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Originally Posted by Error Nomad
ChiTownHoney; Intelligent question. I don't think it's one of the things you mentioned, I think it's a combination of all of them plus some others.
Gangrape in war is extremely common, and has been in every conflict where combatant men were around women and had the opportunity, with -very- few exceptions. Even in most of the exceptions, there were reported cases of rape between soldiers and supposedly friendly (as in; their side) women if left long enough.
So why? And why so much more likely for a guy you'd never worry to leave your daughter alone with in the civilian world?
"Giving a man a rifle changes his sense of property rights" (don't remember the source)
It's a definite that soldiers in a war will loot. The longer and harder the war, the more likely that will be. The less professional the army, the more certain it will be. But it will happen. I think part of this is that to a human male (or female) in duress, if something will alleviate that duress, you will take it. Extreme example is a drowning person drowning another by climbing on them. It happens frequently. It's an extreme example, but an extreme (immediate death) situation. There chicken you stole from the peasant or blanket from a townsman may not be as bad, but you weren't under as much duress. But a war that goes on long enough will have plenty of that.
That they notice they can do this and it helps them sets up;
"Power flows from the barrel of a gun" (Mao I think)
When you realize that you have power over someone, you may not be tempted to use it, but you are aware you can. Once a soldier breaks his normal societal rules, he knows he can. Interestingly, this doesn't mean that especially rulesbound societies produce soldiers who are better behaved. Look at WWII Japan, Nazi Germany, or some examples in Vietnam (*). These weren't mostly what we'd have thought of as "bad men" if we'd met them at our inlaws dinner party.
And it's biochemical. There are multiple studies on the relations in the human brain to sex and violence. The two responsive centers are closely physically and structurally related. It's part of the 4 'F's; Flee, Fight, Feed, and Fuck. All primal, all shared by men and women.
When a male is engaged in violence they are sometimes much more sexually aroused. I've seen this myself, the first time playing something as non-dangerous as paintball. The Victory Fuck doesn't necessarily have to be voluntary.
Thousand Yard Stare
The more these men have seen, and the more psychological trauma they've seen, the more one of two things will happen; 1. They will snap, or 2) They will become numb. That doesn't mean they're robots, but that for one or more of many reasons they are not feeling emotion the way most people do. They may be feeling -more- of it, or less of it, or only parts of it. But their minds are protecting them from the damage until they can assimilate it.
This doesn't necessarily make them heartless or more dangerous, but to avoid option #1 they're going to have to shunt some of the emotions away that we associate with pain.
Dehumanization
This is the kicker. To kill someone you have to be able to a) hate them, b) not care about them, or c) care about yourself and your buddies more.
Usually it's a combination of 'c' and 'b'. In direct combat most soldiers aren't thinking about who that person is, or if they are they aren't firing (or fundamentally don't care and never can, which is pretty rare overall). After combat there has either be a reason, or an understanding that there isn't one. Either one of these has a very high potential of dehumanizing the enemy. If there is a reason, they are in the wrong. If there isn't, I am in the wrong and can choose to accept that (and probably break) or reject it and blame them. I may decide that "It's just a job", but that still leaves me detached.
Most soldiers don't rape, at least in modern first world armies. But if you get enough of these conditions together you will create a condition where there are significant numbers of guys who feel threatened, scared, horny, angry, and have no significant adult supervision. And then you will have rape and many other atrocities.
EN
(* These examples seem to differ, but I think the common thread is dehumanization, plus other factors. For the Japanese, the combination of xenophobia and excessive discipline led to a situation where once faced with someone further down the power structure, and inhuman to boot, the result was atrocity. For the Germans I think a combination of dehumanization (Nazi propaganda, getting shot at constantly by lots pf Russians), and excessive duress, and for the US military in Vietnam, I'd say dehumanization (who is the enemy/friend again?) and breakdown of control. Most of the events I'm aware of there happened several years into the fight)
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