The widespread “atrocities committed against the Armenian people” during the First World War in the Ottoman territories is regarded as the first genocide of the twentieth century. Orchestrated by the Young Turk leadership as part of an aggressive project of “Turkification” of what remained of the centuries old Ottoman empire, it sought either to forcibly assimilate minority populations or eliminate them altogether.
Although scholars debate its precise starting point, a decisive phase began in 1915 with the systematic disarmament and massacre of Armenian conscripts, which left Armenian communities defenceless. This was followed by the arrest and execution of Armenian intellectuals and political leaders, and by mass deportations into the Syrian deserts. These death marches culminated in the widespread killing of women, children, and the elderly. Many scholars have claimed that “tens of thousands of Armenians were forcibly converted into Islam” through coercion and forced marriage, while countless women and children were raped, enslaved, or trafficked. Many others perished in camps or in exile.
Gendered violence was not incidental to this process; it was central to it. Armenian men were initially targeted for elimination in order to destroy communal resistance. Once this objective was achieved, women and children became the primary victims of a distinct, gender-specific genocidal strategy rooted in sexual violence, forced assimilation, and social destruction. As Katherine Derderian notes, “Violence against women was a central feature of the Armenian genocide. After the Armenian leadership and men were murdered, Ittihadists and Ottoman military forces used rape, kidnapping, and forced remarriage as de facto instruments of genocide.”
Sexual violence against Armenian women was systematic and pervasive. Survivor testimonies describe abduction, rape, forced marriage, and murder as routine practices. Mass rapes frequently occurred in public, often in front of family members, functioning both as a tool of terror and a means of collective humiliation. These accounts have been corroborated by the contemporary diplomatic reports of the era. For instance, the German consul in Trabzon observed that widespread rape and forced conversion formed part of a deliberate plan to destroy the Armenian population and sever it from its communal and religious identity.
The Armenian Genocide, therefore, reveals how gendered violence functioned simultaneously as both a means of physical annihilation and cultural destruction. The targeted killing of men, along with the extreme levels of systematic sexualised violence and forced assimilation of women, not only aimed to undermine the survival of Armenians as a community, it was also an attempt to disrupt the continuity of their Armenian identity. This article examines the gendered dynamics of the genocide and demonstrates how gender-based violence was integral to Ottoman genocidal policy.
Gendered Violence and Genocidal Policy
The gendered logic of the Armenian Genocide is evident in the differentiated treatment of victims based on sex. As Özlem Karakuş explains, Armenian men were typically subjected to immediate execution, while women were “spared from immediate execution” and deported, abducted, and exposed to sexual violence and forced marriage. Men were perceived as “the carriers of Armenian ethnicity”, whereas women were viewed as vessels capable of assimilation. This distinction shaped both policy and practice.
Secret government directives reflected this logic explicitly. As Dadrian documents, official plans, “as a fifth agenda point”, called for the extermination of Armenian males under fifty, while women and children were to be Islamised. Genocide, in this sense, extended beyond killing to include the erasure of identity through gendered social engineering.
Following the elimination of Armenian leadership and military-age men, surviving populations were deported from Anatolia to Syria by the Ottoman authorities and Ittihadist supporters. Along these routes, “rape, sexual slavery, and forced re-marriage became the defacto instruments” of destruction rather than spontaneous acts of violence. Eyewitness testimonies and diplomatic records indicate how sexual violence against women was neither random nor exceptional but rather constituted a “central feature” of the genocidal process of Ottoman authorities against Armenians.
Men, too, were subjected to gender-specific violence. De Jong notes that Armenian men were targeted explicitly because of their gender, with documented cases of sexual mutilation and symbolic violence inflicted on male bodies. “Gender based violence against women and men cannot be prevented separately from each other, as the gender roles naturalizing the violence depend on one another. Mainstreaming of gender in atrocity prevention and treatment should still safeguard female tailored sexual violence prevention and treatment, given their higher victimization and the additional underlying rationales for their victimization that do not apply to men.” Holslag further states that “Males were also sexually victimized, male corpses were displayed with their sexual organs cut off…red hot skewers run through their genitals to kill them.” These practices reinforced domination and terror while communicating the total powerlessness of Armenian communities.
For women, sexual violence served multiple purposes. It was justified through misogynistic and religious narratives that framed Armenian women as both inferior and “infidel.” Rape enabled perpetrators to destroy women individually and collectively while avoiding the perceived transgression of directly killing them. The sexual violence against women was looked at as more justifiable as “they could better rationalize their acts given the sexualized gender roles of women, which prevented resistance among their ranks.” As such, forced marriages and sexual enslavement further facilitated assimilation, severing women from their communities and reassigning them new identities.
