Bad governance has always had a body count
- Dr Audrey-Flore Ngomsik
- Jun 8
- 5 min read
We were not looking for this.
We were doing research on something else entirely when I landed on an article by the Association for Asian Studies titled "Teaching about the Comfort Women during World War II and the Use of Personal Stories of the Victims."
The article describes the comfort women system as the largest case of government-sponsored human trafficking and sexual slavery in modern history, created and controlled by the Imperial Japanese government between 1932 and 1945.[1]
Then I read Yong Soo Lee's testimony. Taken from her home in Korea at sixteen. Transported across three countries in cargo ships. Forced to serve soldiers daily. Warned her family would be killed if she spoke.
Then Jan O'Herne. Dutch, twenty-one years old, selected from a prison camp lineup by officers who walked the row and pointed. Returned three months later with a threat sewn into her silence.
Then I stopped reading and started thinking about the pattern.
Wartime rape as a governance failure
The scale of a crime that never stopped
200,000 women.
That is the documented minimum for the Japanese "comfort women" system alone.
They were forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces across occupied territories before and during World War II.
The word "comfort" was chosen deliberately. Someone in a leadership position chose that word.[2]
That tells you everything about how power relates to this crime.
Rape during wartime is an act as old as war itself.
It was not documented as a strategic military practice until World War I.
After World War I, these crimes were never prosecuted, which further encouraged the use of mass rape as a strategic military operation in subsequent conflicts.[3]
It did not stop.
Between 250,000 and 500,000 women were raped in just three months in Rwanda in 1994.
More than 200,000 are estimated to have been raped in Sierra Leone during the 1990s.
Hundreds of thousands of women were violated in the DRC's 20-year war.[4]
In Bosnia, systematic rape was used as part of a strategy of ethnic cleansing. Women were raped specifically so they would give birth to a Serbian baby.[5]
Rape as policy
This is not violence that happens alongside war. One of the most significant shifts in current thinking is the recognition that rape in wartime is not a by-product of war, but often a planned and targeted policy.[6]
It is a governance decision.
When you plan it, resource it, and command it through a military chain of authority, it is policy. And policy reflects the values of those who set it.
The accountability that never came
Now ask the harder question.
What does it say about the leaders of these countries when the crime is documented, the perpetrators are known, and accountability still fails to arrive?
The rapes admitted and listed as war crimes were dismissed during the Nuremberg trials, probably because they were also practiced by Allied armies.[7]
U.S. servicemen committed an estimated 3,500 rapes in France between June 1944 and the end of the war. These were the liberators. A local saying from Normandy survived because it is precise: "With the Germans, the men had to camouflage themselves. With the Americans, we had to hide the women."[8]
The command structure knew. Eisenhower received a formal complaint from the Free French Forces. He issued orders. The rapes continued.
Of the 152 troops charged with rape by the Army in France, 139 were African American. Of the 29 soldiers executed for rape, 25 were African American. In a country where Black soldiers were systematically excluded from combat units, leadership roles, and military honors, they were suddenly overrepresented in rape convictions. The crime was not being prosecuted. Specific bodies were being sacrificed to protect the narrative of liberation.
That is a governance decision.
Colonialism used the same weapon
In the Belgian Congo, rape, sexual exploitation and torture of native women were used as punishment, extortion, and a display of colonial power. Brutality and intimacy were basic to colonialism itself.[9]
Belgian colonial officials and their sentries employed rape and sexual torture on a massive scale during the rubber regime of King Leopold II. Contemporary international discourse on conflict-related sexual violence in eastern DRC is marked by its complete omission of this history.[10]
The omission is structural.
When a country's leaders refuse accountability for this crime, they are not protecting soldiers but the architecture that made the crime possible: the chain of command, the ideology, the institutional silence.
Who decides which suffering counts
Japan's conservative political establishment spent decades insisting comfort women were voluntary. Controversies over comfort women statues and Japanese history textbooks continue. Conservatives insist that comfort women were voluntary prostitutes. The ongoing efforts to secure justice underscore the unending battle against stigma toward survivors.[11]
I call that an active governance of whose suffering counts.
Leadership boards that are 90% male and homogeneous do not just miss market risk.
They miss which crimes get named, which victims get compensated, and which atrocities get written out of the textbooks their children read.
Boards do not fail on diversity metrics. They fail on the decisions that homogeneity made invisible.
The question every board member, every policy maker, and every government minister should be asked is not "did you commit the crime?"
The question is: who decided it did not count?
Because someone always decides that. And that someone is always in a leadership position.
The oldest materiality assessment there is
In CSR, we call it materiality assessment. You decide which risks are significant enough to report, to manage, to price. The comfort women were a materiality decision. The rapes in Normandy were a materiality decision. Colonial sexual violence was a materiality decision. Every time a leadership body decides that a category of harm does not count, it is performing the same calculation that modern boards perform when they exclude social risk from their balance sheets. The mechanism is identical. Only the language has changed.
At Trianon, we have argued for years that separating the Ministry of Ecology from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is itself a governance failure.
Environmental destruction does not stop at borders. Sexual violence in conflict zones is inseparable from the collapse of ecosystems, the competition for land and water, and the economic desperation that armed groups exploit.
A ministry that manages climate and a ministry that manages conflict should not be producing separate reports, separate budgets, and separate accountability frameworks for what is, structurally, the same problem. The women in this article were not harmed by isolated actors. They were harmed by systems. Governing systems requires seeing them whole.
Documented reports of sexual violence exist in several active conflicts today. Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Myanmar, Syria, Somalia, South Sudan, Haiti, and the Central African Republic are all covered in the UN Secretary-General's most recent annual report on conflict-related sexual violence. The UN recorded nearly 10,000 cases of conflict-related sexual violence worldwide in 2025 alone, more than double the previous year's figure. In Sudan, two-thirds of women frontline responders reported a significant increase in sexual violence in 2025, with half reporting further escalation into 2026.
We have not included any of them here. Not because the evidence is absent, but because all of these conflicts are active, politically contested at every level of documentation, and subject to ongoing legal proceedings. Writing about them in this format, without the investigative depth they require, would reduce living women to rhetorical ammunition. The historical cases in this article are documented, adjudicated, and in most instances officially acknowledged. They are not less serious for being past. They are simply less likely to be weaponized by readers looking for confirmation of a geopolitical position rather than an honest reckoning with how power operates. That distinction matters to me.
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