First, it must be stated that all rape is torture, and all torture is rape.

Martyring the body aims to destroy, through the humiliation of pain, the moral identity of the victim.

Sexual violence is “torture” and, as such, one of the easiest means of political domination.

Second, rape is a crime of desecration, the trauma of which is redoubled by the shame borne by the victim herself.

This is the big difference with other physical violence, whose scars can be exhibited as traces of courage. A raped woman, on the contrary, continues to suffer the defilement .

Third, rape is a crime whose destructive effects continue over time: a crime that can be said to be "continuous."

First, there is the immediate physical shame of the stain. Then, for women, there is the risk of pregnancy. The weeks and months following a rape turn into a nightmare, because if the survivor is pregnant, it is the enemy, installed in her womb, that she is carrying the child of. It is the enemy that she is ensuring, against her will, the continuation of. The hatred she feels for the rapist then turns against the child of the enemy that she is carrying in her womb, and therefore against her own body. Unless she manages to disaffiliate the identity of the child to come from that of the physical father.

Rape is finally a "continuous crime" when it destroys (sometimes definitively) the social value of the victim in the eyes of her own environment. This is the case when the survivor is part of a historical and cultural context (often religious) that criminalizes "illegitimate" female sexuality and poses as taboo and sacred talisman for the honor of the men of the family the virginity of girls and the fidelity of wives. Exclusion , confinement, ostracism, punishments, and sometimes murder of the woman victim of rape by members of her community (sometimes her family) are then recurring practices.

Fourth, rape as a "weapon of war" sheds a particular light on the society that uses it, as demonstrated by the war in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, where rape was systematic. The rape of women takes on a particular political meaning in the context of a culture of virility that attributes to men alone the responsibility for the transmission of identity: through his sperm, men transmit "their blood", their name, their culture, their religion, etc.; women are only airlocks in this transmission.

The rape of women, like that of graves, therefore addresses the presence, through time, of the community whose space has been invaded and which we claim to "possess" definitively, "forever".

In this first half of the 21st century, the massive and systematic use by the Russian army of torture, always sexual, and rape reveals to what extent current Russian society is under the influence of an archaic "masculinist" culture.

The crimes of the Russian aggressor are a sign of its ideological choices:

- political domination through violence against bodies

- the valorization of cruelty as proof of virility and political purity,

- the promotion of a sadistic virility as a positive performance of the fighter.