Collective Sexual Violence in Turkey, 1894–1924: What we know and how we know it

Abstract The essay deals with the rape component of the Muslim Turkish massacres of Christian Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians during the years between 1894 and 1924 and the pertinent archival sources. During the three bouts of massacre, amounting to staggered genocides, in 1894–1896, 1915–1916 and 1920–1924, in which the Muslim Turks, under Ottoman imperial governments and, subsequently, under Ataturk’s Nationalist/republican rule, murdered some two million Christians, tens of thousands of Christian women were raped and/or forcibly abducted to Muslim households and Islamized. While almost all Turkish official records of these events have been destroyed or slicked away, archives in the West - US, German, French and British state archives and archives of missionary societies then operating in Asia Minor - are open to researchers and abound with materials that describe and analyze the massacres and the rapes and abductions that accompanied them. The essay lays out what happened and why, and how researchers have traced what happened.