“Justice is Lived”: Women’s Senses of Justice and Reparations After Wartime Sexual Violence in Northern Uganda
"What is the prevailing sense of justice and reparation sought by women who had children from forced marriage?"
Time to read: 10 min
I am Ketty Anyeko, a postdoctoral researcher with the Research Network on Women, Peace and Security (RN-WPS) affiliated with the University of British Columbia (UBC) and Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Canada. The objective of this blog is to share findings of my doctoral research completed in 2021, and to create awareness of the challenges and many sides of justice and reparations for women and girls who survived wartime sexual violence in the global south - Uganda in this case.
The research
‘What about us?’ asks a survivor of sexual violence after hearing that they were not mentioned as a victim category in a human rights violations’ documentation report presented to stakeholders in Gulu district, northern Uganda in 2019. I had the privilege of participating in this event when doing my data collection for my doctoral study. As a woman who was born and raised during the war and worked with these women for nearly two decades, I often observed the sheer exclusion of their voices, experiences and suffering by programs and policies that should be responding to their needs. While the organizers of the event clarified that survivors of sexual violence were included in the report, this story illustrates how simple it is for women to be erased from important justice, reparations, and conflict recovery debates despite their physical presence. It is my interpretation that women’s issues are considered periphery and of less significance compared to other human rights violations such as abductions, massacres, mutilations, and child soldiering. Further, even if women are present and speak in these spaces, their voices are still ignored. My research and this blog intend to redress this erasure by highlighting the experiences of these women and voices on justice and reparations needs.
My research draws attention to the lived experiences of women who survived wartime sexual violence and forced marriage during the 1986-2006 war in Northern Uganda between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels and Uganda’s government. Girls as young as 7-16 years were abducted and kept in captivity for 1-15 years by LRA rebels and forced to serve as fighters, labourers, spies, commander’s wives, and bear children. These women escaped abduction and returned to an impoverished and war-ravaged community that continues to reject, stigmatize, and blame them for the war they were victims of. A few women and their children fathered by rebels were reluctantly accepted by their families and communities. Women and their children currently live in poverty, are unemployed, lack land and homes, and, feel ignored by the Ugandan state that had the legal obligations under the UNSCR 1325 on WPS to provide protection and redress to women during and after conflict.
Little is known about what justice and reparations mean for survivors of sexual violence in the war’s aftermath. Fifteen years after the violence ended on Ugandan soil, few feel they have achieved justice in a legal sense, despite the successful prosecution of an LRA commander Dominic Ongwen by the International Criminal Court (ICC). One of the questions this qualitative research addressed was: What is the prevailing sense of justice and reparation sought by women who had children from forced marriage? I spent seven months in 2019 working with the Women’s Advocacy Network (WAN), a survivor-led organization in Uganda doing interviews, focus groups and storytelling with sixty-eight participants. Most scholarly literature on wartime sexual violence focuses on legally bound approaches to justice, limiting it to retribution for a legal wrong; yet women emphasize that justice is pluralistic and exceeds law.
Findings
Below are three quotes from survivors gathered in 2019 that illustrate the findings of my research:
"Land is the future for everyone. For you to call a place your home, you need to own the land."
"Compensation is all we want…Justice is compensation... As for me Nyakoker (pseudonym), there is nothing else I want apart from money. ….They should just pay us."
"Prosecution will not solve my problems…I need a job and livelihood to take care of my family….. I cannot become a girl again.…What I want now is…to make my life better… That is my justice."
To be able to live a better and dignified life was key to the women’s senses of justice. For example, a religious leader summarily stated in our informal conversation in 2019 that “justice is lived.” A key finding of this study was the conceptualization of a theory of lived justice that captures the deep reflections of women who participated in this study on what justice means to them; a holistic sense of justice that enables women, and their children born in rebel captivity to live dignified lives after wartime sexual violence. The theory has four intersecting themes that underpins the voices of the women quoted above:
Place-based justice is realizable when women own land to live on. Land fulfills senses of justice connected to home (place), identity and belonging.
Compensation-based justice offers recognition of suffering, shattered dreams and time lost in abduction.
Needs-based justice enables lives of dignity by enhancing women’s abilities to meet every day basic human needs such as livelihoods, health, children’s education, employment, feeding, and housing.
Relationship-based justice that involves peaceful co-existence enabled by love, acceptance and recognition of women’s victimhood, citizenship and humanity from their families, communities, and the Ugandan state.
These four themes intersect to enable lived justice and contributes knowledge on senses of justice and reparations for wartime sexual violence. I hope to elaborate these themes in-depth in future blogs.
Recommendations
I conclude with a few of the many recommendations generated by survivors, civil society groups, religious, government and policy representatives in a dissertation dissemination and validation workshop I co-organized with two community-based survivor led organizations in Uganda-WAN and Watyer Ki Gen (WKG) in June 2021:
Ugandan state should offer an official apology for harms women endured and failure to protect, provide comprehensive, transformative and gender-sensitive reparations for women and their children born in captivity.
The International Criminal Court and the Trust Fund for Victims in Uganda should pay reparations to survivors and consider children born in captivity as a special victim category. Reparations should go directly to survivors and their representatives without bureaucracy and should include medical, economic, and social services for women, their children, and the communities they live in to avoid exacerbating existing rejection, stigma, and blame.
Ex-LRA commanders should apologise to the women for harm caused and be responsible for meeting their children’s education and other basic needs.
The cultural institution in Acholi, and the community should ensure the total acceptance of women with their children, advocate for improved land access and ownership by creating a bylaw that calls upon each clan to apportion land for women and their children-ultimately contributing to place-based justice.
Civil Society Organizations should scale up community awareness through dialogues in churches, schools, and other forums to end stigma and encourage full acceptance of women and their children, provide psychosocial support, and record all victims of the conflict to inform reparations and development initiatives. This addresses the question, who are the war victims? Female victims should be systematically categorised.
Academic Institutions and Scholars should develop a strategy for recognizing research participants and SGBV survivors as key players in knowledge production by involving them in research design and analysis, collaborate with grassroots communities in translating findings of academic research to inform programs and policies-eventually improving lives of survivors of a phenomenon under study.
The International Community, including the United Nations must condemn violence against women and children in war, mobilise resources to support reparations and justice efforts in Uganda, support efforts to end LRA activities in neighbouring countries so that sustainable peace is guaranteed for Uganda and its neighbours, and pressure states to assess and scale up its commitment to implement the UNSCR 1325, 1820 on WPS agenda and other international conventions that prevent and provide redress to wartime SGBV.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to women and stakeholders who participated in the study, my research assistant Moses Komakech, Ugandan partners-WAN and WKG, my UBC doctoral committee Dr. Erin Baines, Dr. Pilar Riaño-Alcalá, and Dr. Sheryl Lightfoot, my postdoctoral co-supervisor Dr. Megan Mackenzie of Simon Fraser University, Dr. Nafisa A. Abdulhamid of RN-WPS, the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs and the Interdisciplinary Studies Graduate Program at UBC, Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, UBC’s Graduate Global Leadership Fellowship and Public Scholars’ Initiative for funding the research, and the RN-WPS with funds from the Government of Canada’s Mobilizing Insights in Defence and Security (MINDS) program.
Contact: ketty.anyeko@ubc.ca