International Feminist Journal of Politics

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Debris: autoethnography, feminist epistemology,

ethics, and sexual violence

Jelke Boesten (she/her/hers) & Lurgio Gavilán (he/him/his)

To cite this article: Jelke Boesten (she/her/hers) & Lurgio Gavilán (he/him/his) (04 Jun 2024):
Debris: autoethnography, feminist epistemology, ethics, and sexual violence, International
Feminist Journal of Politics, DOI: 10.1080/14616742.2024.2356012

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2024.2356012

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INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS
https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2024.2356012

Debris: autoethnography, feminist epistemology,

ethics, and sexual violence
Jelke Boesten (she/her/hers)a and Lurgio Gavilán (he/him/his)b
a
Department of International Development, King’s College London, London, UK; bSchool of
Social Anthropology, National University San Cristóbal of Huamanga, Ayacucho, Peru

ABSTRACT
This article examines the impact of methodological choices and collaborative
processes in a complex study that delved into the intimate experiences of
violence as narrated by conscripts to the Peruvian armed forces. Lurgio
Gavilán is a Peruvian anthropologist who strongly identifies with the
interviewed veterans because of his own experiences, and Jelke Boesten is
European feminist scholar with specific ideas about gender justice. Our
collaboration allows us to raise fundamental questions around the
limitations, validity, and ethics of knowledge production. The “debris” of this
collaboration refers to the ethical questions that we may have previously
failed to raise and address. Why did each of us embark on this research?
Have our respective epistemological positions shifted due to the research?
How has the nature of the collaboration, and our different positions of power
therein, enlightened or concerned us? With what are we left, and what do we
leave behind?

KEYWORDS Intimacies of violence; sexual violence; epistemology; methodology; ex-combatants

HISTORY Received 8 July 2023; Accepted 18 December 2023

Introduction
In 2019, Jelke Boesten and Lurgio Gavilán, the co-authors of this article,
embarked on an oral history project focused on Peruvian recruits who
served in the army fighting Shining Path, a communist guerrilla group,
between 1980 and 2000. The 2003 Truth and Reconciliation Commission
(TRC) had found the Peruvian military guilty of most cases of systematic
sexual violence perpetrated during the country’s internal armed conflict
(IAC) (TRC 2003). Earlier research that we had each conducted separately

CONTACT Jelke Boesten jelke.boesten@kcl.ac.uk Department of International Development,

King’s College London, Strand Campus, 30 Aldwych, London, WC2B 4BG, UK
© 2024 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, dis-
tribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed,
or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted
Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
2 J. BOESTEN AND L. GAVILÁN

on the conflict and the perpetrators and victims of violence had led us to the
following question: how did young men – specifically, young recruits – turn
into rapists? Researching this question is not easy. How does one gain access
to men willing to talk whose reputations are tarnished through participation
in a brutal counterinsurgency against Shining Path? How does one obtain
answers from men who belong to an institution, the military, that demands
secrecy and loyalty? How does one speak with perpetrators about violence
and sex?
Gavilán has written about his own complicated history in two memoirs
(Gavilán 2012, 2019). As a ten year old living in rural Peru during surging pol-
itical violence, he followed his brother into Shining Path and, for two years,
was a child soldier of the insurgent organization. Destitute and starving, his
“unit” of children was attacked by the army. His peers were killed but he
was spared. He was captured as a war “orphan,” given an education, and
eventually recruited into the Peruvian army. He spent the next ten years as
a soldier. After leaving the army, he became a Franciscan monk and spent
several years in a monastery. He then wrote his first memoir, went to univer-
sity, and became an anthropologist.
Some years later, we, the authors, met at San Marcos University in Lima
and decided to work together. We wanted to give due attention to the
stories of the recruits with whom Gavilán had spent a decade in the army.
We thought that we could bring together Gavilán’s autoethnographic experi-
ence, grounded knowledge, and local networks, and Boesten’s expertise in
researching gender violence in wartime and peacetime Peru, knowledge of
the comparative scholarship on these issues, and access to funding in the
Global North. In 2019, we started our project thanks to a generous grant
from the British Academy. In the two years that followed, we interviewed
34 ex-combatants about their lives and their time in the army. Guided by
the life story method and Gavilán’s empathetic understanding of these
men’s trajectories and experiences, we were able to ask about the intimacies
of the violence experienced on their own bodies and how they reproduced
embodied violence on others. Much of the violence that they experienced
or perpetrated had erotic undertones; sex and violence were often inter-
twined, and pain and pleasure merged in the veterans’ narratives. We
wrote up these findings in an article published in Latin American Research
Review (Boesten and Gavilán 2023a) and in a book published by the
Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (Boesten and Gavilán 2023b).
Publishing these findings was not easy. The first Global North journals that
we approached raised ethical concerns. Is it possible to publish an article co-
authored by someone implicated in the same violence that is being described
and analyzed? Is a feminist analysis possible when voice is given to perpetra-
tors? Can we allow these voices and the terrible things that they describe to
be published in a respectable journal? In Lima, the questions were different.
 INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 3

