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Mass Violence

Historically, mass violence became part of our global landscape as numbers and diversities among people began to separate and distinguish groups and individuals. Its perpetrators may act alone, or they may be affiliated with government or military institutions. They target men, women, and children in atrocities committed in the home or as acts of war.

Mass violence does not only consist of murder, but can take many forms, such as rape, beatings, arsons, and slavery. Rummel (1995) estimates that, excluding war deaths, over 170 million violent deaths have occurred between 1900 and 1987. An even more ominous number would include “residual deaths” or deaths resulting from emotional and long-term physical damage, as seen in the genocide of the Armenians in Turkey and the “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia, Rwanda, Burundi, the Timorese in Indonesia, and Native Americans. Mass violence has no boundaries in places such as the Cambodian killing fields perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, the death squads in El Salvador, the government-sanctioned killings in Argentina and Chile, the well-documented Stalin purges, and Holocaust murders of millions in Europe.

Comfort Women

During World War II, the Japanese Imperial Army, as part of their colonial expansion, committed sexual war crimes against nearly 200,000 Korean women. The victims were forced to serve as sex slaves to the Japanese soldiers and were referred to as jugun ianfu, or “military comfort women.” The Japanese government collectively conspired with the Japanese military to institutionalize the systematic rape of Korean and other non-Japanese women, including hundreds of Dutch, Filipino, Thai, and other women captured during the war. The dehumanization was so severe that soldiers often referred to the women as “female ammunition” and “sanitary public toilets.”

Systematic rape, institutionalized prostitution, and sexual slavery are common forms of war crimes. The trafficking of women by the Japanese military was institutionalized by 1910, when the Japanese colonized Korea. Later, in 1918, the Japanese invaded Siberia and brought with them Japanese prostitutes known as karayukisan, or foreign-bound/China-bound women. Under the guise of protecting Asian countries, Japan maintained its plan of expansionism and with it, the enrollment of Korean women to keep the Imperial Army content. By the end of World War II, Japan had sent 70,000 to 80,000 Korean females between the ages of 14 and 30, both single and married, to the front lines in Asia to serve as comfort women. Most Korean women came from the lower social classes and were therefore offered to the regular Japanese troops, and European and other Asian women were reserved for the officers. Reports by comfort women reveal that they were forced to service between 30 and 40 soldiers per day or risk being beaten and tortured. The institutionalization of Korean women as sex slaves was justified by noting that without them, Japanese soldiers might be given to raping and plundering, as demonstrated in Nanjing in 1937.

The Nazi Holocaust

The Holocaust, like other genocides, is difficult to capture in words alone. Mass violence was orchestrated not only by a political/military establishment but also by a nation that supported the Third Reich and Adolph Hitler, an expansionist and a hatemonger, with a racial purity agenda that included the extermination of all Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, mentally or physically challenged, and social misfits. Hitler was an incredible mastermind at organizing mass violence at many levels, from his attempt to conquer Europe with plans of world domination and his “Final Solution” to the extermination of European Jews and others deemed unfit by Third Reich standards.

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