Justice for the Invisible, Unspeakable and Inevitable: An Abolition Feminism Analysis of Sexual Violence and the International Criminal Court

Abstract

The unparalleled visibility of the atrocities at the close of the 20th century propelled sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) to the forefront of humanitarian and scholarly rhetoric. This increased visibility paradoxically concealed the needs of victim-survivors within a faceless mass in need of saving and demonised those responsible through racialised narratives. The International Criminal Court (ICC) was instituted to address these failures, yet since its inception it has secured only two successful convictions for SGBV. Given the pervasivity of sexual violence during conflict, this raises questions of the compatibility of normative judicial mechanisms with justice in the aftermath of war. This paper uses the ICC as a thematic case study and examines court reports and transcripts from The Prosecutor v Jean-Pierre Bemba Gombo (2016–2018) and The Prosecutor v Dominic Ongwen (2021–2024), applying abolition feminism and transformative justice to disentangle and elucidate the violence innate to the ICC. It provides transformative justice as a meaningful alternative.