Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Full download Challenging Conceptions: Children Born of Wartime Rape and Sexual Exploitation 1st Edition Kimberly Theidon (Editor) file pdf all chapter on 2024
Full download Challenging Conceptions: Children Born of Wartime Rape and Sexual Exploitation 1st Edition Kimberly Theidon (Editor) file pdf all chapter on 2024
https://ebookmass.com/product/sexual-violence-in-
australia-1970s-1980s-rape-and-child-sexual-abuse-1st-edition-
lisa-featherstone/
https://ebookmass.com/product/from-exploitation-to-empowerment-a-
socio-legal-model-of-rehabilitation-and-reintegration-of-
intellectually-disabled-children-1st-ed-edition-asha-bajpai/
https://ebookmass.com/product/foucault-and-postmodern-
conceptions-of-reason-1st-edition-laurence-barry/
https://ebookmass.com/product/essentials-of-landscape-
ecology-1st-edition-kimberly-a-with/
Conceptions of Giftedness and Talent Robert J.
Sternberg
https://ebookmass.com/product/conceptions-of-giftedness-and-
talent-robert-j-sternberg/
https://ebookmass.com/product/the-greatest-escape-a-gripping-
story-of-wartime-courage-and-adventure-1st-edition-neil-churches/
https://ebookmass.com/product/hearing-the-crimean-war-wartime-
sound-and-the-unmaking-of-sense-1st-edition-gavin-williams/
https://ebookmass.com/product/sexual-crime-and-trauma-1st-ed-
edition-helen-swaby/
https://ebookmass.com/product/sexual-crime-and-prevention-1st-ed-
edition-rebecca-lievesley/
Challenging Conceptions
Challenging Conceptions
Children Born of Wartime Rape and Sexual Exploitation
Edited by
KIMBERLY THEIDON, DYAN MAZURANA, AND DIPALI ANUMOL
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in
research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press
in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2023
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or
by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by
license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction
outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Theidon, Kimberly, editor.
Title: Challenging conceptions : children born of wartime rape and sexual exploitation /
edited by Kimberly Theidon, Dyan Mazurana, and Dipali Anumol.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2023] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022024339 (print) | LCCN 2022024340 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197648315 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197648339 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Sex crimes. | Children of rape victims. |
Rape as a weapon of war. | Women and war.
Classification: LCC HV6558 .C48 2023 (print) | LCC HV6558 (ebook) |
DDC 362.883—dc23/eng/20220815
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022024339
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022024340
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197648315.001.0001
Contents
Author Biographies
1. Challenging Conceptions
Kimberly Theidon
References
Index
Author Biographies
Dipali Anumol, M.A.L.D., is a doctoral candidate at The Fletcher School of Law and
Diplomacy, where she earned her Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy in 2019. Her
research interests include gender theory, sexual and gender-based violence, child rights, and
human security. Her dissertation focuses on the relationship between feminist activism,
practices of care, and responses to sexual violence in India. Prior to Fletcher, Dipali worked
in development consulting. Dipali also holds a Master of Science in International Relations
(Research) from the London School of Economics and Political Science and Integrated
Master of Arts in Development Studies from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.
Fionnuala D. Ní Aoláin, Ph.D., LL.M, is University Regents Professor; holder of the
Robina Chair in Law, Public Policy, and Society; and faculty director of the Human Rights
Center at the Law School. She is concurrently a professor of law at the Queen’s University of
Belfast, School of Law. In 2017, she was appointed as Special Rapporteur on the Promotion
and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism.
Her teaching and research interests are in the fields of international law, human rights law,
national security law, transitional justice, and feminist legal theory. She has published widely
in the fields of emergency powers, conflict regulation, transitional justice, and sex-based
violence in times of war and continues to write extensively on theoretical aspects of
transition. She is the recipient of numerous academic awards and honors, including a
Fulbright scholarship, the Alon Prize, the Robert Schumann scholarship, a European
Commission award, and the Lawlor fellowship. She had held multiple research awards
including from the British Academy, the US Institute of Peace, DfID (Department for
International Development, UK), Research Council UK, and the Economic and Social
Research Council. Professor Ní Aoláin was a representative of the prosecutor at the
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at domestic war crimes trials in
Bosnia (1996–1997). She is Board Chair of the Open Society Foundations Women Program
and serves on the Board of the Center for Victims of Torture National Advisory Council.
Professor Ní Aoláin received her LL.B. and Ph.D. in law at the Queen’s University Law
Faculty in Belfast and also holds an LL.M. degree from Columbia Law School.
