How does the sequence of violence that women experience, before, during and after war relate to transitional justice approaches? This article compares rapes by combatants compared with rapes by civilians, both of which follow abductions intended to result in “marriage.” It calls attention to typically unacknowledged commonalities between the two forms of abduction and illustrates how experiences of rape do not fit neatly into “war” and “ordinary” categories. It suggests that the circumstances under which women experience rape greatly affect the perceptions of those experiences and what would constitute just responses.
This article is based on three years of participant observation and in-depth interviews with a random sample of 187 women from two Acholi villages in Northern Uganda. This region was at the centre of a long and brutal war between 1986 and 2006.
Findings
- The notion of consent is based more on the social contract that takes place between families and clans than on either of the individuals involved. It includes the consideration of: where the event took place, the relationship of the perpetrator with the community, and how far the “marriage” conforms to local notions of a proper marriage.
- Whether the violence of rape was socio-political or not was seen as less important in both individual and collective perceptions of the act and its aftermath than the social effects. The primary moral obligation in the wake of wrongdoing is the restoration of social harmony, not punishment of the perpetrator, or individual victim’s rights.
- The qualitatively similar experiences of women abducted by civilian men/boys and had their relationship formalised through traditional procedures and those who were abducted by the LRA holds less importance than the setting of these events and highlights they are interpreted at different socio-cultural levels: women raped by the LRA mostly wanted more severe punishment for those responsible than women abducted by civilians.
- Interrupted education was a consistent concern – and reality – for young women and girls abducted and forced into marriage, whether by civilians or by the LRA.
- In many of the cases of women who were abducted by the LRA, abduction was the principal crime that they focused on, which gave rise to all others and preference for justice through punishment could not happen because there were no appropriate justice actors available.
- Whether or not a woman had the social support necessary to have realistic options besides marrying the man who abducted and raped her was significant to the women. However, elders and other village leaders reasoned that women who were abducted and stayed must have been interested in marriage.
Implications
The fixation on individual victim and perpetrator roles in transitional justice discourse and the formal legal system excludes the lived experience of rape (and other crime or wrongdoing) as social. Any determination of justice that divorces crimes of war as divorces from the rest of lived reality leave opportunities for transformative justice untapped.