Are you sure that these veterans cannot be identified? Are you sure that they
consent to their testimony being published? We also had our own concerns.
How would the military as an institution, the human rights community, and
the interviewed veterans respond to this work? Despite these concerns, we
believed that publishing the research was not only justifiable but essential
if we wanted to understand how young men become capable of committing
atrocities, including sexual violence. Thus, we pushed through and published
in a manner that we thought was ethically accountable and politically and
intellectually meaningful. Nevertheless, we cannot deny that we are left
with the “debris” of some of these ethical concerns, our own role in
shaping the narrative and the analysis, and the limitations of research and
of knowing. We may not agree on everything with each other, our interlocu-
tors, and our informants. Potentially, no one is happy; we all want to know,
but our own situated biases may limit what we can understand, and we
might all feel sullied by the experience.
Of course, we expect debris after something has broken, and in this
research that is not necessarily the case. Hopefully, the research contributes
to our understanding of violence in general, and of sexual violence in particu-
lar. It also advances our knowledge of armed conflict and the ways in which
young men become involved in committing atrocities against others or even
their own people, and the lives that these men build afterwards. For them,
there is much debris of violence experienced and perpetrated, as Gavilán
also narrates below. For Boesten, there is the debris of ethical choices
made and assumptions undermined. Debris refers to leftover questions
that we are unlikely to be able to answer in unison, but we can highlight
them and expose our concerns and uncertainties in the hope that it
removes unresolved ethical tensions that are undoubtedly present because
of our different positionalities.
The debris of this collaboration, then, refers to the ethical questions that
we may have previously failed to raise and address, but attempt to do so
here. There is also the debris of analytical confusions, perhaps even of
unresolvable differences between us as authors, that needs reflection. Of
course, the debris is related not only to the subject matter but also to our
different epistemological positions; the relationship between us was
unequal from the start, creating a series of additional unresolvable tensions.
On the one hand, much has been written about the inequality that shapes the
relationship between Western researchers and “local” gatekeepers, research
assistants, and collaborators (Eriksson Baaz and Utas 2019; Gluck and Patai
2016 [1991]; Smith 2021 [1999]; Sukarieh and Tannock 2019). Likewise,
much has been written about the need to make amends, to change power
relations, to co-produce and co-design, to facilitate and collaborate without
reproducing unequal and extractive power relations in the generation of
knowledge (Baines forthcoming; Fujii 2017; Gaventa and Cornwall 2006;
4 J. BOESTEN AND L. GAVILÁN

Pearce 2016). Has Boesten, as the white European scholar, outsourced the
“dirty work” to a local researcher who does not benefit (enough or equally)
from this project? Worse, has she exposed Gavilán to unwanted memories,
emotions, confessions, and/or public condemnation? On the other hand,
we may well ask: what power is invested in knowing violence first hand?
What lies behind the intimacy of violence between autoethnographer and
interviewee, and what does exclusion from this intimacy entail for
knowing/not knowing? These are valid questions that we address in this
article, but we do so from the following starting points. Why did each of us
embark on this research? Have our respective epistemological positions
shifted due to the research? How has the nature of the collaboration, and
our different positions of power therein, enlightened or concerned us?
With what are we left, and what do we leave behind?
This article is concerned with learning from the potential shifts in our epis-
temological positions – as co-authors – arising from the methodological
choices and the collaborative process in complex research looking at intima-
cies of violence experienced and perpetrated as narrated by conscripts to the
Peruvian armed forces. The article is partly written in the first-person plural,
and partly in the first-person singular, alternating our voices according to
who is writing. Considering that this is an article in English, written for an aca-
demic audience predominantly based in the Global North, this cannot be an
equally balanced alternation. Considering the subject matter, this is impor-
tant to state, even if all of the content has been extensively discussed and
deliberated between us.
We begin by briefly setting out the research context and methodology.
The second section is written by Gavilán and contains personal reflections
on the strengths of autoethnography and the debris of violence. The third
section is written by Boesten and is concerned with feminist epistemology
and violence research, incorporating personal reflections on expectations
and surprises, and the questions left behind. We close with a joint conclusion
in which we reflect on learnings, questions, and ethical tensions in collabora-
tive research on violence.

Research context
Shining Path was an extremely violent insurgent group that aimed to not only
overthrow Peru’s government but also undo social, economic, and political
hierarchies and inequalities in order to, as one of our interviewees put it,
create a new country “without poor or rich people.” While the Peruvian
TRC (2001–2003) found Shining Path responsible for 47 percent of the
69,280 Peruvians who had perished in the conflict, the army and its para-
military allies were responsible for 30 percent, and the remaining
23 percent was attributed to other actors, such as the rural self-defense
 INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 5

