Debris: autoethnography, feminist epistemology, ethics, and sexual violence

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

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 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 political 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 university, 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 experience, 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 intertwined, 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 perpetrators? 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. 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 interlocutors, 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 particular. 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; 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 epistemological positions – as co-authors – arising from the methodological choices and the collaborative process in complex research looking at intimacies 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 academic audience predominantly based in the Global North, this cannot be an equally balanced alternation. Considering the subject matter, this is important 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 collaborative 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 paramilitary allies were responsible for 30 percent, and the remaining 23 percent was attributed to other actors, such as the rural self-defense 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 militarization of their lives and the role that they played in the atrocities committed by the military. However, due to the complexity of transitional justice processes in the immediate aftermath, and the potential for the judicialization 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, particularly between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s (TRC 2003).

After the publication of the TRC report, Peru saw a wave of successful prosecutions 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.

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 discovered 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 enlistment, 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 perpetrating 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 existing 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 cultures. The sexual element of such brutalization is less well studied.¹ The research project on which we here reflect, then, was motivated by questions 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 existing 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 conversations with interviewees. All interviews were recorded, transcribed, and discussed 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’ 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 contribution was likewise twofold: on the one hand, the more distanced perspective of a foreign gender studies scholar with in-depth knowledge of the Peruvian context and gender-based violence; on the other hand, the privileged 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 published in Spanish were written in Spanish, while our English-language publications 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 contributions. 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 monastery 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, 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 autoethnographer 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 constructed and was able to remember and tell, while processing the debris of violence in a Franciscan monastery high in the Andes. Interviewing others allowed me to listen and see my own story reflected in theirs. This was an intimate 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 predicaments 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 inviting other families. The neighborhood is built on a pile of rubble on the outskirts 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, households, 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, 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 interviewees 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 memories. 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 progressed. 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 interviewees reminisced about the children that they might have left behind. I had never thought about this, but they had, and wondered what might have happened 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 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 perpetrated 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 humiliation and violence by peers and superiors, and a sexual socialization of collective heterosexual performance through vetted military sex workers. These 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 interviewed Congolese ex-combatants about sexual violence, I adopt a methodology 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 recognition of responsibility” (Baines forthcoming, 1). Scrutinizing my own interest 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 violence has certainly produced important insights into the factors and structures 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 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 narratives. This means that in our work we highlight the physical and sexual violence 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 description 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 international social pressures that the committed atrocities generate. Our interviewees 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.

As researchers who also draw on these experiences to explain some of the atrocities committed, we could be accused of affirming ex-combatant victimcy, 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 perpetrators 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 interviewees and those whom they mentioned to avoid any possible consequences 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 “methodological 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 interpret 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 narrative 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.

I asked Gavilán about the apparent lack of shame and guilt in our interviewees’ 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 membership 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 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 positionalities create not only a productive and complementary access to knowledge, 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 interesting, 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 possible 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 understanding, 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 autonomy 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 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 epistemological 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 subjectivities 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 associations: 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 platforming 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 themselves, 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.

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.

Additional information

Funding

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

Notes on contributors

Jelke Boesten

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

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.

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 progress 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.