This book is both disturbing and enlightening. In it, Jelke Boesten reflects on her long-term research enquiry into sexual violence in Peru and the responses to this violence during and after the period of political conflict (1980–2000). Although the discovery of systematic wartime rape raised an outcry in some circles, this did not compel the judiciary to take action. Thus, even though Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) brought to light 538 cases of wartime rape for which evidence could be raised and 16 cases for which evidence had been raised, not one of these cases proceeded to trial. This, argues Boesten, was not because the judiciary does not work in Peru or because all human rights violations go unpunished. So why has sexual violence persistently been ignored? Boesten's analysis starts with abuses committed by the armed forces and explores why the perpetrators of sexual violence have remained exempt from prosecution. The fact that the state forces were primarily responsible for sexual violence during political conflict ‘reinforces the idea that such violence builds on and reproduces institutionalised structures of violence and inequality’. Furthermore, ‘the impunity of these crimes further normalises such violence and perpetuates its persistence in peacetime’ (p. 4). Boesten thus moves the discussion beyond the sufferings of individual women to explore the embedded societal values regarding gender and gendered violence and how these underpin legal and policy practices in peacetime. By carefully unpacking the meanings and workings of sexual violence, her broader aims are to open up institutional structures and underlying social values to scrutiny and challenge and to suggest where progressive changes might be made that could improve access to justice especially in post-conflict settings.

The brilliance of this short book lies in Jelke Boesten's ability to bring together and draw out links between wide-ranging research materials in order ‘to understand and explain the complexity of a discursively constructed common sense that makes sexual violence possible and accountability unlikely’ (p. 14). Testimonies of sexual violence recorded by the TRC (and already in the public domain) provide an important backdrop. Then by combining critical discourse analysis and critical theory Boesten sets out to ‘read’ the layered meanings of sexual violence from testimony and literary narratives, legislation and policy documents, and interviews she conducted with police, lawyers, members of human rights organisations, social workers, and violent men. The chapters address the military's use of the sexual violence and emergence of distinct rape regimes in wartime: the implications of sexual violence at a socio-political level, as integral to the reproduction of inequalities; the treatment of gender and gendered violence in transitional justice and by truth commissions; impunity; and the multiple links between wartime and peacetime gender-based violence. In the final chapter, Boesten pinpoints key issues that her analysis has uncovered where new thinking about legal and policy change could focus.

Boesten builds her arguments with clarity and precision. She considers carefully her choice of wording and phrasing, for this is a complex field with many pitfalls. She takes issue with some recent work that treats rape only as a weapon of war, and provides a timely and thought-provoking synthesis of current thinking on why societies and their institutions have persistently ignored sexual violence in peacetime as well as war. The problem with the ‘weapon of war’ thesis she highlights is that it impedes an understanding of the non-war purposes served, diversity of victims targeted, and ambiguities surrounding dichotomies upheld in national and international law, between victim and perpetrator, coercion and consent. Instead, Boesten argues, sexual violence, including rape, was used in Peru as a strategy to intimidate and submit not only those suspected of political militancy but also the Andean population as a whole. Sexual violence served to uphold violent masculinities, gendered hierarchies and social inequalities rooted in prevailing ideas of hetero-normativity, race and class. As a result, those communities bearing the brunt of sexual violence tended to emerge weaker and more divided in the aftermath, a situation that Boesten can document with respect to increased levels of violence inside both family and community and the incapacity of communal authorities to take action.

In her analysis of the work of Peru's Truth Commission, Boesten suggests that its objectives were organised around extending compassion in exchange for speaking of pain. While understandable, at heart this reflected a ‘tutelary logic’ that framed those giving testimonies on sexual violence only as victims. Left outside the TRC's script was a shared sense of indignation from which demands for restitution and justice could develop. In the field of post-conflict justice, an unfortunate tension (and dichotomy) became clearly notable in Peru. This was between the victim-centred, truth-seeking processes of the TRC on the one side and the perpetrator-centred judicial processes on the other. While truth commissions proved better platforms than the courtroom for victim-survivors to speak out and make claims for justice, the perpetrators are absent; they do not speak. This has served to reinforce the gender binary and disallowed a reconfiguration of gendered roles and hierarchies that are immersed in class, sexuality and race. In the courtroom, Boesten finds that charges of sexual violence have been legally thwarted for three main reasons: how rape is defined, lack of acceptable evidence, and lack of perpetrators. Yet with regard to each of these aspects, laws can be changed.

The central points made by Boesten are not necessarily ‘new’, but in this book they speak out in a new way. With its emphasis on making change happen, it is aimed at a wider audience than academia. Hopefully it will circulate widely among groups who are in a position to take action and who can propose and implement legal and policy change.