Abstract
Contemporary war tends to destruct everything and everyone. Among civilian causalities women, including young girls and children, are often the most exposed and vulnerable. This paper explores how, during some wars, the body of women become the field of strong for a group or a nation, and how the enemies are targeting exactly this identity in order to affirm their superiority. Women are identified with their bodies and become the symbolic territory of a border crossing and the exercise of power. So the dehumanisation of peoples, such as in the former Yugoslavia or in Ruanda, starts on women's body. What is at stake here is not sexual violence per se, but rather its use as war strategy, resting on specific social meanings. On the one hand, atrocities perpetrated on women, also in public, are the metaphor of the permanent destruction of the rival society, and express therefore ethnic hatred rather than misogyny. On the other hand, the identification of women with the “property of the male enemy” to be destructed, is grounded in a contestable patriarchal conception of society.