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Children Born of Wartime Rape and Sexual Exploitation
Edited by KIMBERLY
THEIDON,
DYAN MAZURANA, AND DIPALI ANUMOL
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Theidon, Kimberly, editor.
Title: Challenging conceptions : children born of wartime rape and sexual exploitation / edited by Kimberly Theidon, Dyan Mazurana, and Dipali Anumol.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index
Identifiers: LCCN 2022024339 (print) | LCCN 2022024340 (ebook) | ISBN 9780197648315 (hardback) | ISBN 9780197648339 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Sex crimes | Children of rape victims | Rape as a weapon of war. | Women and war. Classification: LCC HV6558 C48 2023 (print) | LCC HV6558 (ebook) | DDC 362.883 dc23/eng/20220815
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022024339
LC ebook record available at https://lccn loc gov/2022024340
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197648315.001.0001
Author Biographies
1. Challenging Conceptions
Kimberly Theidon
PART I LIFE CYCLES: CHILDREN BORN OF WARTIME RAPE ACROSS TIME AND SPACE
2. “They’re Called Bui Doi”: (Re)framing the Politics of Amerasians and Children Born of War
Donna Seto
3. Reconstructing the Small Family After Democratic Kampuchea: Forced Marriage, Ritual Renewal, and Parent–Child Entanglement in Cambodia
Elena Lesley and Hoy Vathana
4. Unintended Consequences or Desired Outcome? Children Born of War and Their Role in National Rebirth
Sabine Lee
PART II BEYOND STIGMA: GENDER, KINSHIP, AND BELONGING IN NORTHERN UGANDA
5. Gender, Kinship, and Affiliation of Children Born of War in Patriarchal Northern Uganda
Eunice Otuko Apio
6. Kinship and Belonging Among Children Born of War in Northern Uganda: “I Am a Child Who Is Not from Here”
Teddy Atim, Grace Achan Ogwal, and Anne Bunting
7. Missing Fathers: Children Born of Wartime Rape and Their Perspectives on Fathers and Fatherhood in Northern Uganda
Myriam Denov, Anais Cadieux Van Vliet, and Atim Angela Lakor
PART III (IN)VISIBILITY: CONCEALMENT, DISCLOSURE, AND THE QUESTION OF CATEGORIES
8. Triptych: Seeing Children Born of Wartime Rape
Bridget Conley
9. The Unknown Youth of Al-Shabaab: Children Born from Al-Shabaab Sexual Violence
Phoebe Donnelly
10. Contested Identities: Gender, Reproduction, and War in Colombia
Tatiana Sanchez Parra
11. The Complexity of Sexual Violence, Birthing, and Status After the Fall of the Caliphate
Fionnuala D. Ní Aoláin
PART IV TRANSFORMATIONS: INTERGENERATIONAL RECONCILIATION AND JUSTICE
12. “Where Do You Send the Pain?”: Agency and Resilience in Three Children Born of War in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Tatjana Takševa
13. The Role of Spirituality in the Acceptance of Children Born of Conflict-Related Sexual Violence
Dyan Mazurana
14. Moving Beyond Rwanda’s “Children of Bad Memory”: A Conversation on Working with Mothers and Children Born of Wartime Rape
Dipali Anumol and Samuel Munderere
15. Local Inspiration, Global Implementation: Upholding the Rights of Children Born of Conflict-Related Sexual Violence
Virginie Ladisch and Jacqueline Mutere
References Index
Author Biographies
Dipali Anumol, M.A.L.D., is a doctoral candidate at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, where she earned her Master of Arts in Law and Diplomacy in 2019. Her research interests include gender theory, sexual and gender-based violence, child rights, and human security. Her dissertation focuses on the relationship between feminist activism, practices of care, and responses to sexual violence in India. Prior to Fletcher, Dipali worked in development consulting. Dipali also holds a Master of Science in International Relations (Research) from the London School of Economics and Political Science and Integrated Master of Arts in Development Studies from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.
Fionnuala D. Ní Aoláin, Ph.D., LL.M, is University Regents Professor; holder of the Robina Chair in Law, Public Policy, and Society; and faculty director of the Human Rights Center at the Law School. She is concurrently a professor of law at the Queen’s University of Belfast, School of Law. In 2017, she was appointed as Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms while Countering Terrorism. Her teaching and research interests are in the fields of international law, human rights law, national security law, transitional justice, and feminist legal theory. She has published widely in the fields of emergency powers, conflict regulation, transitional justice, and sex-based violence in times of war and continues to write extensively on theoretical aspects of transition. She is the recipient of numerous academic awards and honors, including a Fulbright scholarship, the Alon Prize, the Robert Schumann scholarship, a European Commission award, and the Lawlor fellowship. She had held multiple research awards including from the British Academy, the US Institute of Peace, DfID (Department for International Development, UK), Research Council UK, and the Economic and Social Research Council. Professor Ní Aoláin was a representative of the prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at domestic war crimes trials in Bosnia (1996–1997). She is Board Chair of the Open Society Foundations Women Program and serves on the Board of the Center for Victims of Torture National Advisory Council. Professor Ní Aoláin received her LL.B. and Ph.D. in law at the Queen’s University Law Faculty in Belfast and also holds an LL.M. degree from Columbia Law School.
Eunice Otuko Apio, Ph.D., received her Ph.D. in African studies and anthropology from the Department of History and Cultures, the University of Birmingham (UK) in 2016. In 2017, she joined the Law School, University of Birmingham as Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and Transitional justice, and works on the subject of resilience in survivors of war-related sexual violence. Her doctoral thesis examined “Children Born of War in Northern Uganda: Kinship, Marriage, and the Politics of Post-conflict Reintegration in Lango society.” She is founder of the charity Facilitation for Peace and Development (FAPAD) based in northern Uganda. She has worked in conflict and post conflict settings in northern Uganda since 2001. She is the
author of Zura Maids, a novel that explores the realities of human trafficking in today’s African society.
