Brown, Sara E. “Female Perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide”

In this article, Sara E. Brown discusses female perpetrators who exercised agency in the Rwandan genocide in 1994. Rwandan women played an active role in the genocide against the Tutsi; this contrasts with the gendered assumption which casts women as victims or bystanders. Female perpetrators are thus “depicted as deviant anomalies and stripped of their gender and humanity” (449), but this cannot sufficiently account for Rwandan women’s perpetration. To better understand why and how women perpetrate violence, Brown poses and addresses three core questions.
The first question is: “how women mobilized and were mobilized to commit atrocities” (Ibid.). Brown analyzes the means of mobilization used by Kangura, a print periodical, and the Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM), a radio station. The gender-based mobilization aiming at Hutu women plays with ethnic differences and portrays the Tutsi, especially Tutsi women, as an inhuman and threatening “other”. Hutu women were encouraged to take action against Tutsi compatriots; “[t]his appeal to and sanctioning of female agency is significant given the patriarchal system that dominated Rwandan culture and limited the agency exercised by Rwandan women” (455).
The second question is: “what were the specific actions of women who exercised agency during these periods of violence and upheaval” (449). Brown finds that female perpetrators in the genocide are more likely to commit indirect violence, which takes the form of “looting, theft, knowingly exposing those in hiding to a fatal end, inciting violence and supervising and ordering instances of direct and indirect violence” (458). Representative perpetrators of indirect violence include the female cabinet member Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, who ordered and supervised perpetration, and the RTLM announcer Valerie Bemeriki, who propogated the genocide throughout the nation.
The third question is: “what happened to these women in the aftermath of the genocide” (449). Brown finds that female perpetrators tend to be overlooked and rejoin society smoothly in post-genocide Rwanda. Given the role of Rwandan women in the family and their impact on future generations, this might lead to “future instability and the repercussions of a gender-based impunity-by-attrition culture” (462).
This article contributes to Perpetrator Studies by further challenging the entrenched assumption that women cannot be perpetrators. It stresses the urgency of “research[ing] and incorporat[ing] female agency into narratives of genocide, mass violence and upheaval” (464).

Author of this entry: Runcong Liu.

Brown, Sara E. “Female Perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 16, no. 3 (2013): 448–69.