Eunice Otuko Apio, Ph.D., received her Ph.D. in African studies and anthropology from the
Department of History and Cultures, the University of Birmingham (UK) in 2016. In 2017,
she joined the Law School, University of Birmingham as Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and
Transitional justice, and works on the subject of resilience in survivors of war-related sexual
violence. Her doctoral thesis examined “Children Born of War in Northern Uganda: Kinship,
Marriage, and the Politics of Post-conflict Reintegration in Lango society.” She is founder of
the charity Facilitation for Peace and Development (FAPAD) based in northern Uganda. She
has worked in conflict and post conflict settings in northern Uganda since 2001. She is the
author of Zura Maids, a novel that explores the realities of human trafficking in today’s
African society.
Teddy Atim, Ph.D., is Visiting Research Fellow at the Feinstein International Center, Tufts
University. Atim’s research examines how experiencing armed conflict: forced conscription;
sexual violence, forced impregnation and child bearing; killings and enforced disappearance;
loss of livelihoods; among others, impacts the lives of affected population, both during and in
the aftermath. Her research focuses on: young people affected by armed conflict and their
recovery in the post-conflict period, women survivors of wartime sexual violence and their
children born of wartime rape, youth in challenging situations such as young women engaged
in transactional sex, psychosocial impacts of armed conflict, recovery, transitional justice,
war injuries, among others. She also has extensive experience as a practitioner, working with
young people, their families, and communities affected by armed conflict, where she
supported the psychosocial rehabilitation and reintegration of youth affected by armed
conflict in northern Uganda. In this role, she worked with various national and international
organizations in Uganda, including; the Concerned Parents Association, Save the Children,
CARE International, American Jewish World Service, and the Democratic Governance
Facility. Teddy holds a B.A. in Social Sciences from Makerere University in Kampala,
Uganda and holds an M.A. in Humanitarian Assistance from The Fletcher School of Law and
Diplomacy and the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. She
has her Ph.D. from Wageningen University, the Netherlands.
Annie Bunting, S.J.D., is Associate Professor in the Law & Society program at York
University in Toronto, teaching in the areas of social justice and human rights. Professor
Bunting is a graduate of York, having studied law at Osgoode Hall Law School (1988). She
received her LL.M. from the London School of Economics and Political Science (1991) and
her S.J.D. from the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto (1999). Her research expertise
includes socio-legal studies of marriage and childhoods; feminist international law; and
culture, religion, and law. She has published articles in Social and Legal Studies, Journal of
Law and Society, Canadian Journal of Human Rights, and chapters in various book
collections. Her recent edited collections include: Marriage by Force? Contestation over
Consent and Coercion in Africa (with Lawrance and Roberts) Ohio Univ. Press (2016) and
Contemporary Slavery: Popular Rhetoric and Political Practice (with Joel Quirk), UBC Press,
Law & Society Series (2017).
Bridget Conley, Ph.D., is Research Director of the World Peace Foundation and Associate
Research Professor at The Fletcher School. At WPF, she is the lead researcher on the Mass
Atrocities program, in addition to contributing to the Famine Research program. She is the
author of Memory from the Margins: Ethiopia’s Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum
(Palgrave 2019) and the editor of How Mass Atrocities End: Studies from Guatemala,
Burundi, Indonesia, the Sudans, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Iraq (Cambridge University Press
2016). She has published on issues related to the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia, mass atrocities
and genocide, and how museums can engage on human rights issues. She previously worked
as Research Director for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Committee on Conscience,
where she helped establish the Museum’s program on contemporary threats of genocide,
including engagement on research program, policy issues, and public education, and curating
an exhibition, From Memory to Action: Meeting the Challenge of Genocide Today.
Myriam Denov, Ph.D., is Full Professor at McGill University and holds the Canada
Research Chair in Children, Families and Armed Conflict (Tier 1). Her research interests lie
in the areas of children and families affected by war, migration, and its intergenerational
impact. A specialist in participatory and arts-based research, she has worked with war-
affected children and families in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Her current research is
exploring children born of conflict-related sexual violence in northern Uganda, Rwanda, and
Cambodia. Dr. Denov has presented expert evidence in court on child soldiers and has
advised government and nongovernmental organizations on children in armed conflict and
girls in armed groups. She has authored, co-authored, and co-edited nine books addressing
the impact of war on children, including Child Soldiers: Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United
Front (Cambridge University Press). She is the founding Director of Global Child McGill—a
research group dedicated to children and families affected by war and migration. Dr. Denov
is the recipient of the 2020 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
(SSHRC) Insight Award and the Killam Research Fellowship. She is a Trudeau Foundation
Fellow and Member of the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars, Artists and
Scientists. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, where she was a
Commonwealth Scholar.