Teddy Atim, Ph.D., is Visiting Research Fellow at the Feinstein International Center, Tufts University. Atim’s research examines how experiencing armed conflict: forced conscription; sexual violence, forced impregnation and child bearing; killings and enforced disappearance; loss of livelihoods; among others, impacts the lives of affected population, both during and in the aftermath. Her research focuses on: young people affected by armed conflict and their recovery in the post-conflict period, women survivors of wartime sexual violence and their children born of wartime rape, youth in challenging situations such as young women engaged in transactional sex, psychosocial impacts of armed conflict, recovery, transitional justice, war injuries, among others. She also has extensive experience as a practitioner, working with young people, their families, and communities affected by armed conflict, where she supported the psychosocial rehabilitation and reintegration of youth affected by armed conflict in northern Uganda. In this role, she worked with various national and international organizations in Uganda, including; the Concerned Parents Association, Save the Children, CARE International, American Jewish World Service, and the Democratic Governance Facility. Teddy holds a B.A. in Social Sciences from Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda and holds an M.A. in Humanitarian Assistance from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. She has her Ph.D. from Wageningen University, the Netherlands.
Annie Bunting, S.J.D., is Associate Professor in the Law & Society program at York University in Toronto, teaching in the areas of social justice and human rights. Professor Bunting is a graduate of York, having studied law at Osgoode Hall Law School (1988). She received her LL.M. from the London School of Economics and Political Science (1991) and her S.J.D. from the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto (1999). Her research expertise includes socio-legal studies of marriage and childhoods; feminist international law; and culture, religion, and law. She has published articles in Social and Legal Studies, Journal of Law and Society, Canadian Journal of Human Rights, and chapters in various book collections. Her recent edited collections include: Marriage by Force? Contestation over Consent and Coercion in Africa (with Lawrance and Roberts) Ohio Univ. Press (2016) and Contemporary Slavery: Popular Rhetoric and Political Practice (with Joel Quirk), UBC Press, Law & Society Series (2017).
Bridget Conley, Ph.D., is Research Director of the World Peace Foundation and Associate Research Professor at The Fletcher School. At WPF, she is the lead researcher on the Mass Atrocities program, in addition to contributing to the Famine Research program. She is the author of Memory from the Margins: Ethiopia’s Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum (Palgrave 2019) and the editor of How Mass Atrocities End: Studies from Guatemala, Burundi, Indonesia, the Sudans, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Iraq (Cambridge University Press 2016). She has published on issues related to the 1992–1995 war in Bosnia, mass atrocities and genocide, and how museums can engage on human rights issues. She previously worked as Research Director for the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Committee on Conscience,
where she helped establish the Museum’s program on contemporary threats of genocide, including engagement on research program, policy issues, and public education, and curating an exhibition, From Memory to Action: Meeting the Challenge of Genocide Today.
Myriam Denov, Ph.D., is Full Professor at McGill University and holds the Canada Research Chair in Children, Families and Armed Conflict (Tier 1). Her research interests lie in the areas of children and families affected by war, migration, and its intergenerational impact. A specialist in participatory and arts-based research, she has worked with waraffected children and families in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Her current research is exploring children born of conflict-related sexual violence in northern Uganda, Rwanda, and Cambodia. Dr. Denov has presented expert evidence in court on child soldiers and has advised government and nongovernmental organizations on children in armed conflict and girls in armed groups. She has authored, co-authored, and co-edited nine books addressing the impact of war on children, including Child Soldiers: Sierra Leone’s Revolutionary United Front (Cambridge University Press). She is the founding Director of Global Child McGill a research group dedicated to children and families affected by war and migration. Dr. Denov is the recipient of the 2020 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight Award and the Killam Research Fellowship. She is a Trudeau Foundation Fellow and Member of the Royal Society of Canada College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Commonwealth Scholar.
Phoebe Donnelly, Ph.D., is Stanley Kaplan Postdoctoral Fellow at Williams College where she teaches on gender and conflict and security in Africa. She received her Ph.D. in International Relations from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University in 2019. Phoebe won the Peter Ackerman Award for the outstanding doctoral dissertation at The Fletcher. In 2017, Women in International Security (WIIS) selected Phoebe as one of their “Next Generation Gender Scholars.” Phoebe is also a visiting fellow at Feinstein International Center, a research and teaching center focused on humanitarian crises. Previously, Phoebe was Associate Director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights at UMass-Boston. She also has policy experience through her work as a Legislative Correspondent for Senator Richard Blumenthal and as an intern for the State Department at the U.S. Mission to the UN. Phoebe earned an M.A. in Law in Diplomacy from The Fletcher School in 2013 and a B.A. from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2008.
Virginie Ladisch, M.A., is a senior expert in truth seeking and civic engagement and heads the children and youth program at the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ). In that capacity, she has provided support and technical expertise to a wide range of transitional justice approaches across the globe, including in Canada, Colombia, Cote d’Ivoire, Cyprus, Kenya, Tunisia, and Uganda. Across all her work, Ladisch focuses on how engaging citizens particularly youth in transitional justice processes can serve to catalyze broader public debate and ongoing civic activism. Prior to joining ICTJ, Ladisch was awarded Thomas J. Watson Fellowship for independent research, during which she carried out extensive
fieldwork on truth commissions and reconciliation in South Africa and Guatemala. The results of her research on the challenges of reconciliation have been published in the Journal of Public and International Affairs and the Cyprus Review. More recently, her reflections on engaging children and youth in transitional justice have been published in the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. Virginie Ladisch holds an M.A. in International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) at Columbia University and a B.A. in Political Science from Haverford College.
Atim Angela Lakor is the founder of Watye Ki Gen (We Have Hope), a Ugandan organization whose members are formerly abducted women held in the bush, working for the rights and the welfare of children born in Captivity. Atim Angela was abducted from St Mary’s College, Aboke with fellow pupils by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) when she was 14 years old. She holds a diploma in Guidance and counseling and a Bachelor’s degree in Development studies from Gulu University, Uganda. She is a co-author of The Lord’s Resistance Army’s Forced Wife System. She delivered speeches in 2014 at the Global Sexual Violence Summit on Preventing Sexual Violence in Armed and in 2017 at the Commonwealth Office at the event celebrating the Fifth Anniversary of The Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative, TED Talk speaker on prevention of the use of children as a weapon of war and was awarded the 2017 Marsh Award for innovation in peacemaking and peacekeeping by MARSH Christian Trust, Wilton Park in London.
