Innocent Victims, Heroic Survivors, and Monstrous Perpetrators: The visual politics of memorials commemorating sexual violence 

Speaker: Dr Harriet Gray, University of York

Chair: Professor Marsha Henry, Queen’s University Belfast

After a long history in which the memorials that populate public spaces have been largely silent on the issue of sexual violence, there is now a growing wave of memorials across the world that seek specifically to commemorate this form of harm.  While the growing space for commemorating sexual violence is celebrated among scholars and activists for its potential to ‘break the silence’ - claiming public space and public recognition for an issue that is so often pushed into the shadows by stigma, shame, and gendered disbelief and disinterest - it behoves us, Harriet suggests, to also think carefully about the stories and these memorials tell and the politics that are embedded within them.

In this Lecture, Harriet will draw on a visual analysis of some of the new memorials, as well as on interviews conducted with memorial activists and artists, to unpack the kinds of interventions that sexual violence memorials might make into public debates on sexual violence.   These interventions, as Harriet will demonstrate, are far from straightforward; in particular because the form and the public nature of memorials means that difficult compromises and trade-offs, as well as negotiations with hegemonic ways of storying sexual violence, are often required.

Through a focus on the stock characters that appear across many sexual violence memorials – the ‘innocent victim,’ the ’heroic survivor’ and the ‘monstrous perpetrator’ – Harriet will explore what memorials can tell us about the politics of storying sexual violence across both war and peace in contemporary public spaces. 

Content warning: This lecture includes discussions of sexual violence across war and peace. It also includes images of memorials that commemorate sexual violence, some of which use graphic or violent imagery. 

Dr Harriet Gray

Harriet is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of York.  Prior to this, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Gothenburg, working on a study of conflict-related sexual violence in the African Great Lakes Region.   Harriet completed her PhD at the London School of Economics and Politics Science in 2015, where her thesis focused on domestic violence in the British military community.

Harriet’s research interests fall within the overlapping fields of critical military studies, critical war studies, and feminist IR.   Her work has appeared in journals including The British Journal of Politics and International Relations; Security Dialogue; The RUSI Journal, European Journal of International Relations; Review of International Studies; Gender, Place and Culture; and International Feminist Journal of Politics. Harriet is an Associate Editor of the journals Critical Military Studies and Political Studies.

Professor Marsha Henry

Marsha is the Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair in Women, Peace, Security and Justice.  Her research is concerned with the gendered and racialised politics of violence; militarisation; global south development; international aid and intervention; and conflict, peace, and security.   She is the author of several books, the latest of which is: The End of Peacekeeping:  Gender, Race, and the Martial Politics of Intervention (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024).  Marsha has also advised a number of national governments on women’s participation in the armed forces, combatting sexual exploitation and abuse in humanitarian settings, and developing anti-racist and diversity strategies in foreign policy ministries.