units and a second insurgent group, the Túpac Amaru Revolutionary

Movement. Due to pressure from feminist scholars and organizations, the
TRC conducted an in-depth investigation into sexual violence against
women, revealing that such violence had been systematic on all sides of
the conflict, but in particular on the part of the state armed forces (Boesten
2014; TRC 2003).
Accountability for sexual violence is complex in any circumstances, but
perhaps particularly so in contexts of conflict (see for example Campbell
2022; De Brouwer 2005; Seelinger and Wood 2021). In Peru, as in most contexts,
accountability for conflict-related sexual violence is close to zero (Boesten 2021).
Of the many barriers to prosecuting sexual violence, prevailing patriarchal
gender relations and related understandings of sex and violence are perhaps
the main constraints; armed conflict adds to the disposability of human life,
in particular of those who are considered the “enemy,” which can lead – and
often has led – to atrocities followed by impunity.
As we explore in our article “Military Intimacies” (Boesten and Gavilán
2023a), after being enlisted via a compulsory military draft, soldiers were
trained to commit atrocities without questioning the orders received. The
veterans’ stories that we recorded are of vital importance to comprehending
how the country became embroiled in what some have called a fratricide
between intimate enemies (Theidon 2013). Such stories of ex-combatants
are essential to understanding the ways in which they experienced the mili-
tarization of their lives and the role that they played in the atrocities com-
mitted by the military. However, due to the complexity of transitional
justice processes in the immediate aftermath, and the potential for the judi-
cialization of cases, the TRC did not include an in-depth investigation of the
experiences of recruits. The report was also extremely critical of the overall
counterinsurgency strategy, which had led to an escalation of violence, par-
ticularly between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s (TRC 2003).
After the publication of the TRC report, Peru saw a wave of successful pro-
secutions of perpetrators of human rights violations, including the conviction
of former president Alberto Fujimori (Burt 2009). The pace of prosecutions then
slowed down considerably, and most cases were either archived or dismissed,
or remain “under investigation” (Collins, Balardini, and Burt 2013). In 2016, a
case was opened against 13 soldiers accused of raping nine women at a military
base in the Andes in the 1980s. This emblematic case, known as Manta y Vilca, is
mired in multiple judicial problems and has yet to conclude at the time of
writing in early 2024 (see also Boesten 2021). Nevertheless, despite the lack
of successful prosecutions of the military and their political leaders after
the landmark conviction of Fujimori in 2009, the threat of prosecution for
human rights violations remains. Moreover, the military hierarchy is fearful
of unwelcome revelations and accusations about human rights abuses that
could be attributed to them, and hence keeps its ranks closed.
6 J. BOESTEN AND L. GAVILÁN

In this context, it is unsurprising that veterans have been cautious about

who they speak to and what they talk about. At the same time, as we discov-
ered through our research, sufficient time has now passed for recruits to feel
comfortable to at least start talking about their experiences. Several of those
whom we interviewed had already spent time in prison, often for criminal
offenses, or for involvement in the post-conflict military uprising of 2005
(Boesten and Gavilán 2023b). As the emerging research on recruits shows,
their perspective is considerably different from that of their military leaders,
who chose to join the armed forces, were educated and trained well, and
had authority. By contrast, recruits were often from rural or urban lower
socio-economic backgrounds, without much opportunity to challenge enlist-
ment, and were often forcibly drafted.
An emerging literature has explored many blurred boundaries between
victims and perpetrators in the Peruvian context. It has focused on how
perpetrators become capable of extreme violence, on their agency in per-
petrating such violence, and on how the idea of a sub-human enemy is
created through everyday military practice (Granados 2021; Martinez
Garay 2014; Milton 2018; Pizarro Romero 2016). Likewise, our own work
shows that Peruvian military cultures eroticize violence and build on exist-
ing patriarchal ideas of entitled heterosexual masculinities. While such
research does not excuse the violence, including sexual violence, it does
offer a window into why boys and young men can become the soldiers
who perpetrate human rights abuses (Boesten and Gavilán 2023a,
2023b). Peru is not unique in this, of course; research on the brutalization
of young recruits in Liberia (Utas 2003) and Sierra Leone (Mitton 2015), for
example, shows how boys and men become part of violent combatant cul-
tures. The sexual element of such brutalization is less well studied.1 The
research project on which we here reflect, then, was motivated by ques-
tions about the lives of these military recruits. How did they become
capable of violence? What effects did such experiences have after they
left the military? How do sex and intimacy fit into recruits’ narratives of
their time in military service and after?
We found our 34 interviewees through snowballing, using Gavilán’s exist-
ing networks. We initially conducted the recorded interviews together, until
the pandemic made this no longer possible. Between 2020 and 2022, Gavilán
conducted the remaining interviews in between periods of lockdown, some
with the help of research assistants, who were anthropology students from
the local university. Together, we also conducted several online conversa-
tions with interviewees. All interviews were recorded, transcribed, and dis-
cussed in detail between us. Interviewees gave full informed consent to
this process. We also committed to supporting a local veterans’ association,
the Asociación Licenciados Pacificadores de la Nación Andrés Avelino
Cáceres (LIPANAAC) in organizing an essay competition about veterans’
 INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 7

experiences with recruitment and hazing, and three thematic “rapid painting”
competitions. The latter have allowed the association to build a visual archive
of memory that they can use with different audiences.
Our collaboration built on Gavilán’s own past experience, his proximity to
and empathy for the informants, and his local presence. Boesten’s contri-
bution was likewise twofold: on the one hand, the more distanced perspec-
tive of a foreign gender studies scholar with in-depth knowledge of the
Peruvian context and gender-based violence; on the other hand, the privi-
leged position of the Western researcher with access to resources, including
funding and a global comparative literature. Hence, our positionalities as
researchers could be regarded as being in conflict, but we chose to see our
research partnership as productive and complementary. From the start, we
designed the project together, discussed every step along the way, and
made decisions about its progress and outputs collaboratively. Articles pub-
lished in Spanish were written in Spanish, while our English-language publi-
cations were written by translating back and forth using student translators,
the translation website Deepl, and Google Translate to help us to share our
writings and come to an agreed version.
This article, then, is the result of a process of mutual reflection conducted,
first, through an online video conversation; second, by the joint formulation
of the questions set out in the introduction; and, third, by a back-and-forth
process of translation, feedback, and further questions on each of our contri-
butions. The results of those reflections appear below, followed by a brief
concluding section on the lessons learned.

