For years, academics and activists around the globe have evaluated the cost of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), which is estimated to cost $1.5 trillion globally. Despite this staggering figure, sexual violence continues to devastate communities, and persists in peacetime, during conflict, and after conflict. Emerging research shows that sexual violence has become increasingly profitable.

According to the International Labour Organization's 2024 report, human trafficking generates an estimated $236 billion in profits, a 37% increase since 2014. Forced commercial sexual exploitation accounts for over 73% of these total illegal profits. Euridice Marquez, a specialist at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), recently stated that areas facing economic crises and instability increases the risk of vulnerable populations falling victim to human trafficking, particularly regarding high rates of sexual exploitation, sexual enslavement, forced marriage, and the recruitment and exploitation of child soldiers.

Sexual violence in conflict does not arise from opportunistic violence. Instead, it is organised, calculated, and embedded in the business models of criminal groups. According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, conflicts involving organised crime groups accounted for 79% of the total fatalities in non-state conflicts. Despite a decline in overall deaths from organised violence in 2023 since rising in 2020, the figure remains extremely high and a record high since the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The result is an insidious continuation of conflict where sexual violence remains not only tolerated but also incentivised.

Conflict not only generates and facilitates violence but also creates a lucrative market for criminal economies, involving all conflict actors, including state actors and rebel groups, as complicit beneficiaries. Organised crime groups, including transnational gangs and enterprises, focus primarily on economic gain rather than political objectives during conflict. This fuels global illicit dealings, posing threats to bodily integrity and international security.

Human trafficking occurs in almost every country in the world, but it is particularly rampant during and after conflict. This crime involves the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring, or receipt of individuals by means such as abduction, abusing power and vulnerability, deceiving, coercing, committing fraud, using force, or paying benefits to individuals or groups controlling victims for exploitation. Illegal activities flourish in conflict zones because of their high-profit, low-risk environment.

These conditions arise from fragmented state resources, the breakdown of law and order, and chaos, leading to low risk, opportunities, and greed. Also, the high profitability of various commodities during conflict raises the profile of sexual trafficking and human trafficking alongside drug trafficking. Organised criminal groups exploit displaced individuals, missing people, and those experiencing food, housing, and educational insecurity, profiting from what conflict leaves most vulnerable: human lives.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) reports that 72% of human trafficking victims are women and girls. For millions of women and girls, the social, economic, and political precarity during conflict makes them commodities in the global criminal marketplace. Increasingly, boys are exposed to sexual exploitation and devastation of conflict-related sexual violence, but it continues to go underreported and unseen. This leaves the experiences of men, boys, and individuals who identify outside the male-female binary marginalised.

Organised crime involving sexual violence encompasses the criminal exploitation of individuals, often through coercion, manipulation, or deception, to engage in sexual activity. Sextortion definitions are often corporatised with research focused on the 'peacetime' environment, concerning young job-seekers, the workplace, universities, and the targeting of teenagers and university students on online platforms. However, sextortion is also visible during conflict, masked in the phenomena of child marriages, forced marriages, abductions, and recruitment.

From the Hope for Justice Investigations and Casework, it was identified that "the diversification into human smuggling and trafficking is a simple business decision for [the crime groups] who have no regard for human life and make no distinction between drugs and human commodities." Organised crime influences armed conflicts by increasing tensions and competition for illicit profits and territorial control. Therefore, in many circumstances, the end of conflict is not profitable.

At present, the global response is fragmented. Sextortion, sexual trafficking, and conflict-related sexual violence are treated as separate issues. Accountability mechanisms are weak, with few international frameworks targeting the intersection of organised crime and gendered violence during conflict. While prosecuting sexual crimes has progressed (albeit slowly), disputes over definitions, case selection, and heard and unheard voices persist.

International treaties and principles must recognise the role of organised crime movement, and how conflict has become a marketplace for illicit activity. More investment in research in this nexus is necessary to develop interventions for addressing and eliminating sexual violence in conflict. We need accountability mechanisms involving anti-trafficking efforts to follow the networks profiting from conflict-related sexual violence and dismantle this economy of violence.

This article was originally published on Daily Maverick.

Conflict-related sexual violence is perpetrated against women, men, girls and boys directly or indirectly during conflict, based on their sex or gender. It is endemic to areas suffering from humanitarian crises and conflict, including currently South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Central African Republic, Ukraine and Palestine.

According to research, women and girls are disproportionately targeted and affected by this form of violence. Men and boys, as well as sexually- and gender-diverse persons, are also targeted, but there is a crisis in underreporting and documenting that often marginalises their experiences of conflict-related sexual violence.

Most conflict-related sexual violence is defined by a combination of who (profile of the victims and perpetrators), what (elements of the offence) and why (the motive). Often, perpetrators are profiled as state and non-state armed actors (militia, soldiers, rebels) and victims are profiled as civilian women with actual or perceived political, ethnic or religious affiliations. Also, the offence is often prescribed as systematic or a "tactic" of war, with the motive described as political or economic. Collectively, these factors shape policies and practices intended to protect civilians, particularly women and girls, against sexual and gender-based violence and to provide redress if it occurs.

But this understanding of conflict-related sexual violence has a fundamental problem: it is based on the assumption that violence operates in a distinct past, present and future. This assumption prescribes which violence is visible and invisible in conflict and post-conflict periods.

Transitional justice and peacebuilding practitioners develop measures that specifically address the past based on the understanding that this will stop future violence. Yet, political actors continue to commit human rights violations in countries that have undergone transitional justice processes, including truth commissions, prosecutions and reparations programmes. Our assumption about progress over time is flawed and represents a site of contention around interventions designed to address violence.

This assumption carries the consequence of reinforcing certain biases and myths about sexual and gender-based violence that make other experiences and realities invalid, inadequate and invisible. An example is the invisibility of intimate partner violence (IPV) in the dominant conflict-related sexual violence conversation. In conflict-affected northern Uganda, incidences of IPV, defined as sexual, physical and/or sexual abuse of a person by their partner or spouse, are prevalent. In a 2019 study conducted in the region, high rates of emotional, physical and sexual IPV were found, with 78.5% of women reporting they had experienced at least one type of IPV.

IPV perpetrated by men is reported as the most common form of gender-based violence in conflict settings. Emerging evidence indicates that persistent exposure to conflict and living in conflict-affected communities in countries like Uganda, Sudan, South Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo can increase women's risk of experiencing IPV. According to studies in 2018 and 2021, residents in fatality-affected conflict districts face a 50% increased risk of IPV. Residents of districts that experienced four to five cumulative years of conflict are also more likely to experience IPV. Even five years after the conflict, they are more likely to experience post-conflict IPV.

Despite this evidence, most interventions designed to provide redress and accountability for conflict-related sexual violence primarily focus on anonymous armed actors as perpetrators and women as victims. The consequence of time-bound understandings of conflict-related sexual violence is that many efforts, including policy interventions to combat and address conflict-related sexual violence, are ignorant of IPV, which results in continued impunity for these crimes.

We need to think anew about sexual and gender-based violence by including IPV in our conflict-related sexual violence agenda. More broadly, we need to broaden our categories and understanding of violence in conflict to attend to all survivors, hold all perpetrators accountable and challenge traditions of impunity. Transitional justice and peacebuilding need to acknowledge and deal with the continuities of the past in the present instead of closing sexual and gender-based violence off as repaired or finished. They need to address different kinds of crimes, notably different forms of sexual and gender-based violence.

This article was originally published on Daily Maverick.