Sexual violence also functioned as a performative act of power. As Karakuş argues, it was intended not only to violate women but to humiliate entire communities and demonstrate male domination over both women and Armenian men. Survivor accounts reveal how this trauma persisted across generations, embedding loss, silence, and grief into family memory.
As reported by Karakus, a survivor named Huseyin M, half Kurdish (father’s side) and half Armenian (mother’s side), recounts:
His “grandfather and two sons were among the Armenian men forcibly removed from their village and never returned…after the men in the family were killed, the grandmother, her daughter, and her brother were deported into the Syrian desert, Deir-ez Zor.
State policy actively enabled these outcomes. While official orders claimed gender neutrality, local implementation aligned closely with patriarchal assumptions that men embodied ethnic continuity while women and children were absorbable into the dominant group (Derderian, 2005). Genocide thus unfolded through both violence and assimilation, structured by gendered understandings of identity.
Memory, Identity, and Denial
For many Armenian women who survived, liberation at the end of war brought further marginalisation. Those who had been forcibly married to Muslims and converted to Islam, or sexually abused were often rejected by both their imposed households as well as their original communities. Some returned pregnant; others bore visible scars, sexually transmitted diseases, or indelible psychological trauma. Even when reintegration occurred, it was fraught with tension and silence. “Those girls who were mature and had married Turks used to say, I want my effendi. They wanted their husbands, others did not. Those who did were young and simple”, notes Karakus. The experience of violence and forced assimilation was seared into memory with survivors such as Khanum, the grandmother of filmmaker Suzanne Khardalian, and living “silently with these marks on her life.”
Physical markers such as tattoos, which were used to brand Armenian women during the war, became lasting symbols of survival and exclusion. As Ulrike Luise Glum (2021) notes, these inscriptions on the female body functioned as tools of regulation, marking women as perpetually “other.” Muslim names, altered identities, and enforced silence compounded this alienation, acting both as a “tangible injury and a metaphorical scar that remained perpetually unhealed.”
Children, too, were systematically assimilated. While girls were abducted with official consent from moving caravans, boys were assigned to labour in factories, farms and small businesses. Renaming of the boys and girls, their forced religious conversion, language suppression over Armenian, and circumcision of boys were systemic measures to erase their Armenian identity entirely.
This legacy produced a multigenerational transmission of trauma shaped by silence as families were forced to avoid discussions over such a traumatic past, akin to a “conspiracy of silence.” And yet memory persisted through rituals, customs, and embodied experience, wherein Armenian women emerged as central figures in preserving culture, safeguarding memory, and transmitting identity despite profound loss.
Denial by the perpetrator state has further deepened this trauma. As Peter Balakian observes, denial inflicts psychological and moral harm on survivor communities, and draws from Elie Wiesel’s assertion of it acting as a “second killing” by erasing memory itself. This creates “a morally counterfeit universe for the legacy community.” Moreover, cultural erasure continues through the removal of Armenian presence from historical sites in modern Türkiye, extending the violence into the present. As Balakian further contends, “the Turkish Ministry of Tourism will not even allow the word Armenia/Ermeni on any of the signage of major tourist site”, reinforcing the notion of perpetuating “protracted violence against the eradicated culture.”
Conclusion
Despite enduring extraordinary violence, Armenian women became the custodians of memory and the architects of cultural survival. In the aftermath of genocide and against overwhelming odds, they not only buried the dead, but emerged to raise orphans, and took upon themselves to preserve “language, songs, and rituals,” that the Ottoman Turks tried to erase. Women also wrestled with complex issues of social trust, honour, and belonging, often living with the painful legacy of shattered families. Many chose silence, while others transformed trauma into testimonies. As such, their experiences reveal how genocide operates not only through killing but through gendered systems of domination, assimilation, and denial.
The trauma endured by Armenian women transcends individual suffering, shaping collective memory and identity across generations. Their role in survival and social reconstruction, cultural transmission and remembrance, and resistance and rights advocacy highlights the centrality of gender in understanding both genocide and its long aftermath. Therefore, to recognise their experience is not only an act of historical justice but a necessary step in confronting how gendered violence continues to structure mass atrocities today.
The gendered trauma and survival of Armenian women extend beyond individual experience into collective memory and identity formation. Their role in cultural transmission, social reconstruction, and human rights advocacy preserves the memories of the genocide and the spirit in the post-genocide era, showing the important role of women in both history and memory.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of Middle East Outlook.