Phoebe Donnelly, Ph.D., is Stanley Kaplan Postdoctoral Fellow at Williams College where
she teaches on gender and conflict and security in Africa. She received her Ph.D. in
International Relations from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University
in 2019. Phoebe won the Peter Ackerman Award for the outstanding doctoral dissertation at
The Fletcher. In 2017, Women in International Security (WIIS) selected Phoebe as one of
their “Next Generation Gender Scholars.” Phoebe is also a visiting fellow at Feinstein
International Center, a research and teaching center focused on humanitarian crises.
Previously, Phoebe was Associate Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and
Human Rights at UMass-Boston. She also has policy experience through her work as a
Legislative Correspondent for Senator Richard Blumenthal and as an intern for the State
Department at the U.S. Mission to the UN. Phoebe earned an M.A. in Law in Diplomacy
from The Fletcher School in 2013 and a B.A. from University of Wisconsin-Madison in
2008.
Virginie Ladisch, M.A., is a senior expert in truth seeking and civic engagement and heads
the children and youth program at the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ). In
that capacity, she has provided support and technical expertise to a wide range of transitional
justice approaches across the globe, including in Canada, Colombia, Cote d’Ivoire, Cyprus,
Kenya, Tunisia, and Uganda. Across all her work, Ladisch focuses on how engaging citizens
—particularly youth—in transitional justice processes can serve to catalyze broader public
debate and ongoing civic activism. Prior to joining ICTJ, Ladisch was awarded Thomas J.
Watson Fellowship for independent research, during which she carried out extensive
fieldwork on truth commissions and reconciliation in South Africa and Guatemala. The
results of her research on the challenges of reconciliation have been published in the Journal
of Public and International Affairs and the Cyprus Review. More recently, her reflections on
engaging children and youth in transitional justice have been published in the Journal of the
History of Childhood and Youth. Virginie Ladisch holds an M.A. in International Affairs
from the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University and a
B.A. in Political Science from Haverford College.
Atim Angela Lakor is the founder of Watye Ki Gen (We Have Hope), a Ugandan
organization whose members are formerly abducted women held in the bush, working for the
rights and the welfare of children born in Captivity. Atim Angela was abducted from St
Mary’s College, Aboke with fellow pupils by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) when she
was 14 years old. She holds a diploma in Guidance and counseling and a Bachelor’s degree
in Development studies from Gulu University, Uganda. She is a co-author of The Lord’s
Resistance Army’s Forced Wife System. She delivered speeches in 2014 at the Global Sexual
Violence Summit on Preventing Sexual Violence in Armed and in 2017 at the
Commonwealth Office at the event celebrating the Fifth Anniversary of The Preventing
Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative, TED Talk speaker on prevention of the use of children
as a weapon of war and was awarded the 2017 Marsh Award for innovation in peacemaking
and peacekeeping by MARSH Christian Trust, Wilton Park in London.
Sabine Lee, Ph.D., is Professor of Modern History at the University of Birmingham. Her
research has spanned a range of themes in contemporary history and, more recently,
interdisciplinary research on conflict and security with particular emphasis on conflict-related
sexual violence. She has led several international and interdisciplinary research projects in
these fields, including two AHRC-funded research networks and a European-Union-funded
H2020 international interdisciplinary doctoral training network on children born of war. She
is currently engaged in several projects exploring the experiences of peacekeeper-fathered
children and their mothers in different geopolitical contexts, including Haiti and the
Democratic Republic of Congo.
Elena Lesley, M.S., is Cultural Anthropologist whose work focuses on global mental health,
post-conflict recovery, gender-based violence, and genocide studies. Her doctoral dissertation
research (Emory University) tracked mental health interventions among survivors of the
Khmer Rouge regime, which was responsible for the deaths of roughly 1.7 million
Cambodians from 1975 to 1979. Since 2004, she has lived and worked in Cambodia for a
combined four and a half years, first as a Henry Luce Scholar and Fulbright Fellow, and later
for master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation research (supported by the Wenner Gren
Foundation, the Blakemore Foundation, and the Center for Khmer Studies). Her work has
appeared in the U.K. literary magazine Granta, The Huffington Post, the Journal of Genocide
Studies and Prevention, several edited volumes and numerous other journalistic publications.
A piece about her larger doctoral project is forthcoming in Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology.
Lesley holds a B.A. from Brown University, an M.S. from Rutgers University, and previously
worked as Senior Research Specialist for a center run through Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson
School of Public and International Affairs.
