As a first-year student at Albany Law, Jessica served as a Research Assistant to Dean Rosemary Queenan, exploring access to Free and Appropriate Public Education for children with disabilities. In her second year, Jessica was elected to serve as the Treasurer for Albany Law School’s Family Law Society, a position she held through her third year.
In addition to her law school extracurriculars and interests, Jessica was appointed to the New York State Bar Association’s Committee on Children & the Law.
Following the bar exam, Jessica will be joining Copps DiPaola Silverman, PLLC as an associate on the matrimonial and family law litigation team.
Utilizing rape as a weapon of war is by no means a recent phenomenon. For as long as conflict has existed, so too has rape.
Sexual violence has been used consistently throughout history, originally stemming from the belief that women were property. Rape was viewed as a "legitimate spoil of war," an "inevitable consequence of war and a way to boost soldier morale," and even as a "mark of victory, proof of soldiers’ masculinity and success, and compensation for service.” If history has revealed anything, it is just how interconnected war and rape are.
However perpetual and present it has been, rape as a weapon of war has been ignored and overlooked, together with the survivors and victims of these atrocious crimes. Today, numerous international statutes explicitly prohibit rape and other forms of sexual violence during international and domestic conflicts. This was not always the case, however, and progress in this area has been painstakingly slow.
It was not until the 1990s, at the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, that rape and other sexual crimes against women and girls were explicitly prohibited, recognized, and prosecuted by the international community. Up to this point, and during the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1945 – 1946, the victims and survivors of rape during war suffered in silence, without recognition of or justice for the vile acts they endured.
_________________________
To read the paper, open HERE.