Sabine Lee, Ph.D., is Professor of Modern History at the University of Birmingham. Her research has spanned a range of themes in contemporary history and, more recently, interdisciplinary research on conflict and security with particular emphasis on conflict-related sexual violence. She has led several international and interdisciplinary research projects in these fields, including two AHRC-funded research networks and a European-Union-funded H2020 international interdisciplinary doctoral training network on children born of war. She is currently engaged in several projects exploring the experiences of peacekeeper-fathered children and their mothers in different geopolitical contexts, including Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Elena Lesley, M.S., is Cultural Anthropologist whose work focuses on global mental health, post-conflict recovery, gender-based violence, and genocide studies. Her doctoral dissertation research (Emory University) tracked mental health interventions among survivors of the Khmer Rouge regime, which was responsible for the deaths of roughly 1.7 million Cambodians from 1975 to 1979. Since 2004, she has lived and worked in Cambodia for a combined four and a half years, first as a Henry Luce Scholar and Fulbright Fellow, and later for master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation research (supported by the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Blakemore Foundation, and the Center for Khmer Studies). Her work has appeared in the U.K. literary magazine Granta, The Huffington Post, the Journal of Genocide Studies and Prevention, several edited volumes and numerous other journalistic publications. A piece about her larger doctoral project is forthcoming in Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology. Lesley holds a B.A. from Brown University, an M.S. from Rutgers University, and previously worked as Senior Research Specialist for a center run through Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson
School of Public and International Affairs.
Dyan Mazurana, Ph.D., is Associate Research Professor at both The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, Tufts University. She is Research Fellow at the World Peace Foundation. She focuses on gendered dimensions of humanitarian response to conflict and crises, documenting serious crimes committed during conflict, and accountability, remedy, and reparation. She serves as an advisor to several governments, UN agencies, human rights NGOs, and child protection organizations regarding humanitarian assistance and improving efforts to assist youth and women affected by armed conflict. This work includes the protection of women and children during armed conflict, including those people associated with fighting forces, as well as remedy and reparation in the aftermath of violence. She has worked in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Nepal, and southern, west and east Africa. She has published more than 100 scholarly and policy books, articles, and international reports and her work has been translated into more than 30 languages. She is currently completing a book manuscript on children, adversity, violence, and resilience. She edited A View from Below: Conducting Research in Conflict Zones, with Karen Jacobsen, and Lacey Gale (Cambridge University Press 2013). Her other books include Life and Security in Rural Afghanistan (Rowman & Littlefield 2008) with Nematollah Nojumi and Elizabeth Stites and Gender, Conflict, and Peacekeeping (Rowman & Littlefield 2005) with Angela Raven-Roberts and Jane Parpart and Where Are the Girls? Girls in Fighting Forces in Northern Uganda, Sierra Leone, and Mozambique: Their Lives During and After War (International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, Montréal, Canada: 2004), with Susan McKay.
Samuel Munderere is Chief Executive of Survivors Fund. Munderere is passionate about international development work and improving the lives of vulnerable people. He has a profound understanding of the issues faced by women and children in Rwanda and extensive experience of programmes that seek to empower them and transform their lives. Sam has worked with Survivors Fund Rwanda for the last 13 years. He has particular experience in managing educational and counselling projects and has led a programme supporting 850 youth born of genocide rape. He has also coordinated SURF’s provision of counselling programmes for their mothers. In his career he has developed an array of livelihoods projects including ground-breaking initiatives to introduce solar lights, solar cookers, clean stove cookers, water purifiers, and donkeys to Rwanda. Samuel holds a Masters in International Development Management from the University of Westminster (London, UK) and a Bachelors degree in Social Worker and Social Administration from Bugema University.
Jacqueline Mutere is the founder and director of Grace Agenda based in Nairobi, Kenya. She founded the organization in December 2010 to support survivors of rape of Kenya’s 2007 and 2008 post-election violence. Initially responding to the needs of children born from the rapes, Mutere realized the mothers of these children had additional needs. Through Grace Agenda she has mobilized other survivors to advocate for reparations, participate in police vetting processes, and restore survivors’ dignity. Jacqueline has received several awards and recognition for her work, courage, commitment, and resilience in advocating for sexual and
gender-based violence. Most recently, in 2019, Physicians for Human rights honored the Survivors of Sexual Violence in Kenya Network with the Physicians for Human Rights Award, which she accepted as the Network Co-head. In 2016, Mutere was a nominee for the Women National Human Rights Defender award in Kenya and in 2014 the Kenya Women and Children's Wellness Center/African Women’s Enterprise program gave her an award for courage and determination in advocacy in extremely difficult circumstances. Currently, in addition to her ongoing advocacy for reparations, healing, and self-agency, she is focused on strengthening the establishment of a regional network of survivors of conflict-related sexual violence who have children from the violations.
Grace Achan Ogwal currently works with Refugee Law Project at Makerere University, Kampala Uganda. Previously she worked as a researcher with the Women's Advocacy Network and Justice and Reconciliation Project in northern Uganda. She specializes in gender and transitional justice with a specific focus on work with women survivors Government of Uganad and Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) 20 year war. She also worked with the research team of the University of British Colombia in the Conjugal Slavery in War project. Grace has a Bachelors degree in Development Studies from Gulu University and a post Graduate Diploma in project planning and management from Uganda Management Institute.
Tatiana Sanchez Parra, Ph.D., is an assistant professor at the Institute of Social and Cultural Studies Pensar at Javeriana University in Bogota, Colombia. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Essex, where she also obtained a Masters in Human Rights. Prior to her postgraduate education in the UK, she completed a Masters in Social Anthropology at the University of Los Andes, Colombia, where she also earned an undergraduate degree in Anthropology. Tatiana’s latest work develops at the intersection of feminist socio-legal studies, medical anthropology, and critical studies on political transitions, where her research addresses narratives about people born as a result war-time sexual violence during the Colombian armed conflict.
Donna Seto, Ph.D., is Manager in Research Development at the University of British Columbia. Seto’s research explores the complexity of intersectional violence during armed conflict and the impact of wartime rape on subsequent generations. Her book No Place for a War Baby: The Global Politics of Children Born of Wartime Sexual Violence (Routledge 2013) engages in the subfields of global politics while examining a range of international conflicts, children’s rights literature, and gender theory. She has published in the areas of humanitarian organizations, visual images of war-affected children, and refugee policy. Donna holds a doctorate in Politics and International Relations from the Australian National University. She is a research development manager and adjunct lecturer at the University of British Columbia. She is currently working on her first novel on war-affected children.
