Genocide and the Social Death of Children
Non-lethal elements of genocide are too often dismissed.
I teach genocide—or more correctly a course that introduces students to the theory, history, and practice of genocide. The first day’s lecture is devoted to a key insight made by the father of the genocide concept, Raphael Lemkin: Genocide is about more than just mass killing. It is also the destruction of the very social, physical, and moral fabric that binds a community of people together and defines them as a group.
Mass rape, the transfer of children, and the destruction of cultural heritage, fall short of murder, but they still constitute genocide.
Many measures, like mass rape, the transfer of children, and the destruction of cultural heritage, fall short of murder. But in the words of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, they are still part of the crime of genocide because they are intended to cause “serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.”
In my own research and teaching, I have struggled with how to make these “para-lethal” elements of genocide more legible, especially as they bear on the multigenerational harm of genocide. I’m not alone in this. The international human rights legal community similarly wrestles with elements of genocide that cross into the fields of sexual- and gender-based violence, like the sexual enslavement and mass rape of Yezidi women by the Islamic State, or the harm done to First Nations peoples in Canada at the hands of teachers and administrators at residential schools—experiences mirrored in the Armenian Genocide in the treatment of Karnig Panian at the hands of Halidé Edip in the orphanage at Antoura.
These para-lethal elements have too often been consigned to the status of mere “cultural genocide.” As a consequence, they can be more easily dismissed as “soft” aspects of genocide, and not “hard” in the way mass-killing is. That dismissal is wrong. It undervalues the impact of the para-lethal nature of genocide, and obscures some effects of genocide on children and women, who are more often the targets of para-lethal elements than male victims of genocide.
What I propose is a new paradigm for the historical study of genocide—a holistic approach, one that can better account for historical weight of genocide on its survivors and not just count the dead. I use the concept of social death to explore the para-lethal elements and confront the possible shortcomings of the term “cultural genocide.” The philosopher Claudia Card (who bases her own discussion of social death on the work of Orlando Patterson, a leading historian of slavery in the New World and the phenomenon of “passing down” enslavement to children) is particularly interested in the question of evil and the Holocaust, however her analysis is far reaching. She identifies acts that lead to social death that can be found in all genocides:
Centering social death accommodates the position, controversial among genocide scholars, that genocidal acts are not always or necessarily homicidal. … Forcibly sterilizing women or men of a targeted group or forcibly separating their children from them for re-education for assimilation into another group can also be genocidal in aim or effect. Such policies can be aimed at or achieve the eventual destruction of the social identity of those so treated. It may appear that transported children simply undergo change in social identity, not that they lose all social vitality.
One could imagine that an argument could be made for a bloodless genocide, one where aspects of social death and cultural genocide take place but no homicide and mass extra-judicial killing. Empirically this would be more difficult to analyze, and I think some caution is necessary. But to unravel the full horror of the events in genocides like that of the Ottoman Armenians—especially as we still know so little about what happened in the period 1915-1922—requires the use of a concept like this.
An argument could be made for a bloodless genocide, one where aspects of social death and cultural genocide take place but no homicide and mass extra-judicial killing.
The elements that constitute social death in the Armenian Genocide—child transfer, servile concubinage, and coerced conversion—have individually begun to attract more attention in the scholarly literature. And I draw them together in Bread From Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism into a historiographical unit. Achieving the social death of Armenians was a key feature of the Ottoman policies—and of the anticipated social outcomes—constituting the Genocide of the Ottoman Armenians. It is the reversal of social death, both in its physical and cultural dimensions, that drove the humanitarian mission of governmental and nongovernmental organizations like the Near East Relief, the League of Nations, and the Armenian General Benevolent Union in the early interwar period. The Ottoman state transferred children, coerced conversion of Christian Armenians to Islam, and created a culture of impunity where war-time rape and rape under the cover of forced marriage was not just widespread, but was an expected outcome of policy. International humanitarian relief workers themselves conceptualized the challenges facing the Armenian community in the post-genocide as a reversal of those policies and a repair of the human beings affected.
These dual processes of inducing and reversing social death sheds light not simply on how modern ideas of nation and race were at play in the Ottoman Middle East in the early 20th century, but also on how the content of humanitarianism was changing as it shifted from mere alleviation of suffering to a more comprehensive and modern form of refugee rescue, management, and rehabilitation. These early relief efforts constitute a nascent example of the kind of humanitarianism that we see at work in the world today.
Keith Watenpaugh is Associate Professor of Modern Islam, Human Rights and Peace at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of the Introduction for Goodbye, Antoura as well as the forthcoming book, Bread from Stones: The Middle East and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism (University of California Press, 2015).
Read Next
Stanford University Press blog
Remembering the Armenian
Genocide ⇨
A blog series in commemoration of the centennial.
Stanford University Press blog
Justice, Martin Luther King, and the Armenian Genocide.
