Sexual Violence
Research on sexual violence in war tends to collapse together the experiences of women and girls. Childhood researchers should instead aim for specificity in describing and analyzing children and young people’s experiences of the world.
Although sexual violence has latterly come to the fore of the security agenda there is still little attention paid to the experience of girls in armed groups and therefore “there is insufficient understanding of their wartime experiences of sexual violence or their long-term security needs, particularly post-conflict” (Denov 2006, p. 323). One clearly child-focused research agenda that is emerging is the experiences of children born of wartime rape (Carpenter 2010; Denov 2015; Seto 2013; Watson 2007). More generally research on sexual violence against girls (there is still no research on wartime sexual violence against boys) tends to treat girls, once raped, as if they are women. The gap between academic discourse and the visceral and psychic impacts of sexual violence tends to obscure the effects of sexual violence on young bodies. An exception is the medical literature on the health outcomes for rape survivors. Kalisya et al. (2011) in a retrospective study of children, 95% of whom were girls, in Goma, DRC, found that the incidence of rape did not decline after the cessation of formal hostilities, suggesting that wartime rape impacts on postconflict sexual cultures. Children in this study were more likely than adults to know their assailant. Genital trauma was also correlated with children’s age, whereas studies of sexual violence in wartime indicate that severe genital injury is related to whether or not the victim knew their assailant. This implies that rape was more violent when the rapist did not know their victim. They note that children and youth have been understudied in reports of sexual abuse in DRC. Similar findings were reported by Nelson et al. (2011) whose convenience sample of girls under the age of 18 presenting for post-sexual violence care at Panzi Hospital, South Kivu, DRC were more likely than adult survivors to have been gang raped and to have been attacked by a civilian perpetrator. These two studies suggest that wartime sexual violence is not only perpetrated by armed groups and that the smallness of girl’s vaginas make them vulnerable to genital trauma from rape leading to postrape complications including fistula.Within security studies, political scientists have analyzed large-scale data sets to explain why sexual violence increases during war. Since the publication of Susan Brownmillar’s Against Our Will (1975), the idea that rape is a “weapon of war” has become a general view. However, it does not explain how or why it becomes a “weapon of war.” Haer et al. (2015) note that in their study of witnesses, victims, and perpetrators (n = 250) all three groups said that rape occurred because war afforded the opportunity for men to rape with impunity. Caroline Nordstrom (1997) makes a similar point in A Different Kind of War Story. In contrast, Cohen and Nordas (2015) argue that rape is not a general feature of militias. They claim that of 224 groups active in the study period “only [sic] 38 or about 17%” were “reported as perpetrators of sexual violence.” Progovernment militia groups (the full dataset) who raped were overrepresented but “still constitute a minority (about 30%) in the African context” (Cohen and Nordas 2015, p. 882).
Cohen and Nordas' point is that government forces do not delegate shameful violence (rape, for example) to militias in order to avoid the sanctions of international law. To be clear, Cohen and Nordas are not arguing that rape and other forms of sexual violence are not as widely perpetrated in war as Brownmillar, and subsequent research following her conceptualization, has claimed. What they want to do is to explain why sexual violence occurs, when it does, by showing that it is done for instrumental reasons by particular kinds of militias.
Although they show that sexual violence is not enacted by all progovernment militias, and in fact is used by a minority of them; they also show that government forces continue to be sexually violent even when there are progovernment militias that are also sexually violent. Indeed they say “In fact, data on all militia groups in the fifty countries engaged in armed conflicts from 1989 to 2009 show that in all but one case of militia-perpetrated sexual violence, state forces were also reported to be perpetrators (Cohen and Nordas 2014). Additionally, in all but four countries, state forces named as perpetrators committed the same or higher levels of sexual violence than did the militias” (Cohen and Nordas 2015, p. 880).Since sexual violence in war is not delegated to militias, but is widely, although not universally, used by government armed forces and progovernment militias, what explains why some militias are perpetrators of sexual violence and others are not? They suggest that to understand the dynamics of sexual violence during war we need to focus on training, socialization, and recruitment. They note, “Starting from the earliest work in this realm (e.g., Shils and Janowitz 1948), scholars have found that violence builds new loyalties and severs previous ties. Building on these prior studies, Cohen (2013) argues that the level of internal cohesion in an armed group can be critical for understanding variation in wartime rape” (Cohen and Nordas 2015, p. 882). Building on Cohen's 2013 work, they propose that militias that lack social cohesion are more likely to rape than those that do not - therefore militias formed through abduction use sexual violence to build bonds. Cohen uses this thesis, that sexual violence builds cohesion in otherwise inchoate forces, to explain why women were often active participants in sexual violence in Sierra Leone (for example by holding down victims).
However, this seems to presume that those who were subjected to sexual violence were a distinct group from those who were in the rebel forces.
