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THE CHALLENGE OF GUARDING AGAINST CONFLICT-BASED SEXUAL VIOLENCE TAMSIN PHILLIPA PAIGE Tamsin Phillipa Paige is Lecturer in International Law at Deakin Law School.
In international law, it was only in recent decades that conflict-based sexual violence (CBSV) started to be treated by International Humanitarian Law (IHL) as a crime against the personhood of the victim rather than a crime against military discipline.1 This development has since been reinforced by the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR1325) on Women, Peace, and Security (WPS), which sets out an agenda that focuses, in part, on preventing CBSV as a crime that disproportionally impacts women. Australia, like most states, has drawn on the WPS Agenda to inform what it should be doing at the national policy level on this issue, resulting in the publication of a National Action Plan on WPS in 2012. Given its central role in combatting CBSV in situ, the Australian Defence Force (ADF) was tasked with incorporating the Australian government’s interpretation of UNSCR1325 into its operational framework, with Exercise Talisman Sabre 2015 (TS15) – a biennial military exercise with the United States – marking its first attempt at doing so.2 Although there have been two Talisman Sabres since, this reflection piece focuses on TS15 as it constitutes the very first instance of the UNSCR1325’s operationalisation within a military operational context. What follows is a discussion of the key policy developments and challenges that characterised UNSCR1325’s implementation in TS15.
Particularly with respect to preventing and combatting CBSV, the integration of UNSCR1325 into the ADF’s operational framework resulted in the introduction of three new policies which, as discussed below, can arguably be ranked as being of decent to excellent in quality. The first policy to be incorporated into TS15 was the inclusion of a ‘gender adviser’ in the command team. The role of the gender adviser was modelled on the Female Engagement Teams (FETs) that had been used to build goodwill and gather intelligence in Afghanistan. A gender adviser was included in all command meetings and was charged with ensuring that all decisions had considered the differentiated impact of armed conflict on different parts of society.
The gender adviser was thus responsible for keeping commanders mindful of the complexity of the human terrain of the area of operations. However, there remained the issue of the gender adviser’s role being misunderstood and misrepresented as being more about ‘getting women to talk to other women about women things’, which risked undermining the full positive potential of such a role, particularly in the context of preventing CBSV.3
