On October 7, Hamas weaponized brutal sexual violence against women and girls in Israel. The silence, denialism, and excuses around these atrocities are terrifying to us as women and as lawyers who have fought for victims of sexual violence throughout our careers. In their silence about this well-documented carnage, American women’s organizations, global human rights organizations, and other fighters for social justice and gender equality are, unwittingly, reversing years of progress for victims of sexual assault. They claim to be doing so in support of the civilians in Gaza who are suffering terribly in this war. But sanctioning rape and sexual torture in the name of freedom does not help Gazans. It will not end this war. And it reverses years of progress in the fight to hold rapists accountable for their crimes.
This week, finally, two United Nations-appointed experts released a statement acknowledging the “harrowing” and “growing body of evidence about reported sexual violence” and torture, including gang rape, mutilation, and gunshots to genital areas. This follows three months of definitive and detailed reporting by The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN about Hamas’ sexual violence. While some elected officials and a smattering of organizations have spoken out or signed statements specifically condemning Hamas’s weaponization of rape, there has been no robust movement denouncing these war crimes or demanding the return of the hostages who are still subject to sexual abuse. The response has been reluctant, muted, and delayed, at best, compared to similar atrocities. International and domestic human rights and women groups, women who speak out on similar issues, have said nothing still or made only general statements denouncing rape.
Unsurprisingly, the absence of an immediate and forceful global condemnation has opened a window for denials by Hamas, whose members insist that they did not commit sexual violence. Hamas defenders demand “proof” of sexual abuse that the women’s legal movement has worked tirelessly for decades to lower stringent requirements for re-traumatizing things like rape kits and first-person survivor accounts. This is not a viewpoint being whispered in dark corners of the internet but given airtime in mainstream media. The demand from some that we must hear directly from the victims to believe that rape took place is unfathomable. Aside from the brutal fact that most of Hamas’s victims were murdered or remain in captivity, the idea that survivors would be forced to speak about this unbearable trauma now, or ever, especially publicly, is archaic and re-traumatizing. Laws around sexual assault no longer require this and take into account the stigma of being named publicly as a rape victim. Frequently, prosecutors don’t even call victims as witnesses when proof is available elsewhere. There shouldn’t be a double standard for the Israeli victims of Hamas.
This insistence on specific types of evidence and testimony—not even for an indictment but simply to condemn the atrocities—permits Hamas a free pass. It paves the way for more rape and less accountability in the future. It makes the job of the prosecutor in violent sex abuse and even domestic violence cases even harder. This will be a legacy of October 7: a world in which a victim’s bruises and mutilated genitals are brushed aside in favor of a perpetrator’s denials and a public committed to believing him.
Just as disturbing as denialism are the attempts at justification of Hamas’s rape that sound like “she asked for it.” These attempts have taken the form of Yeah, but Israel has done awful things, or Yeah, but Israel’s occupation provoked Hamas. We cannot say Yeah, but to sexual violence. Either we believe there is no justification for rape, or we don’t. Tolerating rape because of the Benjamin Netanyahu-led government is akin to saying that a woman in a bar asked to be raped because she was wearing a miniskirt.
The world’s refusal to condemn Hamas’s sexual violence will perpetuate their sexual violence, which there is every reason to believe continues against the 14 remaining young women hostages. The collective shrug at their suffering dismantles the progress for which many of us have spent decades fighting. By staying silent and by trying to justify one of the most widely documented gender-based massacres in history, feminists and social justice activists are erasing the premise of the #believewomen movement. They are reinstating a legal and cultural hellscape in which women are never believed, and the actions of rapists are justified because she asked for it.
Dahlia Lithwick is the senior legal correspondent at Slate. Mimi Rocah, a former federal prosecutor, is the Westchester County, New York, district attorney. Ami Berger, a writer and editor, contributed.
