A new book by Griffith Law School academic Dr Olivera Simic explores the silence surrounding women’s experiences of wartime sexual violence.
Silenced Victims of Wartime Sexual Violence (Routlege 2018) focuses on the harrowing experiences of Bosnian Serb women, where the collapse of the former Yugoslavia led to brutal war and gross human rights violations throughout the 1990s.
It draws attention to the hierarchies of victimhood, which are often created and reinforced by law itself.
“I hope to achieve a greater visibility and transparency of the problem of sexual violence in war, and emphasising that while this crime affects women in a similar way, not all women have been legally and symbolically recognised as victims,’’ Dr Simic says.
Based on personal experience, her research focuses on how people, women in particular, deal with past mass human rights abuses such as genocide, ethnic cleansing and rape during and after armed conflicts.
She was just 19 when war broke
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