Gavilán: autoethnography and the debris of violence

In 2012, I published a memoir, Memorias de un soldado desconocido (Gavilán
2012), which was translated into English in 2015 as When Rains Become
Floods: A Child Soldier’s Story.2 I wrote this memoir in the Franciscan monas-
tery of Santa Rosa de Ocopa where I lived after spending years as a child
soldier in Shining Path, followed by years in the army. The book that I
wrote was well received, as it was the first first-person account of someone
both at the margins and at the center of the Peruvian IAC; as a Quechua-
speaking, rural, poor child soldier and recruit, my survival was remarkable.
I underestimated how much some readers would read into my intentions
in writing the book. My professor at the Universidad Iberoamericana de
México, Yerko Castro Neira, who encouraged me to publish the book in the
first place, suggested that I add a motivation along the lines of “I write this
story so that something like this can never happen again in Peru.” And so I
did add this. The Peruvian critic Juan Carlos Ubilluz (2021, 33) considered
my memoir an exercise in humanizing the perpetrator, with the aim of
seeking forgiveness and national reconciliation. Perhaps it was all of this,
8 J. BOESTEN AND L. GAVILÁN

but I must confess that neither “never again” nor reconciliation were my aims.
I wrote the book to tell my story, to process my memories, and to understand
how I came to live through so much violence. Given that, generally, voices like
mine are muted – we are only counted in the statistics of the masses who
died and disappeared – I did not expect anyone to read it. As I learned
during my studies, we are “the subaltern,” and generally others speak on
our behalf (Spivak 2003).
Stories such as mine – the lived experiences of the subalterns who were at
the center of the conflict – were not included in the work of the TRC and are
still not widely told. But I told mine, and people were interested in reading.
The research that Boesten and I did with veterans enabled me to use my
voice and my writing in support of the narratives of my peers, amplifying
our visibility. My role in this research was twofold: as anthropologist and as
autoethnographer. That is, the dual role of anthropologist and autoethno-
grapher allowed me to further understand social processes from the individual
experience and vice versa. My own journey in writing my memoir, and
becoming an anthropologist, was motivated by trying to understand what I
had lived through, and why. Autoethnography, then, brings us closer to
knowing violence. In combination with the life stories of my peers that we
narrated for this project, this knowledge created an intimate experience
between autoethnographer and interviewees as historical subjects, with
Boesten as witness and interlocutor.
Doing this work gave me and my peers some control over the narrative
that is told about us. José Carlos Agüero (2015, 74), a fellow writer of
difficult memories, wrote that I described life in violence without much
emotion and even accused me of writing like a child, creating an image of
Indigenous ignorance so as to avoid any judgment. Agüero suggested that
I failed to take responsibility for my actions. Interpretations abound from
Peruvian politicians, writers, and academics who have considered
Indigenous people as “minors” – children who do not understand their
own historical and political subjectivity (Ulfe and Málaga 2021). While some
may have read the book as child-like – I was of course a child during most
of the violent histories that I lived through and recount – I did not feel like
a child victim. I knew how to be indignant, and I loved Rosaura, my fellow
Senderista who died at the hands of Shogún3 and whom I could not save. I
had seen airplanes fly over my town, I remembered swimming in the
rushing river, and I remembered waiting for the guerrillas on the side of
the road, in the hope of seeing my brother who had joined Shining Path.
Perhaps, in order not to underestimate the author, what needs explaining
– as Pierre Bourdieu (2008) has observed – is that the story that he remembers
and constructs is part of a certain context. My memoir is the story that I con-
structed and was able to remember and tell, while processing the debris of
violence in a Franciscan monastery high in the Andes. Interviewing others
 INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 9

allowed me to listen and see my own story reflected in theirs. This was an inti-
mate experience in which we often saw each other’s memories of violence
and our understanding of what had happened confirmed or challenged,
creating a collective narrative of the past, as well as of our present predica-
ments as part of a divided society.
One morning in May 2023, I went to the neighborhood of veterans in
Ayacucho with our recently published book Perros y promos (Boesten and
Gavilán 2023b) in hand. I met fellow veteran Roberto and we greeted each
other with a hug. I gave him the book, which I had signed for him with
“Here is our story!” We looked at each other and Roberto commented:
“Thank you, Lurgio. Little by little we are moving forward.” Roberto is a
leader in the neighborhood and was at the forefront of building it out of
nothing, from taking and defending the land to building the houses and invit-
ing other families. The neighborhood is built on a pile of rubble on the out-
skirts of Ayacucho. With collective labor, these veterans built an urban
community. I have often asked myself: how does one survive being a
victim and a victimizer at the same time? Our research suggests that it is
the collective identity, the solidarity and empathy fomented by “having
been there” on the battlefields of the IAC, that make it possible to continue
living in the debris of violence, and, in fact, to build new lives, families, house-
holds, and associations.
In our research, we reflected extensively on the binary between victim and
perpetrator in the context of veterans who participated in the conflict. While
the law wants to impose clear lines, to us veterans these distinctions do not
seem very clear at all (Gavilán 2011). In our memories, the life that we had to
live did not allow for clear distinctions, and our agency was constrained by
the circumstances. We suffered atrocious levels of violence at the hands of
our enemies as well as our colleagues and superiors in a context of military
discipline, structural poverty, and racism, as documented in Perros y
promos, which is based on the interviews with veterans. This makes our
own perception of victim/victimizer complex at best.
As veterans of the lower military ranks, and as those who were violently
recruited or incorporated into the military ranks after capture at a very
young age (I was not the only child in the barracks), we have relied on
each other to remake ourselves, to keep our heads high. I refused to stay
trapped in the conditions of the past, stuck with the structural violence
that I lived through and in; I and (as I learned) many of my peers tried to
rebuild ourselves as best as we could and by all means possible to continue
to live. However, the traumatic experiences remain indelible memories. We
do not recall those memories to hurt ourselves – though often they do –
but to rethink and narrate as witnesses of the war.
Thus, we construct narratives out of the debris of our experiences through
the act of sharing stories as a way of seeing the world and ourselves therein,
10 J. BOESTEN AND L. GAVILÁN