Tatjana Takseva, Ph.D., is Professor, Faculty of Arts, at Saint Mary’s University. Takseva’s current research is situated at the intersections of motherhood, feminism, nation-building, and the politics of identity and is interdisciplinary in nature. It utilizes concepts and
methodologies drawn from discourse analysis and literary studies, philosophy, sociology, psychology and psychoanalysis, political science, cultural studies, anthropology, and the history of ideas. She has published on a wide range of topics within motherhood studies, such as mothering in conflict zones; motherhood and consumerism; motherhood and teaching; contemporary mothering practices; and the ethic of care, maternal ambivalence, and empowered mothering. Her publications also include topics in the area of English Renaissance literature, intercultural communication, globalization, and digital media.
Kimberly Theidon, Ph.D., is Henry J. Leir Professor of International Humanitarian Studies at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. Theidon is medical anthropologist focusing on Latin America. Her research interests include political violence, transitional justice, humanitarian and post-conflict interventions, gender studies, and drug policy. She is the author of many articles, commissioned reports, and two books. Entre Prójimos: El conflicto armado interno y la política de la reconciliación en el Perú (Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1st edition 2004; 2nd edition 2009) was awarded the Latin American Studies Association 2006 Premio Iberoamericano Book Award Honorable Mention for outstanding book in the social sciences published in Spanish or Portuguese. Her second book, Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru (University of Pennsylvania Press 2012), was awarded the 2013 Honorable Mention from the Washington Office on Latin America-Duke University Libraries Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America, and the 2013 Honorable Mention for the Eileen Basker Prize from the Society for Medical Anthropology for research on gender and health. She is currently completing two book manuscripts. Pasts Imperfect: Working with Former Combatants in Colombia is based on research with former combatants from the paramilitaries, the FARC, and the ELN. Sex at the Security Council: A Greater Measure of Justice draws upon her research in Peru on sexual violence, children born of wartime rape, and the politics of reparations.
Hoy Vathana is a mental health professional in Cambodia with over three years of experience in project management and more than five years of experience as a trauma clinician. At Transcultural Psychosocial Organization of Cambodia (TPO Cambodia), she has been a mental health clinician since 2011 and served as manager for the “Promoting Gender Equality and Improving Access to Justice for Female Survivors and Victims of Gender Based Violence under Khmer Rouge Regime” project from 2016 to 2018. Vathana holds a B.A. in Psychology from the Royal University of Phnom Penh and a B.A. in English TESOL from Paññasatra University of Cambodia.
Anaïs Cadieux Van Vliet holds a Master of Social Work from McGill University, where she works as a research assistant. Her academic work centers on the experiences of children born of wartime rape and the complex realities of victim perpetrators. Her previous grassroots organizing work, tackling sexual and gender-based violence, informs her current research interests. She is, amongst others, the co-author of “Child Soldiers” in The Oxford Handbook of Atrocity Crimes (Oxford Press forthcoming).
1
Challenging Conceptions
Kimberly Theidon
There is a tremendous knowledge gap surrounding the issue of children born of conflict-related sexual violence, and even less public policy to address the needs of these children.1
It was twenty-two years ago that the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1325, the first in a series of Resolutions focused on the important role women play in conflict prevention, resolution, and peacebuilding efforts. Collectively known as the Women, Peace and Security agenda, these resolutions (Security Council Resolutions 1325, 1820, 1888, 1889, 1960, 2106, 2122, 2242, and 2467) have also demanded the complete cessation of all acts of sexual violence by all parties to armed conflicts, with each successive resolution lamenting the slow progress made to date on this issue. While insisting on the need to protect women and girls from rape and sexual violence in armed conflict and postconflict situations, it would be thirteen years before Resolution 2122 noted “the need for access to the full range of sexual and reproductive health services, including regarding pregnancies resulting from rape, without discrimination” (2013). There was nothing said about the outcome of those pregnancies, nor about their meaning for the mothers and their children. A few more years would pass.
In 2019, to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Women, Peace and Security Agenda’s foundational Resolution 1325, the UN Security Council proposed Resolution 2467. The resolution recognizes that “women and girls who become pregnant as a result of sexual violence in armed conflict, including those who choose to become mothers, may have different and specific needs,” and advocates a “survivor-centered approach” that recognizes the needs of survivors of sexual violence to receive nondiscriminatory access to a full range of services. The original language included references to sexual and reproductive health, triggering vocal opposition from the United States and the “right to life” block a group I prefer to call “forced birth extremists.” When the United States threatened to veto the resolution, it was watered down and the “offending” words omitted.
Some have criticized the “hypervisibilization” of conflict-related sexual violence, concerned that this focus might unintentionally reinforce patriarchal notions that the most important thing to know about a girl or a woman is her sexual “purity.” Another concern, which I also share, is that this focus may obscure a broader gender equity agenda that extends far beyond ending sexual violence, however important (and elusive) that goal may be. Here I wish to trouble other waters: How can there be so much attention to sexual violence while so little is said about the potential, and obvious, outcomes of that violence? How can it be that in over two decades of grappling with conflict-related sexual violence and its legacies, there is but passing mention of various potential and obvious outcomes: pregnancy, abortion,
forced maternity and children conceived through acts of sexual coercion or outright violence?
To date the most sustained engagement with children born of wartime rape comes from the political scientist and international relations scholar R. Charli Carpenter. Her 2007 edited volume contains several empirically rich chapters that draw attention to the lack of research and legal response to children born as a result of mass rape campaigns or sexual abuse in conflict zones; these chapters in turn call for enhanced human rights protection for these children. The edited volume is a touchstone for those of us working on these issues. Her subsequent monograph, however, draws disturbing conclusions.
In Forgetting Children Born of War: Setting the Human Rights Agenda in Bosnia and Beyond, Carpenter analyzes the war in the Balkans, a watershed conflict in terms of placing conflict-related rape on the international agenda (2010). Focusing on Bosnia-Herzegovina, Carpenter critiques the ways in which ethno-nationalists and the international media reified ethnicity and how human rights organizations and certain feminist scholars bought into the “ethnic hatred script” to achieve political ends, one of which was to establish that rape can constitute genocide. In order for rape to constitute an act of genocide, previously fluid ethnic categories were presented as timeless and immutable, and patrilineal descent was given primacy in determining the child’s genetic makeup and thus ethnicity. As Carpenter argues, human rights organizations and misguided feminists thus unwittingly reinforced the patriarchal regime that made such reasoning possible in the first place. In constructing ethnic identity as immutable and genetically encoded, children born of rape were either invisible as victims in their own right, or at best taken as proof of the harm done to their mothers and, by extension, to their ethnic group (2010).
