During the Armenian genocide, which occurred in the Ottoman Empire under the leadership of the CUP, Armenian women in the Ottoman Empire were targets of a systematic campaign of genocidal rape, and other acts of violence against women described by scholars as "instruments of genocide" including kidnapping, forced prostitution, sexual mutilation and forced marriage into the perpetrator group.[a][3][4]
Heinrich Bergfeld, the German consul to Trabzon, reported "the numerous rapes of women and girls," a crime he regarded as being part of a plan for "the virtually complete extermination of the Armenians." The systematic use of rape during the genocide was testified to by Turkish, American, Austrian, and German witnesses and officials.[5]
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