and this allows us to weave the present with the past. In this research,
Boesten and I engaged with several veterans’ associations that have relatively
clearly defined political projects alongside a set of social objectives aimed at
supporting each other. The associations’ politics of memory are directed at
recovering veterans’ visibility as, on the one hand, agents of the state, and,
on the other, victims of an abusive military hierarchy. As agents of the
state, veterans seek state support, housing, and healthcare. They claim that
the state has abandoned them. However, they also deny responsibility for
the atrocities committed, and hold on to the idea that they obeyed orders
under the threat of violent punishment and even death. Their narrative
emphasizes their lack of agency when faced with atrocity.
Our research was particularly interested in exploring the role of sex in the
perpetration of violence. We started these conversations with our inter-
viewees by asking them about the sex workers who were contracted by
the military to service the troops – the “Charlis,” as we called them back
then. Some of the interviewed veterans said that they were forced to have
sex with military-contracted sex workers, as an exercise in masculinity. The
majority, however, remembered the Charlis with fondness. I had written
about this before and was criticized for making these events seem “fun
and trivial” (Agüero 2015, 75). This is, however, how we perceived them at
the time, and this is how veterans continue to speak about sex while in
service. For example, in 2022 we worked with the veterans’ organization in
Ayacucho on the third “rapid painting” competition, in which artists
worked with veterans to produce paintings reflecting their stories and mem-
ories. This time, the theme of the competition was the Charlis. I was present
during the event, talking to the veterans and seeing how the paintings pro-
gressed. In the exhibition room, several ex-soldiers chatted, reminiscing as
they looked at the paintings of the naked bodies of the Charlis. They told
each other stories, remembering particular women or situations – “Do you
remember that old woman?”, “Yes, I remember” – and they laughed and
joked at the memory of it all.
It is not easy to talk about rape. As we recount in our writings, several inter-
viewees reminisced about the children that they might have left behind. I had
never thought about this, but they had, and wondered what might have hap-
pened to those children. When in service, we soldiers were encouraged to go
out on our free days and seek sexual release in the community, or with women
in the military base who were there doing laundry and cooking. As this was the
context in which I grew up, I came to perceive this as a normal part of intimate
life in the army. Many of the interviewees remembered relations with women
and girls as fun, as legitimate sexual release in exchange for money or small
goods such as sugar and rice. The population was extremely impoverished
through the war, so women gave their bodies cheaply. We did not perceive
this as rape then, and most veterans still do not consider this rape. Looking
 INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 11

back at this period with the research participants, I have the same kind of
memories: not of rape, but of sexual mischief, of a youth spent in a violent
war in which sex did indeed give a little bit of joy.
The instances that men do understand as rape and torture – the violent
gang rape of enemies or those who were going to be killed afterwards –
are not talked about as “fun or trivial,” neither to us as researchers nor
among themselves. These are the unspoken atrocities; veterans do not
speak about these experiences. I have written about witnessing such acts
(Gavilán 2012), and one or two of our interviewees reflected on witnessing
such events, but no one speaks of being a participant in such extremely
violent atrocity. There are things that are too difficult to even remember,
let alone speak of. We were trained to see enemies, to vilify those enemies,
to believe that they deserved all of the violence that we could mete out on
them. Nevertheless, these enemies were also our brothers and sisters, our
neighbors. We carry these experiences with us but, in order to survive, we
try hard to let them go.

Boesten: questioning feminist methodology

Through my own previous work on conflict-related sexual violence, I had a
good understanding of what had happened and the patterns of military-
perpetrated rape against civilians and suspects in Peru during the IAC.
Based on TRC testimonies of both victims and perpetrators, I had come to
a categorization of rape regimes that identified two principal interlocking
forms: first, gang rape as a weapon of war, ordered from above and per-
petrated against enemies; second, rape as consumption, perceived (by the
perpetrators) as a pleasurable event. Our interviews with ex-combatants
largely confirmed this typification; former soldiers happily told us about the
abuse of women and girls in the communities where they were stationed,
and even of young women living on military bases who were often captured
for the purpose of reproductive labor and sexual slavery. In their accounts,
these were stories of youthful mischief and sexuality, even if violence was
ever present. By contrast, our interviewees did not talk to us in the first
person about gang rape against suspected terrorists; they understood that
to do so would be to acknowledge violence and human rights violations,
and that this was not something that should be said out loud.
Thus, while the interviews with perpetrators affirmed my initial analysis
based on victim testimonies, the narratives of ex-soldiers allowed us to
peek into the socio-psychological mechanisms that made these atrocities
possible: a brutalization through a violent rupture of moral and intimate
ties to prior family and community, an ever-present threat of sexual humilia-
tion and violence by peers and superiors, and a sexual socialization of collec-
tive heterosexual performance through vetted military sex workers. These
12 J. BOESTEN AND L. GAVILÁN