Dyan Mazurana, Ph.D., is Associate Research Professor at both The Fletcher School of
Law and Diplomacy and the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Tufts
University. She is Research Fellow at the World Peace Foundation. She focuses on gendered
dimensions of humanitarian response to conflict and crises, documenting serious crimes
committed during conflict, and accountability, remedy, and reparation. She serves as an
advisor to several governments, UN agencies, human rights NGOs, and child protection
organizations regarding humanitarian assistance and improving efforts to assist youth and
women affected by armed conflict. This work includes the protection of women and children
during armed conflict, including those people associated with fighting forces, as well as
remedy and reparation in the aftermath of violence. She has worked in Afghanistan, the
Balkans, Nepal, and southern, west and east Africa. She has published more than 100
scholarly and policy books, articles, and international reports and her work has been
translated into more than 30 languages. She is currently completing a book manuscript on
children, adversity, violence, and resilience. She edited A View from Below: Conducting
Research in Conflict Zones, with Karen Jacobsen, and Lacey Gale (Cambridge University
Press 2013). Her other books include Life and Security in Rural Afghanistan (Rowman &
Littlefield 2008) with Nematollah Nojumi and Elizabeth Stites and Gender, Conflict, and
Peacekeeping (Rowman & Littlefield 2005) with Angela Raven-Roberts and Jane Parpart
and Where Are the Girls? Girls in Fighting Forces in Northern Uganda, Sierra Leone, and
Mozambique: Their Lives During and After War (International Centre for Human Rights and
Democratic Development, Montréal, Canada: 2004), with Susan McKay.
Samuel Munderere is Chief Executive of Survivors Fund. Munderere is passionate about
international development work and improving the lives of vulnerable people. He has a
profound understanding of the issues faced by women and children in Rwanda and extensive
experience of programmes that seek to empower them and transform their lives. Sam has
worked with Survivors Fund Rwanda for the last 13 years. He has particular experience in
managing educational and counselling projects and has led a programme supporting 850
youth born of genocide rape. He has also coordinated SURF’s provision of counselling
programmes for their mothers. In his career he has developed an array of livelihoods projects
including ground-breaking initiatives to introduce solar lights, solar cookers, clean stove
cookers, water purifiers, and donkeys to Rwanda. Samuel holds a Masters in International
Development Management from the University of Westminster (London, UK) and a
Bachelors degree in Social Worker and Social Administration from Bugema University.
Jacqueline Mutere is the founder and director of Grace Agenda based in Nairobi, Kenya.
She founded the organization in December 2010 to support survivors of rape of Kenya’s
2007 and 2008 post-election violence. Initially responding to the needs of children born from
the rapes, Mutere realized the mothers of these children had additional needs. Through Grace
Agenda she has mobilized other survivors to advocate for reparations, participate in police
vetting processes, and restore survivors’ dignity. Jacqueline has received several awards and
recognition for her work, courage, commitment, and resilience in advocating for sexual and
gender-based violence. Most recently, in 2019, Physicians for Human rights honored the
Survivors of Sexual Violence in Kenya Network with the Physicians for Human Rights
Award, which she accepted as the Network Co-head. In 2016, Mutere was a nominee for the
Women National Human Rights Defender award in Kenya and in 2014 the Kenya Women
and Children's Wellness Center/African Women’s Enterprise program gave her an award for
courage and determination in advocacy in extremely difficult circumstances. Currently, in
addition to her ongoing advocacy for reparations, healing, and self-agency, she is focused on
strengthening the establishment of a regional network of survivors of conflict-related sexual
violence who have children from the violations.
Grace Achan Ogwal currently works with Refugee Law Project at Makerere University,
Kampala Uganda. Previously she worked as a researcher with the Women's Advocacy
Network and Justice and Reconciliation Project in northern Uganda. She specializes in
gender and transitional justice with a specific focus on work with women survivors
Government of Uganad and Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) 20 year war. She also worked
with the research team of the University of British Colombia in the Conjugal Slavery in War
project. Grace has a Bachelors degree in Development Studies from Gulu University and a
post Graduate Diploma in project planning and management from Uganda Management
Institute.
Tatiana Sanchez Parra, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the Institute of Social and
Cultural Studies Pensar at Javeriana University in Bogota, Colombia. She holds a Ph.D. in
Sociology from the University of Essex, where she also obtained a Masters in Human Rights.
Prior to her postgraduate education in the UK, she completed a Masters in Social
Anthropology at the University of Los Andes, Colombia, where she also earned an
undergraduate degree in Anthropology. Tatiana’s latest work develops at the intersection of
feminist socio-legal studies, medical anthropology, and critical studies on political
transitions, where her research addresses narratives about people born as a result war-time
sexual violence during the Colombian armed conflict.
