Imperial War Museum London exhibits sexual violence in conflict – and the Government of Japan refrains from protesting

Anna-Karin Eriksson | 12 June 2025

Weapon flanking Imperial War Museum London. Credit: The author

Flanked by weaponry, with a museum book shop filled with literature about Hitler and Stalin, Imperial War Museum London might not be the first place to imagine learning about sexual violence. Last month, the well-curated special exhibition Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict did, however, open (23 May to 2 November 2025).

Advised to be suitable only for those aged 16 or over and located in a secluded area on the third floor, this is the first time that Imperial War Museum has dedicated an exhibition to investigate the use of sexual violence in conflict.

Historically, the curators note, stories about sexual violence in conflict have been marginalized or not recorded and Imperial War Museum has not always prioritized collecting them. They also acknowledge that sexual violence has occurred in conflicts throughout world history and continue to this day, meaning that the case studies included in the exhibition are not exhaustive. The curators also recognize that sexual violence is difficult to discuss; for victims, survivors and for those who want to understand their experiences.

The exhibition opens with a run through of what sexual violence in conflict is (what is included in the definition of the term, where we might expect it to occur and what its consequences are – for everyone).

Sexual violence is here stated to be a common consequence of conflict, based on the chaotic environment that war has created to allow for it to occur throughout history. Sexual violence in conflict is described to have far-reaching consequences for victims and survivors. This includes trauma, fracturing families and forcing people from their homes and communities.

While women and girls are depicted as disproportionately affected due to persistent gender inequalities, men, boys and members of LGBTQIA+ communities are also highlighted to be impacted.

Sexual violence in conflict is represented as an ongoing problem that is no longer approached as an ‘inevitable by-product’ of conflict; as a crime that is both preventable and punishable under International Law.

The first exhibition room showcases three videos in parallel: each raising questions and introducing scholars and practitioners working with sexual violence in conflict, speaking to the topics raised; and showing footage from the contexts described.

Here we learn that sexual violence in conflict, or conflict-related sexual violence, refers to coercive and violent acts that target or involve the sexual organs and genitals of those who are being attacked, such as: rape, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution, enforced pregnancy, forced abortion and various forms of sexual torture, including mutilation.

Like all forms of violence, sexual violence affects everybody, because everybody might end up being vulnerable to violence. As a play of power and vulnerability, anybody in a position of vulnerability can be targeted for sexual violence in a conflict setting.

We also learn that sexual violence is depicted by some as the cheapest weapon known to man [sic!] … cheaper than a Kalashnikov bullet, and that state actors, military police and non-state actors alike perpetrate these crimes.

Perpetration occurs in different domains of militarized environments, because militaries, as sites of masculinized power, are prone to a toxicity that manifests in relations of dominance over vulnerability, in which sexual violence is perpetrated.

Sexual violence is also perpetrated in detention and imprisonment, carried out by police and security forces, far from scenes of battle or information extraction, where men are often targeted.

Sexual violence is prevalent in both conflict and peacetime, throughout human history. Examples raised are the systematic sexual violence against women in the Bosnian war in the former Yugoslavia, the genocidal attacks on Tutsi women in Rwanda, and the systematic sexual violence against men committed by the Russian Federation’s forces in Ukraine.

Challenges like safety issues related to migration, displacement, trafficking and camps in the wake of climate change are raised as a reason for acknowledging and tackling these issues. So too is its status as the most neglected war crime.

The moral of the prelude seems to be that we are all vulnerable, it is 2025, this happens in places not too far from where we are and very little is being done about it.

The following exhibition rooms house testimonies given by survivors of sexual violence from the First World War to the present day. It follows the thematic structure of: Structures and representations, Acts and manifestations, Justice and Reconciliation and Room for Rebuilding. Rather than to attempt a chronological rundown, the exhibition’s narrative structure focuses on the globality of the phenomenon, showcasing testimonies from around the world.

In relation to the structures and representations of sexual violence in conflict, we learn that this does not happen in a vacuum and is related to the social and cultural contexts in which it takes place.

We also learn that war and conflict reinforce and exacerbate gender roles and inequalities and that wartime propaganda routinely associates men with strength, dominance and aggression, while women are vilified or represented by domesticity and motherhood.

Members of the armed forces are elevated in society, protected by the uniform they wear and the values that they thereby are assumed to embody. This makes war change power structures within a society and conflict reduce people’s agency, ability to make choices, and control over their environments. The underlying societal and gender-based structures influence how people are treated and expected to behave.

Regarding acts and manifestations, we learn that sexual violence in conflict is a broad term, perpetrated by opportunistic individuals, sometimes on a mass scale.

We learn that sexual violence in conflict is used to demonstrate power and dominance, and that it creates fear and terror in civilian populations by breaking down societal norms and disrupting established power dynamics and that it is also used for ethnic cleansing.

We are reminded that its use continues today; that the conflicts in Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza and the democratic Republic of Congo all are recent examples of places in which sexual violence in conflict continue to occur.

Reaching the testimony and photograph of Kim Bok-dong, one of an estimated 50,000-200,000 survivors of the so-called ‘comfort women’ system, the state-sponsored sexual slavery regime under the Empire of Japan (1932-45) that remains difficult to memorialize because it continues to spur controversy among successive governments of Japan and its Asian neighbors, we learn that the women (and girls) from Korea, Taiwan, China, the Philippines, Indonesia, the Netherlands, Malaysia, Burma, Papua New Guinea, Guam and Japan who were held captive at one of the approximately 2,000 ‘comfort stations’ were raped by up to 40 soldiers a day.

