Social Repair, Belonging and Patriarchy after Conflict-Related Sexual Violence

• In Event: Gender, Relational Harm, and Justice: Legacies of Political Violence

Abstract

In the strain of remaking the social world after a violent conflict, women who conceive children as the result of sexual violence must often raise them amongst resentful victim communities. Abducted and forced into marriage by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda, Acholi women are perceived to have returned with the children of the enemy and are subsequently told they do not belong. In this article, we consider the post-conflict experiences of women and girls forced into motherhood by the LRA. While many mothers are ambivalent towards their children’s fathers, a consideration of their children’s paternal identities becomes a part of their post-conflict experiences, informed by patriarchal expectations that children belong to the paternal clan. As mothers navigate post-conflict social dynamics, some choose to rebuild relations with their children’s fathers in accordance with patrilineal norms. Drawing on ten years of research, we consider the ways women traverse patriarchal institutions to repair webs of kin relations and to secure a future no longer dictated by the circumstances of their children’s birth.

Authors

• Erin Baines, Liu Insitute for Global Issues

• Camile Oliveira