Donna Seto, Ph.D., is Manager in Research Development at the University of British
Columbia. Seto’s research explores the complexity of intersectional violence during armed
conflict and the impact of wartime rape on subsequent generations. Her book No Place for a
War Baby: The Global Politics of Children Born of Wartime Sexual Violence (Routledge
2013) engages in the subfields of global politics while examining a range of international
conflicts, children’s rights literature, and gender theory. She has published in the areas of
humanitarian organizations, visual images of war-affected children, and refugee policy.
Donna holds a doctorate in Politics and International Relations from the Australian National
University. She is a research development manager and adjunct lecturer at the University of
British Columbia. She is currently working on her first novel on war-affected children.
Tatjana Takseva, Ph.D., is Professor, Faculty of Arts, at Saint Mary’s University. Takseva’s
current research is situated at the intersections of motherhood, feminism, nation-building, and
the politics of identity and is interdisciplinary in nature. It utilizes concepts and
methodologies drawn from discourse analysis and literary studies, philosophy, sociology,
psychology and psychoanalysis, political science, cultural studies, anthropology, and the
history of ideas. She has published on a wide range of topics within motherhood studies, such
as mothering in conflict zones; motherhood and consumerism; motherhood and teaching;
contemporary mothering practices; and the ethic of care, maternal ambivalence, and
empowered mothering. Her publications also include topics in the area of English
Renaissance literature, intercultural communication, globalization, and digital media.
Kimberly Theidon, Ph.D., is Henry J. Leir Professor of International Humanitarian Studies
at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. Theidon is medical
anthropologist focusing on Latin America. Her research interests include political violence,
transitional justice, humanitarian and post-conflict interventions, gender studies, and drug
policy. She is the author of many articles, commissioned reports, and two books. Entre
Prójimos: El conflicto armado interno y la política de la reconciliación en el Perú (Instituto
de Estudios Peruanos, 1st edition 2004; 2nd edition 2009) was awarded the Latin American
Studies Association 2006 Premio Iberoamericano Book Award Honorable Mention for
outstanding book in the social sciences published in Spanish or Portuguese. Her second book,
Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru (University of Pennsylvania Press
2012), was awarded the 2013 Honorable Mention from the Washington Office on Latin
America-Duke University Libraries Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America, and
the 2013 Honorable Mention for the Eileen Basker Prize from the Society for Medical
Anthropology for research on gender and health. She is currently completing two book
manuscripts. Pasts Imperfect: Working with Former Combatants in Colombia is based on
research with former combatants from the paramilitaries, the FARC, and the ELN. Sex at the
Security Council: A Greater Measure of Justice draws upon her research in Peru on sexual
violence, children born of wartime rape, and the politics of reparations.
Hoy Vathana is a mental health professional in Cambodia with over three years of
experience in project management and more than five years of experience as a trauma
clinician. At Transcultural Psychosocial Organization of Cambodia (TPO Cambodia), she has
been a mental health clinician since 2011 and served as manager for the “Promoting Gender
Equality and Improving Access to Justice for Female Survivors and Victims of Gender Based
Violence under Khmer Rouge Regime” project from 2016 to 2018. Vathana holds a B.A. in
Psychology from the Royal University of Phnom Penh and a B.A. in English TESOL from
Paññasatra University of Cambodia.
Anaïs Cadieux Van Vliet holds a Master of Social Work from McGill University, where she
works as a research assistant. Her academic work centers on the experiences of children born
of wartime rape and the complex realities of victim perpetrators. Her previous grassroots
organizing work, tackling sexual and gender-based violence, informs her current research
interests. She is, amongst others, the co-author of “Child Soldiers” in The Oxford Handbook
of Atrocity Crimes (Oxford Press forthcoming).
1
Challenging Conceptions
Kimberly Theidon
There is a tremendous knowledge gap surrounding the issue of children born of conflict-related sexual violence, and
even less public policy to address the needs of these children.1
It was twenty-two years ago that the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution
1325, the first in a series of Resolutions focused on the important role women play in conflict
prevention, resolution, and peacebuilding efforts. Collectively known as the Women, Peace
and Security agenda, these resolutions (Security Council Resolutions 1325, 1820, 1888,
1889, 1960, 2106, 2122, 2242, and 2467) have also demanded the complete cessation of all
acts of sexual violence by all parties to armed conflicts, with each successive resolution
lamenting the slow progress made to date on this issue. While insisting on the need to protect
women and girls from rape and sexual violence in armed conflict and postconflict situations,
it would be thirteen years before Resolution 2122 noted “the need for access to the full range
of sexual and reproductive health services, including regarding pregnancies resulting from
rape, without discrimination” (2013). There was nothing said about the outcome of those
pregnancies, nor about their meaning for the mothers and their children. A few more years
would pass.
