Eventually, during the last half of century rape was understood as an offense against woman, against her dignity, instead of against her family's or her husband's honour.
Later on, rape was considered to be a crime against family honour. For centuries, wartime rape of women was considered an inevitable consequence of war, necessary to boost soldiers' morale, and was lumped together with property crimes. Those crimes being assessed proved and established a need a specific classification as the crimes are being seen both a distinctive from other war crimes and are being paid no adequate attention to in the post-conflict times. Nowadays, gender-based crimes include but are not limited to rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, forced pregnancy/childbirth and forced sterilization. During the history, prosecution has not been focused either on criminal liability or the real victims of the crime. In the national and international context, gender/based war crimes have been recognized since long time in several form. There is a number of occasions wherein, during the armed conflict, women/girls can be put at risk of gender-based violence at the hands of the ethnic Other Being one of them “rape comes to be interpreted as means of humiliating the Other and destroying a society's cultural, traditional, and religious integrity.“ Rape was explicitly included in article 5(g) of the Statute of the ICTY as a crime against humanity.
Furthermore, it has been forbidden by Article 26 of the Protocol I to Geneva Conventions. 27) states that „omen shall be especially protected against any attack on their honour, in particular against rape, enforced prostitution, or any form of indecent assault”. Rape as the most severe gender-based crime had been provided for as a crime in International law, but its definition was a bit vague: it was considered to be a violent act of sexual nature committed against a certain person. The development of international military and ad hoc tribunals has allowed the international community to prosecute suspects responsible for crimes that occurred in specific regions of the world, b ut gender-based war crimes were largely ignored until the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), had been put in place.
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