Reified ethnicity is a useful foil in Carpenter’s analysis, and deconstructing it is easy. It is here, to my mind, that her analysis veers onto problematic terrain. In situating her approach, she writes, “The feminism here is thus less focused on women’s experiences per se than on the broader project of overcoming gender hierarchies as they pertain to human security for all people, particularly for children conceived as a result of gender-based violence. Rather than emphasize survivor’s experiences per se, my goal is to explore the marginality of their children born of wartime rape and consider what this marginality means for children’s human rights and for international relations” (2010, 9). I am concerned by what her feminism means for women.
Carpenter acknowledges she frequently heard that rape survivors who gave birth refused to accept these children as their own, and subsequently rejected them. Indeed, at one point she praises the “courageous women” who kept their children despite familial and communal disapproval. Where does that leave the rest of the women? Did their rejection of these children born of rape and their reluctance to raise them as their own indicate that women bought into the dominant ethnonationalist discourse, reducing rejection or repugnance to little more than being ideologically duped, stuck in a gestationally induced false consciousness? Somehow, if one can demonstrate that ethnic difference was erroneously portrayed as a rigid and timeless category, then the rest falls away. The other constructions “children of the enemy,” “occupied wombs,” maternal ambivalence or rejection are merely artifacts of the ethnic hatred script. It is not so simple. Her top-down analysis rightly
identified the missed opportunity to challenge the paternal trump card; however, looking only at the macro and discursive levels obscures long-standing local biologies and culturally informed theories of transmission from parent to child. Making ethnicity a strawman in her argument allows her to deconstruct ethnicity and then argue that everything else is an artifact of this misguided convergence of media, ethnonationalism, and feminist advocacy that reflected patriarchal gender norms rather than challenged them. I share the desire to challenge gendered hierarchies, but while we wait for the world historic defeat of patriarchy, this line of critique leaves women holding up the entire sky.
I advocate a different kind of feminism. I suspect that one reason children girls, boys, and other genders born of wartime rape were and have, to some extent, remained invisible on the international agenda is because there is no reasonable way to discuss this issue from a “survivor-centered” perspective without addressing women’s right to abortion a woman’s right to refuse to lend her body to nine months of reproductive labor, and to acknowledge that some women may experience these pregnancies and babies as a harm done to them. 2 The Women Peace and Security Agenda, for all its good intentions and accomplishments, is a framework that placates those for whom a more feminist agenda would be unpalatable. “Mainstreaming gender” can be a double-entendre, as the feminist critique of policy is mainstreamed into an agenda that does not threaten the status quo of powerful countries or interest groups a move that may obscure the fact that women and their children (especially their fetuses) may be located within competing rights regimes. One cannot finesse away these competing rights. This calls for an explicitly feminist peacebuilding and postconflict reconstruction agenda, understood to include a full range of sexual and reproductive rights, including access to safe and accessible abortions for those women who want them.
In addition to questioning a gendered-yet-not-feminist approach to conflict-related sexual violence and children born as a result of that violence, there is another leitmotif in the existing literature that warrants a critique. Although sparse, in the literature that does exist, the concept of stigma is frequently applied to these children and given wide-ranging explanatory power. From an anthropological perspective, however, stigma is a thin explanation for a thick phenomenon, and forecloses a broader repertoire of potential meanings and motivations for the acceptance or rejection of these children by their mothers, families, and communities. Stigma seems to be a placeholder in the literature rather than an analytically nuanced tool, almost commonsensical in its usage.
Challenging Conceptions questions such common sense and is a purposeful play on words. With my colleague, Dyan Mazurana, in May 2018 we convened an authors’workshop at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. At this workshop we brought together researchers and practitioners from around the globe, each of whom has spent decades working with women who survived wartime rape, and with the children who were the result of that violence. Together we aimed to rethink some of the assumptions that echo in the literature and in popular culture about these children and those around them. We acknowledged that their conception may stem from a woman’s most painful experience, and that their birth may provoke deep maternal ambivalence. To conduct research on these issues is to go far beyond a university’s human subjects review process and the “technical ethics” required of us as researchers; it is to be plunged into deep moral conundrums. At each step,
the researchers in this book have struggled with how to conduct their research in such a way as to do no harm to these children and their mothers, underscoring that each methodological choice is an ethical decision as well. This book is the result of that workshop and lively discussion.
Life Cycles: Names, Silences, Secrets
When speaking or writing about “children born of war,” exactly who are we referring to? It is the most frequent term in the literature, abbreviated as CBOW. This is policy-speak, and the language of policy documents may not be the language that allows us to think clearly in our research. Research categories demand greater precision. An anthropologist wants details about age, gender, race, religion, nationality, culture; in short, a researcher needs to incorporate intersectionality into her questions, her categories, and her analysis.4
In this book, when authors refer to “children born of conflict-related sexual violence,” we are not speaking about the age of the person per se but rather about the circumstances of their conception and birth and how those circumstances manifest across their lifetime. The needs of that person will change as they age, but the status is one that will have legacies; these are not always tragic, but they are always there. For example, the age of the person should not be a key factor in whether or not they qualify for reparations and redress; it is the circumstances of their conception and the concentration of disadvantages and forms of exclusion many of them have faced throughout their life that requires remedy. That remedy will in turn depend upon a changing set of needs as the person passes from childhood into their adult life hence the emphasis on life cycles. Similarly, Virginie Ladisch and Jacqueline Mutere insist on the temporal dimensions of harm: what is considered the core injury may change across time, and the challenge they identify is that of recognizing victimization without making it the core of one’s identity.
Life cycles are a productive analytic for various themes that crosscut the powerful chapters in this book. Let’s consider names and their impact on the individuals to whom they are given. I conducted years of research in the central highlands of Peru, exploring the legacies of lethal violence among “intimate enemies.”3 As with other civil wars, the internal armed conflict in Peru involved high levels of intra and inter communal violence. This terror left a legacy of distrust, rancor, and landscapes steeped in blood and memories and people painfully aware of the danger human beings can pose to one another. In addition to civilian participation in the violence, the Peruvian state installed military bases throughout the countryside; this counterinsurgency strategy led to the conflation of “terrorist-guerrilla” with “brown-skinned peasant,” resulting in the destruction of hundreds of peasant communities. Within the repertoires of violence deployed by various armed groups, forms of sexual violence were one constant.4 This violence left its own legacies: unwanted pregnancies and, at times, unwanted children. Some of these children were sent to live with extended family members residing outside the community, while others were raised by their mothers amid the gossip. I recall one communal authority who bitterly complained about los regalos de los soldados (the soldiers’ gifts) who were born in his pueblo. That community alone had more
than fifty young people who carried only their mother’s last name their father’s identity was never determined.