military strategies of intimate governance were supported by an existing

culture of heteropatriarchal misogyny and racism.
Following Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern (2009, 2013), who inter-
viewed Congolese ex-combatants about sexual violence, I adopt a method-
ology of “unease” by exploring my own biases and assumptions and see
how these might be in tension with my findings (Eriksson Baaz and Stern
2016; Eriksson Baaz, Gray, and Stern 2018). I believe strongly in the
reflexive process that characterizes feminist epistemologies – the exploration
of biases and inequalities in the research process; however, at the same time, I
recognize that my decision to focus on men who have been involved in the
perpetration of atrocity and sexual violence and the underlying collaboration
that makes that possible may betray some of these feminist epistemological
principles if seen from a Global North perspective. As Erin Baines
(forthcoming, 1) argues, “narratives of war by ex-combatants are often
highly regulated in Western academic studies, designed to uncover their
motivations to commit violence or to weigh their potential to commit
further acts of violence following demobilisation.” In addition, she observes
that “perpetrator narratives are often scrutinised for signs of remorse, or rec-
ognition of responsibility” (Baines forthcoming, 1). Scrutinizing my own inter-
est in listening to stories of violence is thus part of the reflexive process.
Feminist research on gendered violence generally aims to capture the
experiences and voices of victim-survivors. This is for good reason, as the
social normalization and domestication of such violence and the invisibility
of victims are important factors in perpetuating its persistence. Thus, feminist
research draws (largely) on women’s perspectives to further our understanding
of such violence with the aim to combat its ubiquity and to de-normalize it
(Alcoff 2018). Hence, our focus on the perpetrators of sexual violence arguably
removes agency from the victim-survivors to spotlight those who deserve our
condemnation for their violent acts. This is a feminist dilemma for me.
Victim-centered research on understanding conflict-related sexual vio-
lence has certainly produced important insights into the factors and struc-
tures that facilitate such violence, despite the methodological difficulties of
collecting accurate data (Baines 2015; Boesten 2017). Nevertheless, if we
also want to think about persistent post-conflict violence, and if we want
to know what happens to the men who have raped and to the families
that they might form after their lives as combatants, then we need to talk
to these perpetrators. Following the important work by Eriksson Baaz and
Stern (2009), Kimberly Theidon (2016), and Omer Aijazi and Erin Baines
(2017), several others are undertaking perpetrator-centered research.
Nevertheless, only a very few researchers examine direct testimony: Inger
Skjelsbæk (2015) looks at the court statements of perpetrators before the
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia; Leigh Payne and
Kiran Stallone (2024) analyze the public statements of Colombian
 INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 13

perpetrators of sexual violence as part of the peace process; Camile Oliveira

and Erin Baines (2020) focus on “complex political actors” and speak with
entire families in northern Uganda, including fathers of children born of
rape. Their work is important and adds new perspectives on ex-combatants’
relations with a violent past and a caring present. Overall, perpetrator
research aims to further our understanding of the links between past and
present, and in our case, between sex and violence in ex-combatants’ lives
and how these relate to both wartime and peacetime culture.
While this seems to justify a spotlight on perpetrators as it furthers the
feminist project of eradicating gendered violence, there is still another
aspect to this that potentially undermines the feminist goals; in order to
understand how young men become capable of committing atrocities, one
must let them speak, hear their stories, and affirm – and analyze – their nar-
ratives. This means that in our work we highlight the physical and sexual vio-
lence that they have undergone as part of hazing practices, the erotic
intimacies between men, and the ways in which the military foments and
grooms young men to demonstrate their physical domination and courage
in sexual terms and practices. In sum, we demonstrate how the relationships
between sex and violence, and between pain and pleasure, become a feature
of combatants’ subjectivity, partly explaining the possibility of sexual atrocity.
The description of these experiences as included in our writing disturbed
some of the reviewers of an earlier – rejected – submission to a Global North
academic journal, one of whom wrote that “the amount of detail and descrip-
tion of violent acts bordered on the egregious. Indeed, at times, it became
nauseating.” As the reviewer admitted, details do need to be provided, but
careful choices need to be made as to what to include. Of course, we did
so; as the veterans show, and as my co-author affirms, there is so much
that cannot be said, whether verbally or in writing. However, what can be
said has a purpose, even if it is difficult to read. We personally felt that we
had not revealed any explicit details of violence; on the contrary, in line
with interviewees’ narratives, most details were implicit rather than explicit.
Our interviewees identified the extreme violence that they experienced as
highly abusive, unjust, and torturous, even if they also recognized that they
completed the cycle of violence by meting out the same or worse violence
on recruits who came after them. It was the violence that they experienced
that allowed them to speak about the violence that they committed; it
gave them legitimacy. Mats Utas (2011), looking at child soldiers in Liberia
and Sierra Leone, speaks of “victimcy” to explain how ex-child soldiers
draw on a victim narrative to navigate local, national, and indeed inter-
national social pressures that the committed atrocities generate. Our inter-
viewees deployed a similar narrative; they referred to their youth to explain
sexual practices and desires, and cited the violence experienced to indicate
that they had no choice other than to obey.
14 J. BOESTEN AND L. GAVILÁN

