartime rape. Specifically, the findings support an argument about wartime rape as a method of socialization, in which armed groups that recruit by forcethrough abduction or pressganging-use rape to create unit cohesion. State weakness and insurgent contraband funding are also associated with increased wartime rape by rebel groups. I examine observable implications of the argument in a brief case study of the Sierra Leone civil war. The results challenge common explanations for wartime rape, with important implications for scholars and policy makers.

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of the current scholarship on violence in conflict settings assumes that women are victims and men are perpetrators. even in studies of female fighters, the tendency is to take for granted that women do not participate in acts of violence, whether by choice or because women are assumed to play merely supporting roles to their male combatant counterparts. as one scholar notes, women in armed groups may more often be referred to as camp followers or dependents, whereas men are viewed as fighters, combatants, or soldiers. 1 What roles do female combatants serve in armed groups? in particular, to what extent do female combatants participate in perpetrating violence against noncombatants? does the presence of women fighters prevent men from abusing noncombatants, as is often argued in policy circles? or do women, when given the opportunity and facing similar social constraints and pressures, tend to perpetrate violence alongside their male peers? *the author thanks Jana asher, Patrick ball, michael barnett, Jeffrey Checkel, James Fearon, amelia hoover Green, leah Knowles, ronald Krebs, michele leiby, meghan Foster lynch, rose mcdermott, Fionnuala ni aolain, laura sjoberg, Jeremy Weinstein, elisabeth Wood, the editors of World Politics, and the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and advice. matthew Valerius and rebecca olson provided excellent research assistance. special thanks to Jana asher and the human rights data analysis Group, as well as to macartan humphreys and Jeremy Weinstein, for sharing survey data, and to pride-sl and ibrahim bangura for arranging interviews. earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2009 international studies association annual convention and at the United states institute for Peace in 2010. i gratefully acknowledge the support of the national science Foundation (ses-0720440), the United states institute for Peace, and the Center for international security and Cooperation (cisac) and the Freeman spogli institute for international studies at stanford University. this study received human subjects approval from the stanford University institutional review board. 1 macKenzie 2009. . 101 baaz and stern 2009 note a difference in soldiers' descriptions in the drC between "lust rape" and "evil rape," the latter resulting from rage and including object rape and rape with the intention to kill. the interviews presented here do not indicate such a distinction between the intentions of rape, but the normalization of sexualized violence by the fighters is clear. 102 interviewee 18,

Existing research maintains that governments delegate extreme, gratuitous, or excessively brutal violence to militias. However, analyzing all militias in armed conflicts from 1989 to 2009, we find that this argument does not account for the observed patterns of sexual violence, a form of violence that should be especially likely to be delegated by governments. Instead, we find that states commit sexual violence as a complement to—rather than a substitute for—violence perpetrated by militias. Rather than the logic of delegation, we argue that two characteristics of militia groups increase the probability of perpetrating sexual violence. First, we find that militias that have recruited children are associated with higher levels of sexual violence. This lends support to a socialization hypothesis, in which sexual violence may be used as a tool for building group cohesion. Second, we find that militias that were trained by states are associated with higher levels of sexual violence, which provides evidence for sexual violence as a “practice” of armed groups. These two complementary results suggest that militia-perpetrated sexual violence follows a different logic and is neither the result of delegation nor, perhaps, indiscipline.