Over the years I met several children who were the result of rape.5 Here I mention just one boy whose mother had been passed around by the soldiers in the base that had overlooked their community for almost fifteen years. I first noticed him because he was standoffish, never joining the growing group of children who made my room a lively place. I tried to speak with him a few times, but he had no interest in conversation. After months of living in the community, I finally had an opportunity to ask someone about him. It was late afternoon and I saw him heading down the steep hill toward home, his three goats and one llama kept together with an occasional slap of a slender stick. The woman sitting at my side knew him by name: Chiki. My face must have expressed my surprise because she whispered that his mother was “one of those women.”
Chiki is a painful name for a young boy, who in turn was a painful child for his mother. Chiki means “danger” in Quechua and in daily usage refers to a warning that something bad is about to happen and should be averted. People recall the ways they learned to look for a sign that the enemy might attack. One such chiki was a strong wind that blew through the village, rattling the aluminum roofs and letting people know something evil was about to occur.
This boy was a “future memory,” a perverse distortion of time. He could not be a warning; it was too late to avert this particular danger. Rather, he was the product of an evil event his mother had been unable to escape. His mere being extends his mother’s memory both to the past and into the future. Her son is a living memory of the danger she survived, as well as a reminder that nothing good could possibly come from this Chiki she had failed to avoid.6
I have carried Chiki’s story with me for many years now, unable to write him out of my memory. In my research he is Child Zero, the one who set me thinking about these issues. He haunts me, and his name is clearly not an isolated phenomenon. In any given community this is in no way limited to Peru there is the audible impact of names, both individual and collective, that are frequently of an injurious nature. Linguistic or cultural variation alone does not explain this widespread practice in postconflict settings. Comparative ethnographic data are important because this allows us to see patterns in what at first glance might seem to be isolated cases. Time and again, across regions, names reveal the conjuncture of painful kinship and “poisonous knowledge.”7 Some examples of these are:
RWANDA: collectively labeled “unwanted children,” “children of bad memories,” “children of hate,” “genocidal children,” and the individual names include “little killer,” “child of hate,” “I’m at a loss,” and “the intruder”8
KOSOVO: “children of shame”9
EAST TIMOR: “children of the enemy”10
VIETNAM: “dust of life”11 and “American infected babies”12
NICARAGUA: “monster babies”13
GUATEMALA: “soldadito” (little soldier)14
UGANDA: “Only God knows why this happened to me,” “I am unfortunate,” “Things have gone bad”15
COLOMBIA: “paraquitos” (little paramilitaries)16
In Peru, among other names, children are referred to as “los regalos de los soldados,” (the soldier’s gifts), “hijo de nadie” (nobody’s child), “fulano” (what’s his name), and “chatarra” (stray cat).
This seems strikingly at odds with the secrecy and silence assumed to surround the issue of rape and other forms of sexual violence. For instance, in their work with rape survivors in Rwanda, Elisa Van Ee and Rolf Kleber found that “Out of shame, many women who have been raped want to hide their trauma and the way their child was conceived.”17 Concealment is a leitmotif in the literature and is generally understood as a way to avoid stigma for both the mother and her child.
And yet amidst this complicated array of hidden practices, there are inevitably names that mark these children and reveal their violent origins. As Gabriele Von Bruck and Barbara Bodenhorn note, “Because others usually name us, the act of naming has the potential to implicate infants in relations through which they become inserted into and ultimately, will act upon, a social matrix. Individual lives thus become entangled through the name in the life histories of others.”18 Naming is verbal, audible, and interpersonal; naming practices are one way of expressing, perhaps projecting, the private into public space and laying claims upon others. These “entanglements” are worth contemplating. Who and what is being named?
In this volume, Eunice Otuko Apio, Teddy Atim, Grace Achan Ogwal, Anne Bunting, and Tatiana Sanchez Parra take up these questions and follow various “life cycles,” so to speak. What is the intergenerational impact of sexual violence? How is kinship figured and reconfigured across generations, when some of those generations include children born of wartime rape? When do the children’s names memorialize a woman’s most brutal memories? Do these names have a finite life span can these children escape the taint and be, literally, resignified? As the authors demonstrate, when these children are given injurious names and excluded from kinship networks, this can translate into being excluded from land ownership and inheritance lineages. Here, stigma must be unpacked to grasp the economic interests that influence how these children and their mothers are or are not rejected by their communities and their families. I suspect that rejection of male children will be heightened in settings in which their status as a male gives them some claim upon familial property.
Importantly, as Apio notes, these names can be changed: seminal violence is not destiny.
This is a fascinating contrast with findings in her earlier research, underscoring the importance of longitudinal studies. In an earlier chapter on children born to young women who had been abducted and made “wives” by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda, Apio briefly discussed naming practices. In a sample of 69 children, she found that 49 of them had injurious names (the others had been named either by the father after one of his relatives, or by medical staff who delivered the babies following their mother’s reintegration). Thus it can be assumed the mothers named the other 49 children, and the names depicted the plight of their mothers. “These names compile all the bad experiences of a mother into a name and give it a life in the nature of her baby. In this way the baby is turned into a living reminder of her suffering.”19 Of particular interest is the mother’s reaction to the efforts of social workers to give these children new names such as “I am fortunate” or “Things have turned good.” As Apio found in her interviews with World Vision staff, “The mothers, however, are reluctant to pick up these changes. They prefer the old names. ”20 What has changed? It seems that local kinship systems can accommodate ambiguity, which in turn may allow the mothers and their children to reclaim their place within familial and communal networks. Names and fates can be remade. And once the researcher has explored familial and communal logics, then a scalar analysis calls for investigating state-level policies that take reproduction as a key site of governance. As one Chinese official stated, “To put it bluntly, the birth of a baby is not only a matter of the family itself, but also a state affair.”21
Statecraft: Policies and Populations
Reproductive governance refers to the mechanisms through which different historical configurations of actors such as state, religious, and international financial institutions, NGOs, and social movements use legislative controls, economic inducements, moral injunctions, direct coercion, and ethical incitements to produce, monitor, and control reproductive behaviours and population practices.
Morgan and Roberts (2012, 341)
A key site in which statecraft is practiced is sexuality and reproduction. This is equally true for countries at peace as well as those at war. Here, I concern myself with conflict and postconflict settings. There are always policies implicit or explicit put in place to address the issue of children born of wartime sexual violence, the women who may abort or give birth to them, and the biological fathers. From state militaries to irregular forces, from combat troops to international peacekeeping missions, the question of what will be done with the children who (inevitably?) result from these encounters is a topic of discussion and policymaking.22
In addition to reproductive governance as a rich analytical concept, I have also found “jurisdiction” to be a useful tool. All women live within multiple reproductive jurisdictions, in the sense of multiple and perhaps contradictory regimes of law, language, and practice.23 For example, in her research on the legacies of the Partition, Veena Das analyzes the Indian state’s policies to “recuperate” and “recover” women who had been abducted and sexually violated during the violence, tracing the national response to women impregnated by “other” men and giving birth to the “wrong” children (1995). She found that in the sphere of the
nation, identity categories were rigidified in the service of national honor, while at the familiar and communal levels kinship norms were bent in a myriad of ways to absorb these women and their children into the structures of family and marriage. The multiplicity of customary norms that existed with regard to the children of victimized women were standardized into one single law by which illegitimacy was defined, frequently to the detriment of both the mothers and their children. This is a useful reminder that law can be a blunt instrument, working at odds with “practical kinship” and its useful ambiguities.24
Our authors explore how various states have been compelled to take action on these issues, and with what consequences. As Donna Seto, Elena Lesley and Hoy Vathana, Fionnuala D. Ní Aoláin, and Sabine Lee skillfully demonstrate, controlling marriage and reproduction has been a cornerstone of statecraft and geopolitics across time and space. From Vietnam to Cambodia, from Germany to Bosnia and beyond, population and adoption policies are vast projects of social engineering harnessed to the cause of nationalism, cultural revolutions, and ethnic conflicts. By providing rich comparative ethnographic data, these authors add to our understanding of the logics that drive governments to develop policies that may further complicate the precarious conditions in which many of these women and their children live. At times those policies are clearly aimed at bolstering nation or state building efforts, the women serving as ethnic markers and their children as useful symbolic tools to pursue various political agendas.
Additionally, as Dipali Anumol and Samual Munderere demonstrate, governmental requirements may be the site of forced disclosure. Their lengthy conversations about Rwanda contribute to generating practical steps for overcoming discrimination and for not locating the affective burden of caring for these girls and boys solely on the shoulders of their mothers. At times the recommendations seem so obvious that the reader will wonder why action was not taken much earlier. For example, in order to attend school, children must provide documentation that forces them to identify the conditions of their conception. For children born of rape, that documentation is a painful reminder or first-time news of how they came into the world. The Rwandan government could abolish such requirements, making school at site for learning and growth rather than one of humiliation or painful disclosures for those children who learn only then that they are the product of rape.
Disclosure, handled with care, can be beneficial. Across contexts children born of conflict-related sexual violence express a desire to know who their fathers are. I join our authors in insisting that we must balance the mother’s right to secrecy with the child’s rights to know the facts surrounding their conception; here, the issue of sequencing is vital. Mothers may need therapy for their own trauma before they can even begin to speak with their children about the sexual violence to which they were subjected and from which their children were conceived. Speaking of fathers leads us to making kin.
Making Kin: Beyond Patriarchal Biologies
My purpose is to make “kin” mean something other/more than entities tied by ancestry or genealogy.
Donna Haraway25
The child shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have the right from birth to a name, the right to acquire a nationality and as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 7
Another rich area of inquiry centers on “local biologies” and theories of transmission. Margaret Lock’s concept of local biologies provides a way of analyzing the coproduction of biology and culture (as opposed to one universal biology upon which cultures elaborate), and to capture how this coproduction contributes to embodied experiences and discourses about the body (1995). This allows us to explore biology as a system of signification, as a way of producing meaning. Although DNA and genetic codes animate scientific discussions of inherited traits, local biologies are more apt to involve bodily fluids, toxic memories, and wounds of the soul. Looking comparatively, researchers can explore some of the characteristics thought to pass from parent to child via blood, semen, breast milk, or in utero.
In Peru I was told that children conceived via rape were “naturally aggressive,” a trait traced back to the violence perpetrated by their biological fathers. Other mothers assured me that these children were prone to seeking revenge, reflecting the idea they were the “enemy within” and that the desire for vengeance was passed from father to son. From the scant literature available, it appears that the male children born of rape are more likely to provoke fear than are the girls, indicating the primacy of the father’s semen and blood in the transmission of traits associated with violent masculinities.26 In this case, nature trumps nurture and biology veers into destiny.
In her comparative work on children born of rape in Bosnia and Rwanda, Patricia Weitsman considers these children as a prism for identity politics. She situates the different uses of rape within the politics of identity, especially with regard to whether ethnicity is or is not determined by the father’s bloodline.27 During the Serbian rape campaigns, “the paramount assumption underpinning these policies is that identity is biologically and paternally given.”28 In this case, women were mere vessels for transmitting paternal identity, and these were occupied wombs. Different constructs of identity will culminate in different logics behind the use (or not) of sexual violence, yet Weitsman is surely correct when she states that, “Once born, the identity of war babies is inextricably linked to their rapist fathers.”29 Challenging the centrality of the father’s identity in determining the fate of these children whether through behavioral predispositions, ethnic identity, physical appearance, or some other characteristic is one component of questioning patriarchal reasoning rather than reinforcing it. For now, given the centrality of the father’s identity in determining the fate of these children whether one agrees with such essentialism or not underscores the need for further research on and with men.
In this book, Phoebe Donnelly and Myriam Denov and Anais Cadieux Van Vliet take up that challenge to fascinating ends. Donnelly explores the pro-natalist policies of Al-Shabaab and how those policies and babies were central to accruing male prestige and promoting a specific form of masculinity. Providing men with a route to traditional markers of manhood was an effective recruitment strategy, and the children, in turn, are valued and considered
future fighters. This is strikingly at odds with the policies of other insurgent groups, such as the Shining Path in Peru and the Revolutionary Armed Forces in Colombia, laying the groundwork for further research on the reproductive governance policies within nonstate armed groups and between nonstate armed groups and the civilians they seek to control.