As researchers who also draw on these experiences to explain some of the

atrocities committed, we could be accused of affirming ex-combatant vic-
timcy, providing them with a platform to lay out their justifications for
having perpetrated war crimes, even if we clearly say in our writing that
we do not justify violent actions. As Diane Enns (2012) argues, identifying per-
petrators as victims not only helps to explain their violence, but also makes it
difficult to pass moral judgment and demand accountability for their deeds.
As researchers, we decided not to impose judgment; we anonymized all inter-
viewees and those whom they mentioned to avoid any possible con-
sequences of their participation in the research. Collectively, however, we
still gave them a platform for victimcy, and could even be accused of
being egregious. For our Peruvian publishers, shock was not the problem,
but the possibility that too much detail might identify people, places, or
cases; we needed to ensure that our work could not be used by prosecutors
to trace evidence.
The legitimizing effect of giving voice also concerns my collaborator and
co-author. As the reviewer of the same rejected paper noted, his “embeddedness
and complicity in the sexual violence issues discussed” produces “methodo-
logical and ethical challenges.” We do not disagree with this assessment, as
we discuss in this article; Gavilán has experienced things that he cannot talk
about, because, in his words, “some things cannot be remembered, as they
would not allow me to live.” Silence is, as we know from feminist research,
sometimes the chosen or even the only way to survive. As researchers, we
must respect silence, and sometimes learn to read between the lines and inter-
pret it. There are multiple reasons why research participants keep silent (Ryan-
Flood and Gill 2010). In the case of our interviewees, there may also have
been multiple reasons: for example, because of an awareness of the danger of
speaking about human rights violations, or because forgetting can be a survival
strategy after trauma (Baines forthcoming; Zur 2004). Gavilán suggests that he
forgets – or keeps silent – because of trauma, in order to survive.
Forgetting in order to survive can, of course, also mean that some things
cannot be said, as they would have to be accounted for. As Martha Huggins,
Mika Haritos-Fatouros, and Philip Zimbardo (2002) discuss, silence can also
constitute secrecy. Shared secrets around perpetrating violence are often
established and maintained through a group identity or a community. A nar-
rative is created that the group finds acceptable for public consumption. My
co-author has made it very clear that our interviewees had different narratives
for different audiences, and that I only heard a fraction of what they had to
say. It is this fraction that he, just like his colleagues, wants us to highlight,
to platform, to showcase. Hence, while feminist convention suggests that
the power imbalance in the research collaboration tips in my favor, as a
Western researcher with an academic position and grant money
(Moletsane 2015; Visweswaran 1994), I do not control the story.
 INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 15

I asked Gavilán about the apparent lack of shame and guilt in our inter-
viewees’ narratives. He posed a counter-question: why should he feel
guilty, considering all that he has lived through? Knowing his story, it is
difficult to argue with that. The apparent absence of shame and guilt in
the narratives of the veterans was one of the surprising outcomes of the
research; there is plenty of research about the role of shame in perpetuating
cycles of violence (see for example Lynd 2013 [1958]; Mitton 2015). The extent
to which shame and guilt play a role at a deeper level, invisible to us the
public as part of the unspeakable things that ex-combatants may have
done and witnessed, is an open question. However, were the veterans
whom we interviewed not also shameless? After all, they tried to build their
houses on a field filled with mass graves that they themselves had dug
years before; they spoke of sexual violence but refused to recognize that
that was what their actions amount to; they glorified their victimcy in
memorial events and activities to which we, with our research, contributed.
From a research ethics perspective, I could not in any way jeopardize our
interviewees. This was a compromise that I made toward the feminist goal of
gender justice: to accept that my aim was knowledge and understanding, and
not justice and accountability. I am at peace with that compromise, as I think
it is of paramount importance to understand how young men can become
wartime rapists. What I find more difficult to accept is that I am potentially
legitimizing their victimcy, including the sexual violence that they may
have perpetrated as recruits, and very possibly the gender-based violence
that they continued to perpetrate after they finished their service. Several
leaders of veteran organizations assured us that 90 percent of their member-
ship beat their wives (Boesten and Gavilán 2023a, 2023b), and I know from my
research with victims of intimate partner violence that the majority of women
who experience physical violence also experience sexual violence (Boesten
2012). We also know that sexual violence against minors and in homes is
widespread, in particular in towns where many veterans live (Østby, Leiby,
and Nordås 2019). Research is generally not able to resolve the problems
that it studies, so this is not a compromise as such. My unease is with
giving voice to those who were potentially victimizers, and not those who
were victimized. I find doing so very unfeminist, and the unease difficult to
accept.
At the same time, our interviewees did not know beforehand how we
would interpret their stories of sex and violence and may have been surprised
to see in our writing that what they thought was sex was actually violence.
Perhaps this was my hope: that they would read the analysis and become
aware, and that atonement would follow. Rationally, I know that this is
unlikely to happen; they are equally likely to reproach us for writing about
their ambiguous masculinities, or how we confuse sex and violence, pain
and pleasure. For now, these feelings of unease and awareness of the
16 J. BOESTEN AND L. GAVILÁN

limitations of our project form part of the debris of research that we are
leaving behind.

