Sexual violence only began to receive effective legal attention in international criminal law with the establishment of ad hoc international criminal tribunals. After a long period of inadequate focus on the issue, there was a strengthening of feminist discourses on sexual violence, from the 1990s onward, within international institutions and the criminalization of this form of violence. Therefore, the objective of the paper is to expose the meanings of the terms rape and sexual violence in the International Criminal Courts for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, comparing understandings of this form of violence in these courts. Furthermore, the idea is to clarify which elements were considered by the case law to classify certain acts of sexual violence and rape as genocide.