On display in the exhibition is a door sign that used to hang on a comfort station in Burma in 1944, a comfort station permit – given to a soldier for permission to enter the comfort station – and a series of photographs taken by the British Army Film and Photographic Unit, which shows how young these women and girls were. The original captions, written in 1945, stated ‘forcibly employed,’ severely diminishing the exploitation that they were subjected to.

Focusing on how and why sexual violence occurs in conflict, in the museum, testimonies are balanced with what the museum curators describe as stories about survival and reconciliation. I would have called it activism.

In addition to Kim’s testimony and the objects from the comfort station, a picket sign, a poster and images from landmark protests in Seoul are featured in the exhibition. Also, the poster: Twenty-first Century without Sexual Violence! by Kim Ch’ang-su (2000), featuring three women saying No! by holding up their hands in a stop sign in front of two miniature-sized soldiers, which was used to draw attention to The Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Sexual Slavery in Tokyo 2000 and is also used as this exhibition’s poster, is on display.

The Women’s International War Crimes Tribunal on Japan’s Sexual Slavery was held in Tokyo on 8-12 December 2000 to consider high-ranking Japanese military and political officials as criminally liable for sexual violence against women throughout the Pacific during the 1930s and 40s. Christin Chinkin, one of the tribunal’s judges, serves on the Advisory Panel of this exhibition.

In the exhibition, there is also a miniature replica of the original Statue of Peace, the world’s likely most fought-over peace statue, together with a bigger image of the statue with an explanation of its symbolism. The Statue of Peace, by Kim Seo-kyung and Kim Eun-sung (2011), was sculpted to memorialize the 1000^th Wednesday demonstration in front of the Embassy of Japan in Seoul, where it was erected. Since then, several replicas (and other statues) have appeared in Asia, the US, Europe and Australia.

The final exhibition room is a large seating area with a wide screen video reaching across the entire wall. In the video, the five interviewees from the first exhibition room return to talk about the future.

They suggest that in recent decades, there has been a greater public understanding that sexual violence is perpetrated and that it is not inevitable. This puts greater pressure than before on those in charge to do something about it. While in peacetime societies, this attention has long been developed, the argument here is that this is beginning to happen in conflict spaces as well. One guesses that an exhibition of this kind could not have happened 10 years ago.

President Zelensky’s talking about rape in the same breath as killing and torture is highlighted as pivotal to these developments. Wider acknowledgement that sexual violence has happened is called for, because the lack of acknowledgement is in itself traumatizing.

They suggest that survivors’ voices, wishes and needs must be heard, understood and listened to; their experience giving them expertise; the knowledge and information needed to inform international policy.

Sexual violence in conflict has long-lasting consequences; the repair takes a very long time and reparations are an obligation. That we must take the perpetrators to justice. They know that nothing is going to happen to them. They must be held accountable. At the moment, there is no prize to pay.

This is the outlook that the curators want the visitors to bring with them from the exhibition (raising questions such as changing attitudes).

Returning to the innermost corner of the book shop, there is indeed a table with a few titles about sexual violence in conflict – though the staff apologize for its limited range. Apart from the standard imperial war museum shop books and paraphernalia, there is also a (permanent) merchandise section dedicated to women in the military and a (temporary) LGBTQ+ book table.

The section dedicated to women in the military comprises T-shits, keychains, mugs and tote-bags. It has the slogan The future is female printed, illustrated by a woman in a military uniform. The section is topped by the Churchill quote: ‘But I leave the past and I leave the present. It is to the future that we must turn our gaze’ (Winston Churchill, 21 June 1955). As a permanent section, located by the shop counter, this merch section is highly visible.

Contrasting the limited visibility of the book table on sexual violence in conflict, the LGBTQ+ book table is located at the core of the shop. Its books are, however, only about men. The only book that I find about Japan in the entire shop is The Hiroshima Men.

A special exhibition, leaving no traces in the museum catalog, Unsilenced: Sexual Violence in Conflict still writes history at Imperial War Museum. Reconciliation might be a less accurate description than activism and its exhibition rooms might not be as centrally located as the aircraft and the other military equipment, but the exhibition is there, it is well-curated, and it builds on recent scholarship about sexual violence in conflict.

That the curators have managed to tread the fine line allowing an exhibition that includes ‘comfort women’ without seeing massive protest against it on the part of the Government of Japan is an achievement in itself.

The framing of the charges against the government of Japan in a way that does not interfere with successive governments’ aspirations to reduce the issue to the confines of Japanese-South Korean bilateral relations (with no survivor involvement), providing only glimpses of what is believed to be the most brutal regime of sexual exploitation in world history, and framing sexual exploitation as a global phenomenon might have helped in this regard.

For next time, I would like to see a section about the aftermaths of war ‘at home’ and acknowledgements that wartime and peacetime are not that easily separable after all, and that conflict happens ‘at home’ as much as ‘elsewhere’ (no matter how close).

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Keywords: #ImperialWarMuseumLondon #Conflict-related Sexual Violence

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Anna-Karin Eriksson holds a PhD in Politics. Her work has been published in Feminist Theory and Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy.