Rape during the Vietnam War

Photograph taken by Ronald L. Haeberle of South Vietnamese women and children in Mỹ Lai before being killed in the massacre.[1] According to Haeberle, soldiers had attempted to rip the blouse off the woman in the back while her mother, in the front of the photo, tried to protect her.[2]

Rape, among other acts of wartime sexual violence, was frequently committed against female Vietnamese civilians during the Vietnam War. It was an aspect of the various human rights abuses perpetrated by the United States and South Korea, as well as by local Vietnamese combatants. According to American political scientist Elisabeth Jean Wood, the sexual violation of women by American military personnel was tolerated by their commanders.[3][4][5]: 65  American professor Gina Marie Weaver stated that not only were documented crimes against Vietnamese women by American soldiers ignored during the international legal discourse that occurred immediately after the conflict, but modern feminists and other anti-war rape campaigners, as well as historians, have continued to dismiss them.[6]

Some American veterans[vague] believe that sexual violence against Vietnamese women was motivated by "racism, sexism, or a combination of both" as a result of the strong social reform movements that were roiling the United States in the early 1970s.[5] According to one source,[which?] only 25 cases of rape from the United States Army and 16 cases of rape from the United States Marine Corps resulted in court-martial convictions involving Vietnamese victims between 1965 and 1973.[citation needed]

The issue of pregnancies resulting from rapes has had a significant impact on South Korea–Vietnam relations: these people, conceived through the rape of Vietnamese women by South Korean soldiers, continue to be subjected to discriminatory treatment by the Vietnamese government, while their presence in South Korea is unacknowledged by the South Korean government.[7][8][9][10][11] In Vietnam, the term "Lai Đại Hàn" ([laːi ɗâˀi hâːn]) refers to a person beget by a Vietnamese mother and a South Korean father during the Vietnam War. The extent of these relationships' sexual consent is still debated;[12][13] one Japanese study determined that over half of Lai Đại Hàn births had resulted from rape.[14]

  1. ^ "Report of the Department of Army review of the preliminary investigations into the Mỹ Lai incident. Volume III, Exhibits, Book 6 – Photographs, 14 March 1970" (PDF). Library of Congress. p. 50.
  2. ^ "Report of the Department of Army review of the preliminary investigations into the Mỹ Lai incident. Volume II, Exhibits, Book 11 – Testimony, 14 March 1970" (PDF). Library of Congress. p. 18. Haeberle: they started stripping her, taking her top off, and the mother, if that was her mother, was trying to protect her. The GI's were punching her around and one of them kicked her in the ass.
  3. ^ Wood, Elisabeth Jean (7 May 2018). "Rape as a Practice of War: Toward a Typology of Political Violence". Politics & Society. 46 (4): 513–537. doi:10.1177/0032329218773710. S2CID 158990694.
  4. ^ West, Philip; Levine, Steven I.; Hiltz, Jackie (3 June 2015). United States and Asia at War: A Cultural Approach: A Cultural Approach. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-45293-5.
  5. ^ a b Weaver, Gina Marie (1 February 2012). Ideologies of Forgetting: Rape in the Vietnam War. SUNY Press. ISBN 978-1-4384-3000-3. Retrieved 20 June 2022.
  6. ^ Weaver, Gina Marie (2007). Ideologies of forgetting: American erasure of women's sexual trauma in the Vietnam War (Thesis). Rice University. hdl:1911/20667. Retrieved 14 September 2022.
  7. ^ ey3media (21 August 2018). "Vietnam's Skewed Sense of Social Justice". Justice for Lai Dai Han. Retrieved 28 July 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  8. ^ "The Vietnamese women whose mothers were raped in wartime seek justice for a lifetime of pain and prejudice". The Independent. 11 September 2017. Retrieved 28 July 2020.
  9. ^ ey3media (21 August 2018). "The invisible struggle of the refugees [Translated]". Justice for Lai Dai Han. Retrieved 28 July 2020.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: numeric names: authors list (link)
  10. ^ "Sir David Lidington: In 2020, sexual violence is still being used as a weapon of war". The Independent. 19 June 2020. Retrieved 28 July 2020.
  11. ^ "1968 – the year that haunts hundreds of women". BBC News. Retrieved 28 July 2020.
  12. ^ "Vietnam War Rape Survivors Demand Justice from South Korea – Bringing Justice to the Lai Dai Han". 10 August 2021. Retrieved 21 October 2021.
  13. ^ jp:名越二荒之助 『日韓2000年の真実』〜ベトナムの方がのべる韓国の残虐行為〜、2002年
  14. ^ A. Kameyama, Betonamu Sensou, Saigon Souru, Toukyou [Vietnam War, Saigon, Seoul, Tokyo], Iwanami Shoten Publishing, 1972, p. 122

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