S/2017/249 urban warfare, during house searches, operations in resid ential areas and at checkpoints. Moreover, since 2014, the United Nations has intensified its focus on the use of sexual violence as a tactic of terrorism by a range of violent extremist groups. For these actors, sexual violence advances not only such obje ctives as incentivizing recruitment, terrorizing populations into compliance, displacing civilians from strategic areas, eliciting operational intelligence and forcing conversions through marriage, but also entrenches an ideology based on suppressing women’s rights and controlling their sexuality and reproduction. It is further used to generate revenue, as part of the shadow economy of conflict and terrorism, through sex trafficking, sexual slavery, enforced prostitution and the extortion of ransoms from desperate families. In some circumstances, women and girls are themselves treated as the “wages of war”, being gifted as a form of in-kind compensation or payment to fighters, who are then entitled to resell or exploit them as they wish. The past year has also seen the use of women and girls held in sexual slavery as human shields and suicide bombers, denoting their status as expendable “resources” in the machinery of terrorism. In the context of mass migration, women and children affected by conflict, displacement or violent extremism are particularly at risk of falling prey to traffickers owing to the collapse of protective political, legal, economic and social systems. 9. At the same time, certain counter-terrorism measures have also infringed women’s rights and freedoms, such as the practice of detaining those released from the captivity of violent extremist groups as potential affiliates or intelligence assets, rather than supporting them as victims and referring them to humanitarian actors. Such measures can signal to communities that such women and girls are complicit in the violence and should therefore be shunned. Sexual violence has also been used in the context of counterinsurgency operations, whereby the rape of a wife or daughter is intended to punish her absent husband, father or relative, often to pressure him to surrender to the authorities during efforts to capture actual or perceived opponents. 10. A strikingly consistent concern, across the varied contexts examined in the present report, is the intense stigma suffered by survivors of conflict-related sexual violence. Survivors risk being twice traumatized: first by the action of the perpetrator, then again by the reaction of society and the State, which is often unresponsive or even punitive and discriminatory. Shame and stigma are integral to the logic of sexual violence being employed as a tactic of war or terrorism: aggressors understand that this type of crime can turn victims into outcasts, thus unravelling the family and kinship ties that hold communities together. The effect may be diminished reproductive capacity and prospects for group survival. Just as there are many manifestations of conflict-related sexual violence, there are multiple and intersecting stigmas that follow in its wake. T hese include the stigma of “guilt by association” with the perpetrator and their group; fear of suspected sexually transmitted infections such as HIV; the perceived dishonour of lost chastity or virginity; the stigma of maternity out of wedlock, especially where children conceived through rape are considered “children of the enemy”; homosexuality taboos, in the case of male rape; and the shame of being unable to defend oneself and loved ones. Children born of rape may themselves face a lifetime of marginalization, owing to stigma and uncertain legal status. Sociocultural stigma compounds the problem of universal underreporting of sexual violence in times of 4/33 17-05090