In 2019, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda’s
foundational Resolution 1325, the UN Security Council proposed Resolution 2467. The
resolution recognizes that “women and girls who become pregnant as a result of sexual
violence in armed conflict, including those who choose to become mothers, may have
different and specific needs,” and advocates a “survivor-centered approach” that recognizes
the needs of survivors of sexual violence to receive nondiscriminatory access to a full range
of services. The original language included references to sexual and reproductive health,
triggering vocal opposition from the United States and the “right to life” block—a group I
prefer to call “forced birth extremists.” When the United States threatened to veto the
resolution, it was watered down and the “offending” words omitted.
Some have criticized the “hypervisibilization” of conflict-related sexual violence,
concerned that this focus might unintentionally reinforce patriarchal notions that the most
important thing to know about a girl or a woman is her sexual “purity.” Another concern,
which I also share, is that this focus may obscure a broader gender equity agenda that extends
far beyond ending sexual violence, however important (and elusive) that goal may be. Here I
wish to trouble other waters: How can there be so much attention to sexual violence while so
little is said about the potential, and obvious, outcomes of that violence? How can it be that
in over two decades of grappling with conflict-related sexual violence and its legacies, there
is but passing mention of various potential and obvious outcomes: pregnancy, abortion,
forced maternity—and children conceived through acts of sexual coercion or outright
violence?
To date the most sustained engagement with children born of wartime rape comes from
the political scientist and international relations scholar R. Charli Carpenter. Her 2007 edited
volume contains several empirically rich chapters that draw attention to the lack of research
and legal response to children born as a result of mass rape campaigns or sexual abuse in
conflict zones; these chapters in turn call for enhanced human rights protection for these
children. The edited volume is a touchstone for those of us working on these issues. Her
subsequent monograph, however, draws disturbing conclusions.
In Forgetting Children Born of War: Setting the Human Rights Agenda in Bosnia and
Beyond, Carpenter analyzes the war in the Balkans, a watershed conflict in terms of placing
conflict-related rape on the international agenda (2010). Focusing on Bosnia-Herzegovina,
Carpenter critiques the ways in which ethno-nationalists and the international media reified
ethnicity and how human rights organizations and certain feminist scholars bought into the
“ethnic hatred script” to achieve political ends, one of which was to establish that rape can
constitute genocide. In order for rape to constitute an act of genocide, previously fluid ethnic
categories were presented as timeless and immutable, and patrilineal descent was given
primacy in determining the child’s genetic makeup and thus ethnicity. As Carpenter argues,
human rights organizations and misguided feminists thus unwittingly reinforced the
patriarchal regime that made such reasoning possible in the first place. In constructing ethnic
identity as immutable and genetically encoded, children born of rape were either invisible as
victims in their own right, or at best taken as proof of the harm done to their mothers and, by
extension, to their ethnic group (2010).
Reified ethnicity is a useful foil in Carpenter’s analysis, and deconstructing it is easy. It is
here, to my mind, that her analysis veers onto problematic terrain. In situating her approach,
she writes, “The feminism here is thus less focused on women’s experiences per se than on
the broader project of overcoming gender hierarchies as they pertain to human security for all
people, particularly for children conceived as a result of gender-based violence. Rather than
emphasize survivor’s experiences per se, my goal is to explore the marginality of their
children born of wartime rape and consider what this marginality means for children’s human
rights and for international relations” (2010, 9). I am concerned by what her feminism means
for women.
Carpenter acknowledges she frequently heard that rape survivors who gave birth refused
to accept these children as their own, and subsequently rejected them. Indeed, at one point
she praises the “courageous women” who kept their children despite familial and communal
disapproval. Where does that leave the rest of the women? Did their rejection of these
children born of rape and their reluctance to raise them as their own indicate that women
bought into the dominant ethnonationalist discourse, reducing rejection or repugnance to
little more than being ideologically duped, stuck in a gestationally induced false
consciousness? Somehow, if one can demonstrate that ethnic difference was erroneously
portrayed as a rigid and timeless category, then the rest falls away. The other constructions
—“children of the enemy,” “occupied wombs,” maternal ambivalence or rejection—are
merely artifacts of the ethnic hatred script. It is not so simple. Her top-down analysis rightly
identified the missed opportunity to challenge the paternal trump card; however, looking only
at the macro and discursive levels obscures long-standing local biologies and culturally
informed theories of transmission from parent to child. Making ethnicity a strawman in her
argument allows her to deconstruct ethnicity and then argue that everything else is an artifact
of this misguided convergence of media, ethnonationalism, and feminist advocacy that
reflected patriarchal gender norms rather than challenged them. I share the desire to
challenge gendered hierarchies, but while we wait for the world historic defeat of patriarchy,
this line of critique leaves women holding up the entire sky.
