Conclusion
Wars have destroyed local infrastructure, displaced masses and left people within the iron fist of poverty. In every war, alongside cataclysmic tolls of civilian deaths, a major hurdle is the large-scale perpetration of violence against women, making them arguably the worst victims of conflict. This does not mean that no gender inequality exists in peacetime – but rather, that wars pave the way for its manifestation in horrendous ways. As the men of the household take to armed forefronts, women find themselves being made vulnerable to political and criminal violence, while holding fort as the sole breadwinner of their families. Gender-based violence is among the greatest incidences on any warfront. When women are subjected to violence, the family is broken, and social functioning comes to a grinding halt. The lack of sufficient machinery to enforce the inherent rights of women during conflict proves that a culture of impunity thrives due to the culture of silence, consequent to a lack of legal attention to the issues.
In the current state that it is in, the Responsibility to Protect doctrine allows rape and sexual violence as a ground for intervention only if the crimes occur in pursuit of ethnic cleansing.{49} As history, politics and reality has dictated, this is a severe handicap in the Responsibility to Protect discourse. Of course it is understandable and true that rape and sexual violence are common methods of ethnic cleansing. However, the two crimes are also as common in war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture and especially in perpetrating genocide. There must be a clear recognition of the crime for the crime that it is, for even when it has no ethnic connotations, it is still a crime of disastrous proportions with terrible consequences. The current framework as it remains fails the very purpose it sets out to achieve, since it asserts that the sexual and physical autonomy of a human being should be protected only if he or she is part of an identifiable group that is facing a threat to its existence because of its ethnicity.