Mass Rapes in War and Peace: Reflections on Sofi Oksanen’s Same River Twice: Putin’s War on Women

In this essay, I reflect on the book Same River Twice: Putin’s War on Women by Ukrainian writer Sofi Oksanen, using it as a backdrop to discuss mass rape. I use Oksanen’s discussion of the war on women in Ukraine to examine the prevalence of gender-based and especially sexual violence during both armed conflict and peacetime. As a scholar of transitional justice, I am concerned about the collective blaming of women for mass atrocities committed mainly by men, both soldiers and civilians. I write this essay as an anti-militarist feminist, taking neither a pro-Russian nor an anti-Ukrainian stance. I also approach this topic as a woman scholar with firsthand experience of war and its lingering trauma, which I have studied extensively for many years.