I advocate a different kind of feminism. I suspect that one reason children—girls, boys,
and other genders—born of wartime rape were and have, to some extent, remained invisible
on the international agenda is because there is no reasonable way to discuss this issue from a
“survivor-centered” perspective without addressing women’s right to abortion—a woman’s
right to refuse to lend her body to nine months of reproductive labor, and to acknowledge that
some women may experience these pregnancies and babies as a harm done to them.2 The
Women Peace and Security Agenda, for all its good intentions and accomplishments, is a
framework that placates those for whom a more feminist agenda would be unpalatable.
“Mainstreaming gender” can be a double-entendre, as the feminist critique of policy is
mainstreamed into an agenda that does not threaten the status quo of powerful countries or
interest groups—a move that may obscure the fact that women and their children (especially
their fetuses) may be located within competing rights regimes. One cannot finesse away these
competing rights. This calls for an explicitly feminist peacebuilding and postconflict
reconstruction agenda, understood to include a full range of sexual and reproductive rights,
including access to safe and accessible abortions for those women who want them.
In addition to questioning a gendered-yet-not-feminist approach to conflict-related sexual
violence and children born as a result of that violence, there is another leitmotif in the
existing literature that warrants a critique. Although sparse, in the literature that does exist,
the concept of stigma is frequently applied to these children and given wide-ranging
explanatory power. From an anthropological perspective, however, stigma is a thin
explanation for a thick phenomenon, and forecloses a broader repertoire of potential
meanings and motivations for the acceptance or rejection of these children by their mothers,
families, and communities. Stigma seems to be a placeholder in the literature rather than an
analytically nuanced tool, almost commonsensical in its usage.
Challenging Conceptions questions such common sense and is a purposeful play on
words. With my colleague, Dyan Mazurana, in May 2018 we convened an authors’ workshop
at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. At this workshop we brought
together researchers and practitioners from around the globe, each of whom has spent
decades working with women who survived wartime rape, and with the children who were
the result of that violence. Together we aimed to rethink some of the assumptions that echo in
the literature and in popular culture about these children and those around them. We
acknowledged that their conception may stem from a woman’s most painful experience, and
that their birth may provoke deep maternal ambivalence. To conduct research on these issues
is to go far beyond a university’s human subjects review process and the “technical ethics”
required of us as researchers; it is to be plunged into deep moral conundrums. At each step,
the researchers in this book have struggled with how to conduct their research in such a way
as to do no harm to these children and their mothers, underscoring that each methodological
choice is an ethical decision as well. This book is the result of that workshop and lively
discussion.
In Peru, among other names, children are referred to as “los regalos de los soldados,” (the
soldier’s gifts), “hijo de nadie” (nobody’s child), “fulano” (what’s his name), and “chatarra”
(stray cat).
This seems strikingly at odds with the secrecy and silence assumed to surround the issue
of rape and other forms of sexual violence. For instance, in their work with rape survivors in
Rwanda, Elisa Van Ee and Rolf Kleber found that “Out of shame, many women who have
been raped want to hide their trauma and the way their child was conceived.”17 Concealment
is a leitmotif in the literature and is generally understood as a way to avoid stigma for both
the mother and her child.
And yet amidst this complicated array of hidden practices, there are inevitably names that
mark these children and reveal their violent origins. As Gabriele Von Bruck and Barbara
Bodenhorn note, “Because others usually name us, the act of naming has the potential to
implicate infants in relations through which they become inserted into and ultimately, will act
upon, a social matrix. Individual lives thus become entangled—through the name—in the life
histories of others.”18 Naming is verbal, audible, and interpersonal; naming practices are one
way of expressing, perhaps projecting, the private into public space and laying claims upon
others. These “entanglements” are worth contemplating. Who and what is being named?
In this volume, Eunice Otuko Apio, Teddy Atim, Grace Achan Ogwal, Anne Bunting, and
Tatiana Sanchez Parra take up these questions and follow various “life cycles,” so to speak.
What is the intergenerational impact of sexual violence? How is kinship figured and
reconfigured across generations, when some of those generations include children born of
wartime rape? When do the children’s names memorialize a woman’s most brutal memories?