This was not the case; there is substantial evidence that women and girls who were raped were then also integrated into the rebel forces and that being in the rebel forces did not protect women or girls from subsequently being raped.In their study, Cohen and Nordas (2015) used child soldiers as a proxy for low cohesion and high abduction and confirm through their analysis of the dataset that nearly one third (34%) of progovernment militia groups that recruited children (and are therefore presumed to have low cohesion) were perpetrators of sexual violence, whereas “only [sic] 12% of militia groups that did not recruit children were reported as perpetrators of sexual violence” (p. 885). (They also found that ideology was not correlated with lower levels of sexual violence, as previous qualitative studies have proposed; gender-egalitarian ideology, for example, in revolutionary movements does not protect women and girls from rape and other forms of sexual violence).
Sara Meger (2010) in her attempt to theorize rape in DRC notes that between 2005 and 2007 alone, 32,000 cases of rape and sexual violence were reported in South Kivu, likely to be a fraction of all cases. Meger notes that all parties to the conflict, including the UN, have perpetrated sexual violence against women and girls. However, she does not speak specifically about what it means that girls were raped. Her argument is that men raped because they could not live up to the culture of masculinity (sexual ability, multiple wives, ability to protect their homes), but this argument cannot be warranted either anthropologically or sociologically: Nowhere in Africa is it considered either masculine or hyper-masculine to, for instance, insert a chili pestle into a woman’s vagina and pound it so hard that the woman now has to urinate into a bag through a hole in her stomach (Meger 2010, p. 217 citing Ohambe et al. 2004, p. 42) or to rape a 6-month-old baby (2010, p. 126 citing Lynch 2004, p. A27).
Meger’s argument is that the militias seek to terrorize the population through extreme violence in order to control the mineral resources of the Eastern Congo, on which the entire economy now relies. She says, “What distinguishes wartime sexual violence is that, in addition to exploiting the social and interpersonal dimensions of violence as found in peacetime rape, sexual violence in warfare assumes a political and/or economic dimension, in which the systematic abuse of women in conflict is a strategy by which to terrorize a population, communicate a political message between men, or to strip women of their economic and political assets” (Meger 2010, p. 121 citing Turshen 2001, p. 55). Rape then is not a kind of heightened version of an existing culture of masculinity, in her account, but a terrorist act.If Meger is correct in her argument that rape is intended as a message “between men” or to “strip women of their economic and political assets,” what message is intended by the rape of girls, who have no independent economic or political assets? Is their rape, a message between adults, is the violent attack on girls an attack on their parents, a destruction of their reproductive futures? These questions cannot be answered within the scope of this chapter, but they are questions that children’s geographers have the theoretical tools to address.
Sexual violence in Sierra Leone has probably been more thoroughly researched than in many conflict zones (Mazurana and McKay 2004; Coulter 2009). Zoe Marks in her research with 150 combatants in Sierra Leone in 2010 (some 10 years after the end of the war) argues for an unpacking of the “black box” of sexual violence to understand the dynamics of sexual violence in specific contexts. In the case of the Sierra Leone war she notes, as have others even during the war, that the Revolutionary United Forces (RUF) had a code of conduct that included an injunction against rape. She says that most women who experienced sexual violence do not describe this as rape, using the Krio word “virgination.” However, in the interview transcripts women do refer to themselves as having been raped, a disjuncture that Marks does not comment on.
Marks does make some distinctions between the experiences of women and girls in the Bush (in the rebel camps), suggesting that younger children would not be kept as “wives” in the camp and might instead be adopted by senior women until they “aged” out. However, she also comments on the extreme disjuncture between the RUF prohibition against rape, supposedly punishable by death, and the rape of even very young girls during raids on villages. Her wider point seems to be that in the rebel camps a kind of domestic order prevailed in which rape was not common. She seems to be making a distinction between a kind of moral domestic code of conjugal relations that prevailed in the RUF camps and the vicious and uncontrolled rapes done during “battle.” However, this distinction is belied by other evidence; for example, in Denov’s a qualitative study with 80 war-affected children (organized through Defence of Children International - Sierra Leone; DCI-SL), one respondent reported the following:Girls [in the camp] were dying of rape all around me. Every young girl was terrified of rape. The first time I was raped was by the commander who abducted me.... He left me bleeding. I was so afraid and I thought I was going to die like the other rape victims.... This commander continued having sex with me against my will. Other officers also came around and had sex with me. Even the young boys were attempting it... Ever since I was raped, I get horrible stomach aches. I think it’s because of the rapes. (Denov 2006, p. 326)
This girl had been living in the camp since she was a very young child (about 4) and was raped when she reached puberty, the same time as she was sent to the front. In the same study another girl recounted:
I was raped the moment they captured me by an older man and I bled and bled. They gave me some medicine, but I could not walk. The man who raped me later carried me on his back. The same day other girls were raped too. They would just rape you and leave you. It happened to me so many times, I can’t even count. (Denov 2006, p. 326)
Both the Sierra Leone Civil War and the wars in the South Kivus in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) were marked by extraordinary levels of sexual violence against women and girls. Although the extent of this violence has been recognized and has generated research agendas and medical interventions to heal girls and women, there has been very little research on the psychological trauma of sexual violence or the different affects of sexual violence if one experiences it as a girl or as a woman. Indeed, most of the research on the psychosocial impacts of war on children focuses on the experience of collective violence and the trauma of witnessing death and experiencing injury, as the next section discusses.
5