Conversations in the Literature (2005-2017): Girls and Women Forcibly Involved in Armed Groups in Northern Uganda

• In Event: Roundtable Session (Monday II)
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Gender issues and equity

Proposal

Over 12,000 girls and young women have endured abduction by the Lord’s Resistance Army and government forces during the civil war (1986-2007) in Northern Uganda (Akello, 2013). These girls experienced and perpetuated violence; served as domestics; and were subjected to forced marriage and motherhood (Annan, et al., 2008). The majority of females in Northern Uganda have not had the opportunity to go beyond a grade six education; consequently they have few opportunities to create a livelihood for themselves (Annan, et. al., 2008) and continue to live in poverty eleven years post-war. The girls are often rejected by the community because having children out of wedlock which violates gender norms.
Post-war, reintegration programs emerged to provide vocational training, counselling and work with communities to foster acceptance of youth returning from the war. For forcibly involved girls and women in Northern Uganda, education for sustainability means that reintegration programs will provide them with vocational training leading to financial stability and the ability to feed, school, and house their children. It means that these programs will serve to alleviate their trauma with effective counselling, and the life skills training necessary to enhance competent functioning (self-esteem, ability to maintain social relationships, deal with stress and conflict etc.). Finally, programs will address the social exclusion these women experience by working with women’s groups to address patriarchal values. This is not the case. Most reintegration programs offer short-term education, focus on quick fixes and on graduating youth who are “productive” and serve the neoliberal agenda. Unfortunately, while reintegration programs have a unique opportunity to advance the equity and status of women, they continue to create programs that reinforce patriarchal values, steer them into low-paying gendered jobs and underline their “vulnerability” rather than strengths.
In order to understand why reintegration programs take a deficit-based approach to programming, we embarked on a review of the academic, practitioner and popular press articles written about forcibly involved girls and women from 2005 to 2017. We found 96 articles. After reviewing a sample of articles, certain themes began to emerge such as victimization, sexual slavery, agency and resilience. We analyzed the content of these articles, and categorized them according to topic and theme. We found that although a higher percentage of articles recognized females’ agency as opposed to characterizing them as victims (32% vs. 26%), we believe that a quarter of articles referring to forcibly involved females exclusively as victims is problematic. We then began to understand how the overarching conversations in the literature and the language used, contribute to the current approach of reintegration programming.
There are researchers who recognize this misrepresentation in the literature (McKay, & Mazurana, 2004; Stout, 2013) however, the breadth of this review and the content analysis points to how each genre specifically contributes to this unbalanced representation of forcibly involved young women and how this trickles down to reintegration programming. This presentation will provide recommendations to address these misconceptions and outline a model for the education component of reintegration programming.

Authors

• Michelle Savard, Concordia University

• Sonia Michaelsen, University of Montreal