In conflicts and crises across the globe, armed actors have perpetrated gender-based crimes, but are hardly ever held accountable for them. Human rights defenders are working to change that.

Germany

At the turn of the twentieth century, a devastated Germany began promulgating an antisemitic, racist, sexist and homophobic ideology under the direction of the Nazi party. High-ranking Nazi officials denounced homosexuality as “a dangerous and infectious plague” that perpetuated “womanish emotionalism” and should be met with “barbaric severity.” Women in politics were seen as “disgraceful aberrations” and were told that “only a man must be and remain a judge, soldier, and politician.” Masculine-perceived women and trans men were seen as threatening in their gender nonconformity, which was believed to lure women away from their assigned roles, endangering the birth rate. Nazi members also interwove racism and homophobia. For example, some viewed homosexuals as “racial degenerates” stemming from the “evil propensities of the Jewish soul.”