![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
Abstract
Drawing on the author's previous and current fieldwork in Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH) and interactions with several non-governmental organizations (NGOs), this article asks whether some organizations that seek to help and support victims/-survivors of conflict-related sexual violence are potentially doing more harm than good. In developing this argument, the article's aim is neither to unjustly criticize NGOs nor to trivialize the challenges that victims/-survivors face. What it seeks to demonstrate, however, is that a heavy focus on the thematic of trauma can be counter-productive. Specifically, it critiques trauma as a disempowering, essentializing and collectivizing discourse. Calling for a meta discursive shift away from trauma and towards resilience, it argues that NGOs should give more attention to the families and communities of victims/-survivors. Families and communities, in this regard, constitute potential resilience resources that should be harnessed and strengthened.
Notes
1 Loseke (Citation2001: 108) has noted that, “The complexity of lived experience has a way of resisting formulaic presentation.” In this article, I use the somewhat clumsy terminology of “victims/-survivors.” This is to recognize the fact that some individuals who have experienced sexual violence may identify themselves either as victims, as survivors, or as both. However, it also acknowledged that some men and women may not identify (or fully identify) with either of these terms.
2 Between August 2014 and September 2015, I interviewed 79 male and female victims/-survivors of conflict-related sexual violence in BiH. This research was funded by the Leverhulme Trust and received full ethics approval from the Humanities and Social Sciences Ethical Review Committee at the University of Birmingham on July 28, 2014. All interviewees were provided with a participant information sheet, given the opportunity to ask questions, and required to sign an informed consent form.
3 This research is being funded by the European Research Council through a five-year Consolidator Grant.
4 According to the 1991 census, Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) constituted 43.7 percent of BiH’s population, Bosnian Serbs made up 31.4 percent, and Bosnian Croats represented 17.3 percent (Bieber Citation2006: 2).
5 The preamble of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, for example, stressed the importance of women’s “equal participation and full involvement in all efforts for the maintenance and promotion of peace and security, and the need to increase their role in decision-making with regard to conflict prevention and resolution” (UN Citation2000).
6 The preamble of UN Security Council Resolution 2106 noted “with concern” that “sexual violence in armed conflict and post-conflict situations disproportionately affects women and girls, as well as groups that are particularly vulnerable or may be specifically targeted, as well as affecting men and boys and those secondarily traumatized as forced witnesses of sexual violence against family members” (UN Citation2013).
7 Apropos of Uganda, for example, Apperley (2015: 96) has commented that, “leading up to the screening of the Refugee Law Project’s (RLP) ‘Gender Against Men’ film (http://www.refugeelawproject.org), Dutch Oxfam threatened to cut the project’s funding unless women continued to form at least 70% of RLP’s patient base.”
8 In Colombia, sexual violence has been widely used against LGBT people—primarily by paramilitaries—to serve a “corrective” function. According to Bartell (Citation2016), “Colombians defining as LGBT are … singled out by the illegal armed groups throughout the country. They face particular threats of displacement and ‘corrective rape’ to cleanse the society of their perverse behavior.”
9 Problematizing the very notion of “protector” and “protected,” Stiehm (Citation1982: 373) has noted that “In Vietnam and Angola peasants’ lives have been disrupted and diminished when they were moved into ‘strategic hamlets’ for their protection.”
10 A fundamental part of the questionnaire is the Adult Resilience Measure (ARM), developed by Michael Ungar and colleagues (Resilience Research Centre Citation2016).
11 The piloting of the questionnaire in Colombia (February and March 2018) revealed similar results. Of the 10 women who participated in the piloting process, five selected sexual violence as their most traumatic experience (one of these women had been raped by an armed actor and subsequently by her husband). The other five respondents gave a variety of responses, including death threats and a mother’s assassination. In Uganda, where six men and five women completed a pilot questionnaire (March and April 2018), only one female respondent identified sexual violence as the worst experience she had suffered, and one male respondent said that his most traumatic experience was being made to have sex with a woman. The seven other participants who responded to this particular question answered, inter alia, torture, being shot, and being homeless.
12 The common use of such medications is not specific to victims/-survivors of sexual violence. In 2016, for example, “more than 1 million packages of prescription antidepressants (1,030,898) were reportedly sold in Bosnia, a country of 3.5 million. This represents a rise of 14 percent since 2014, when 887,573 packages were sold” (Knežević Citation2017). According to Zdravko Grebo, a Sarajevo academic, boredom is a big part of the explanation. According to him “this is … one boring country in the sense that nothing changes, nothing is moving forward. … This is so mind-numbingly boring that we don’t see any individual resistance, much less any collective protest. Apathy reigns because the people have been trampled over. They are stupefied. And we are all just tired and bored” (cited in Knežević Citation2017).
13 Frankl (Citation2004: 76) insisted that, “If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.”
14 Fitzgerald, Berntsen, and Broadbridge (Citation2016: 10) noted that, “Although PTSD is conceptually understood as a sequela of a traumatic event, the prevalence of exposure to traumatic events is much higher than the prevalence of the disorder.”
15 A Colombian anthropologist points out that, “One of the most inspiring parts of the peace process [a peace agreement was signed between the Colombian government and the FARC in November 2016] was to witness populations long silenced by decades of violence finally able to exercise their rights as citizens. But now, these very leaders who have been constructing peace from their territories are being targeted” (Bolaños Citation2018).
16 Using similar language to the focus group participants, the head of one women’s NGO in BiH has stressed: “The problems faced by these women [who suffered wartime sexual violence] are not a priority for many. The victims believe that the Bosnian state has forgotten them and only organisations like Medica Zenica are interested in their difficulties. And it has to be said, this is generally the case. Time and time again we have to reprimand the government, reminding them of their responsibility towards survivors” (Medica Mondiale Citation2013).
17 Post-war BiH is divided into two entities: the Federation and Republika Srpska (RS). Victims/-survivors who live in the Federation—as most of the women in the focus group did—can apply for civilian victim of war status (see Clark Citation2017b). In RS, victims/-survivors of sexual violence could only seek civilian victim of war status up until the end of 2007, and in order to be successful they had to be able to demonstrate at least a 60 percent disability (see Clark Citation2017b). However, the situation recently changed following the adoption of a new law “for the protection of victims of war torture” (see, e.g., Sorguc Citation2018).
18 The BiH Federation is divided into 10 different cantons, each of which has its own government.
19 It is important to stress that this incentivization of victimhood is not exclusive to BiH. Based on her work in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, Freedman (2014: 137) highlights the creation of “a ‘market’ for SGBV [sexual- and gender-based violence] prevention and for services to victims.” This market, she argues, provides “incentives for women and girls to claim victimhood in the hope of accessing these services” (Freedman Citation2014: 139) [04 September 2018].
20 One NGO that is working directly on the issue of tackling stigma is the Centre for Peacebuilding in Sanski Most (see http://unvocim.net/eng/break-the-stigma-campaign/).
21 Antonovsky (Citation1979: 72) defined stressors as, “A stimulus which poses a demand to which one has no ready-made, immediately available and adequate response.”
Additional information
Funding
Notes on contributors
Janine Natalya Clark
Janine Natalya Clark is a professor of gender, transitional justice, and international criminal law in the Law School at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her research interests include sexual violence in conflict, transitional justice, ethnic conflict, and reconciliation. She has published three books and multiple research articles. Her previous work has been funded by the Economic & Social Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust. Her current research—a comparative study of resilience in victims/-survivors of conflict-related sexual violence in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Colombia, and Uganda—is being funded by the European Research Council through a five-year Consolidator Grant.