Do these names have a finite life span—can these children escape the taint and be, literally,
resignified? As the authors demonstrate, when these children are given injurious names and
excluded from kinship networks, this can translate into being excluded from land ownership
and inheritance lineages. Here, stigma must be unpacked to grasp the economic interests that
influence how these children and their mothers are or are not rejected by their communities
and their families. I suspect that rejection of male children will be heightened in settings in
which their status as a male gives them some claim upon familial property.
Importantly, as Apio notes, these names can be changed: seminal violence is not destiny.
This is a fascinating contrast with findings in her earlier research, underscoring the
importance of longitudinal studies. In an earlier chapter on children born to young women
who had been abducted and made “wives” by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda,
Apio briefly discussed naming practices. In a sample of 69 children, she found that 49 of
them had injurious names (the others had been named either by the father after one of his
relatives, or by medical staff who delivered the babies following their mother’s
reintegration). Thus it can be assumed the mothers named the other 49 children, and the
names depicted the plight of their mothers. “These names compile all the bad experiences of
a mother into a name and give it a life in the nature of her baby. In this way the baby is turned
into a living reminder of her suffering.”19 Of particular interest is the mother’s reaction to the
efforts of social workers to give these children new names such as “I am fortunate” or
“Things have turned good.” As Apio found in her interviews with World Vision staff, “The
mothers, however, are reluctant to pick up these changes. They prefer the old names.”20 What
has changed? It seems that local kinship systems can accommodate ambiguity, which in turn
may allow the mothers and their children to reclaim their place within familial and communal
networks. Names and fates can be remade. And once the researcher has explored familial and
communal logics, then a scalar analysis calls for investigating state-level policies that take
reproduction as a key site of governance. As one Chinese official stated, “To put it bluntly,
the birth of a baby is not only a matter of the family itself, but also a state affair.”21
Reproductive governance refers to the mechanisms through which different historical configurations of actors—such
as state, religious, and international financial institutions, NGOs, and social movements—use legislative controls,
economic inducements, moral injunctions, direct coercion, and ethical incitements to produce, monitor, and control
reproductive behaviours and population practices.
—Morgan and Roberts (2012, 341)
A key site in which statecraft is practiced is sexuality and reproduction. This is equally true
for countries at peace as well as those at war. Here, I concern myself with conflict and
postconflict settings. There are always policies—implicit or explicit—put in place to address
the issue of children born of wartime sexual violence, the women who may abort or give
birth to them, and the biological fathers. From state militaries to irregular forces, from
combat troops to international peacekeeping missions, the question of what will be done with
the children who (inevitably?) result from these encounters is a topic of discussion and
policymaking.22
In addition to reproductive governance as a rich analytical concept, I have also found
“jurisdiction” to be a useful tool. All women live within multiple reproductive jurisdictions,
in the sense of multiple and perhaps contradictory regimes of law, language, and practice.23
For example, in her research on the legacies of the Partition, Veena Das analyzes the Indian
state’s policies to “recuperate” and “recover” women who had been abducted and sexually
violated during the violence, tracing the national response to women impregnated by “other”
men and giving birth to the “wrong” children (1995). She found that in the sphere of the
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
BETH- Jer. xlviii. See Almon — A town of Moab.
DIBLATHAIM 22 Diblathaim See Almon
Diblathaim.
Signifying house
of the two discs.
‘Possibly the
name Deleiyât
may be a
corruption of
Diblah, as the
situation seems
appropriate,
south of Tell
Mʾaîn.’ (Heth
and Moab.)
BETHEL Gen. xii. 8; Beitin 10 The present
xiii. 3; village Beitin, 9½
xxviii. 19; miles north of
xxxi. 13; Jerusalem.
xxxv. 1– (Mem. II. 305;
16; Josh. Sh. XIV.)
vii. 2; viii.
9, 12, 17;
xii. 9, 16;
xvi. 2;
xviii. 13,
22; Judg.
i. 22; iv. 5;
xxi. 2, 19;
1 Sam. vii.
16; x. 3;
xxx. 27; 1
Kings xii.
29, 32, 33;
xiii. 1, 4,
10, 11, 32;
2 Kings ii.
2, 23; x.
29; xvii.
28; xxiii. 4,
15, 17, 19;
1 Chron.
vii. 28; 2
Chron. xiii.
19; Ezra ii.
28; Neh.
vii. 32; xi.
31; Jer.
xlviii. 13;
Hos. x. 15;
xii. 4; Am.
iii. 14; iv.
4; v. 5, 6;
vii. 10, 13;
1 Macc. ix.
50