Conclusion
This article has aimed to recover the debris of some ethical dilemmas that
emerged from a particular collaborative research project carried out by two
researchers with very different epistemological positionalities. As this exercise
of sharing our own concerns and that of our publishers indicates, our posi-
tionalities create not only a productive and complementary access to knowl-
edge, but also quite different interpretations of the world. While Gavilán’s
epistemology emerges from an autoethnographic identification with the
experiences of violence as recounted by our interviewees, Boesten’s feminist
perspective creates unease with these same narratives.
Perhaps the most significant initial unease relates to sympathy for the life
stories of the interviewees. The conversations with veterans were very inter-
esting, and their willingness to share their stories with us, to show us a
glimpse of their lives – we often conducted the interviews in their homes,
cafés, and neighborhoods, and even met the wife and children of one of
our interviewees – was heartening. The sympathy that the men generated
among both of us not only concerned their current lives and struggles in a
context of structural precarity, but precisely the context that shaped their
actions while they served in the army. Gavilán feels empathy with these
men and what they lived through; he understands their silence around poss-
ible feelings of shame and guilt and says that he does not feel guilty about
anything that he did because of what he lived through, suggesting that
the structural nature of violence in his rural Indigenous world of the 1980s
and 1990s made it impossible to act differently. He does not say that he
did not choose, or that he had no agency; he clearly states that he did
make choices, but that of the choices available violence seems to have
been the only possible outcome. Our interviewees presented us with
similar narratives; they did make choices, but every decision made would
eventually lead to more violence. For Boesten, this cannot but lead to under-
standing, and indeed sympathy.
However, then there is sexual violence. Whereas Gavilán again paints a
picture of a limiting context that allowed very little space for alternative
worldviews and corresponding behavior that would respect the bodily auton-
omy of others, Boesten questions the bodily autonomy of these veterans
themselves. How to understand the use and abuse of women and girls in
communities, of women captured and laboring in the barracks in the
casual manner that the veterans spoke about this? The project has taught
us how the normalization of sexual violence came about; it has created a
space for understanding, as we analyze in “Military Intimacies” (Boesten
 INTERNATIONAL FEMINIST JOURNAL OF POLITICS 17

and Gavilán 2023a). For Gavilán, the veterans’ stories about sexual violence
also generate empathy; for Boesten, they do not. This is where our respective
positions cannot meet, and this opposition is inherently bound to our epis-
temological positions. As a feminist researcher, Boesten understands the
workings of abuse too well to be able to sympathize with those who
abuse; for Gavilán, autoethnographic understanding of how sexual subjectiv-
ities came about among young recruits in the army makes empathy the only
option.
Lastly, as we have both stated and questioned in different ways, our
research contributes to the consolidation of a narrative about recruits
that is shaped by the collective work done by veterans and their associ-
ations: telling stories that recall sex and violence, and resentments as
well as joy, in ways that do not reproduce trauma, shame, or guilt for
them, but rather generate acceptable narratives of victimhood, strength,
and survival that may overcome more intrusive and harmful memories.
For Gavilán, this is a positive aspect of the research and his role therein,
and contributes to the collective remaking of a possible lifeworld, a
future for veterans in a divided community. For Boesten, despite the clear
need for understanding and remaking worlds, there is unease over the plat-
forming of the voices of men who have not atoned for the violence that
they inflicted. The research project was never intended to find remorse or
responsibility, as Baines (forthcoming, 1) observes is often the case when
Western peace and justice scholars research ex-combatants; nevertheless,
it seems that Boesten could not escape a moral expectation of some
form of redemption.
This is the ethical debris of the research that emerged because of our
different positionalities, our different ways of knowing (autoethnography of
violence versus Global North feminist scholarship). This article is not an
attempt to overcome differences or conclude with an harmonious story,
but an effort to expose the necessarily ambiguous interpretations and
ethical considerations that we have both made as a result of our collaboration
and the need to further our collective understanding of military atrocity and
sexual violence.
We hope that the article is also testimony to the possibility and importance
of reflection with ex-combatants, beyond atrocity and judicial accountability.
Despite the concerns that we had about the potentially acrimonious
responses of human rights advocates, the military, and the veterans them-
selves, our research and writings have so far been received well by all
parties, and have neither led to a search for hidden evidence of human
rights abuses, nor impeded our interviewees from proudly claiming their
role in the study. After all, they were central to the violence that engulfed
the Peruvian highlands in the 1980s and 1990s, and their stories must be
part of the memory landscape.
18 J. BOESTEN AND L. GAVILÁN

Notes
1. However, see the work of Aaron Belkin (2012) and Dara Kay Cohen (2016) for a
comparative perspective.
2. Memorias de un soldado desconocido was first published in Mexico (Gavilán
2012) and subsequently edited and translated into English and Japanese. It
forms the basis of the documentary La búsqueda, and of the feature film in pro-
gress Tatuajes en la memoria.
3. In his second memoir, Carta al teniente Shogún, Gavilán (2019) tells how he and
his fellow Shining Path child soldiers were ambushed by a military unit. All of his
comrades died; only he survived. Rosaura, who must have been about 14 years
old, died too.

Acknowledgments
This research obtained research ethics approval from King’s College London (RESCM-
18/19-3730) and was funded by the British Academy (IC3100040). We are profoundly
grateful to the careful engagement with this article by two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
This work was supported by British Academy: [Grant Number IC3100040].

Notes on contributors
Jelke Boesten is Professor of Gender and Development at King’s College London, UK.
She has written extensively on sexual violence in war and in peace, social policy and
politics, and gender-based violence in Latin America, in particular in Peru.
Lurgio Gavilán is an anthropologist teaching at the National University San
Cristóbal of Huamanga, Peru. He has written articles on post-conflict cultures
and customs in the Peruvian highlands. Notably, he has also written two
memoirs about his own experiences as a child soldier for Shining Path, as a
soldier in the Peruvian army, and as a Franciscan monk who dedicated himself
to reflection on those experiences.

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