Denov and Cadiuex Van Vliet provide another fascinating chapter that challenges many preconceived notions about “rapist fathers.” They conducted research with fathers and the children they produced in the LRA in Northern Uganda. They worked with the children who resulted from those acts and, of vital importance, explored how the children themselves view their perpetrator-fathers. Within the LRA, commanders provided for their children and their status conferred certain benefits to their offspring. The children remember their fathers not as perpetrators, but as good providers and yearn for them. Readers may be surprised by their results, which provide yet another example of the importance of ethnographic nuance and detail.
Finally, I ask readers to look at the language from the Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 7: the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents. There is no caveat that those parents must be related by blood, by biology. For feminist researchers, reconfiguring kin is a key means of challenging patriarchal reasoning, property rights, inheritance norms, and even human exceptionalism and its toxic effects on our planet. Haraway urges us to “make kin, not babies,” by which she invites her readers to imagine other ways of reckoning family, belonging, kindness, and care (2016).
Transformations
What can assist these children of all genders, their mothers, and their wider communities in light of the abundant challenges we lay out in this book? Where are the spaces that may provide respite and care, and who are the actors who may ease some of the burdens? Within the explicitly feminist peacebuilding and postconflict reconstruction approach that frames this introduction, how can we help? These questions animate the last part of this book.
At times, absence can be evidence. When these children are not discriminated against, what has allowed that to happen? Mazurana explores religion and spirituality, arguing that these are crucial tools for remaking life in the aftermath of war’s devastation. In Mozambique, she found no evidence that girls and boys born of wartime rape were rejected; indeed, healers were surprised by the question. The process of naming that I discussed earlier played a crucial role in helping to protect children taken by the armed forces and other armed groups, and helped smooth their acceptance back into their communities. She identifies key factors that have made the country an exception to the rule of rejection of girls and boys born of war, and argues that religious leaders and spirituality are key to understanding how both the children and the country have fared.
Tatjana Takševa provides another example that challenges overly pessimistic narratives regarding the fate of these children. Drawing upon her long-term research with young women and men born of wartime rape in Bosnia and Herzegovina, she argues that the children’s ethnically hybrid identities can contribute to peacebuilding efforts, particularly in contexts in which peace accords, such as the 1995 Dayton Agreement, served to reify and even
exacerbate ethnic cleavages. The resilience of these young people, and their embodiment of intersectional identities, allows them to critique ethnonationalism and its corrosive legacies. She underscores their agency and refusal to construct victimization as the core of their (now) young adult subjectivities.
For Ladisch and Mutere, it is crucial to combine the efforts of local activists with international policies and programs to ensure they work together rather than at odds with one another. Taking the example of postelection violence in Kenya as their point of departure, they look at policies that break the cycle of harm. By identifying those factors that speak to both local specificities as well as global patterns, they lay out a series of recommendations that can contribute to transformational justice for these children and their mothers.
Finally, the politics of visibility and representation form key themes in Bridget Conley’s contemplation of photos of genocide survivors and their children in Rwanda. She asks viewers to look again at these survivors, not away, and grasp the responsibility one must assume as a result of knowledge about them. The photos she analyzes were taken by photographers at different points in time, and they reveal the challenges of maternal–child relationships and responsibilities across time. For concerned audiences, Conley raises question of how to move beyond the distant gaze and into effective and compassionate action.
Final Reflections
At one point early on in my doctoral studies and research, it became clear that I needed to know much more about the anthropology of children and childhood. I headed to the (then) Kroeber anthropology library at the University of California: in the stacks, I found there were no children there. With a few notable exceptions, somehow anthropology’s interest in children stopped with Margaret Mead, a perverse disciplinary twist on “arrested development.” I invite the skeptic to randomly select one hundred ethnographies. Read them and try to learn something about the lives of children in the societies studied. I do not mean what adults say about children but what the children themselves say and do. I agree with Nancy Scheper-Hughes, who notes that “As a whole, childhood is under-represented and under-theorized and anthropologists need to alter their conventional ways and methods of studying children.”30
The chapters in this book contain empirical and theoretical innovations; they also offer methodological innovations. In each chapter the authors discuss how they ethically conducted their research and the precautions they took to do no harm. I have long advocated for shifting the narrative burden for sexual violence off the shoulders of the victim-survivors and framing it as our collective responsibility to speak out when those around us are being harmed. Feminist legal theorist Ní Aoláin has written about “communities of harm.” She insists we consider the concept of connected harms, which is grounded in the idea that individual violations create communities of harm which include not only the victim herself but also those people who are closely tied to her emotionally, or who are in a relationship of codependency with her.31 When turning to the topic of conflict-related sexual violence and the girls, boys, and other genders born as a result of those violations, we simply cannot
reduce our analyses to the mother-child dyad the undifferentiated women and children that Cynthia Enloe insightfully critiques throughout her prolific work. Not only might the women and children have competing rights regimes, but they are all and always embedded in complex networks of intimate relations, families, communities, nation-states: in short, dyadic myopia will not lead to new responses to the legacies of armed conflict.
Taken together, the chapters in this edited volume do challenge conceptions, and serve as an invitation to think further about these questions. Evaluating the ways in which children born of wartime sexual violence are constructed, named, represented, marked, and perhaps loved could generate new insights into the intersection of gender, ethnicity, sexuality, violence, and identity. I am convinced that it is detailed ethnographic research that can provide some answers and a greater measure of justice for these women and their children. Perhaps we can then move beyond precarity and discrimination move beyond communities of harm to construct environments of compassion and care.
Notes
1 Bouvier (2016)
2 For further discussion of this issue see Theidon (2022)
3. See Theidon (2004; 2012).
4 See Wood (2006) for a discussion of repertoires of violence
5. Here I draw upon Theidon (2015).
6. For further discussion of children born of wartime rape in Peru see Theidon (2015).
21 Editorial, the People’s Daily, quoted in the New York Times, August 12, 2018
22. Grieg (2001).
23 Richland (2013)
24 Das (1995, 65)
25. Haraway (2016, 103).
26 Carpenter (2007)
27. Weitsman (2008, 563).
28. Ibid., 565.
29 Ibid , 566
30. Scheper-Hughes and Sargent (1998, 13).
31. Ní Aoláin (2009, 220).
PART I LIFE CYCLES
Children Born of Wartime Rape Across Time and Space
“They’re Called Bui Doi”
(Re)framing the Politics of Amerasians and Children Born of War
Donna Seto
Introduction
“When I heard him cry . . . I asked the doctor to bring him to me. I wanted to strangle him” (Anthony 2015a). These words were spoken by the mother of Alen Muhic, a Bosnian Muslim woman who was raped by Serbian soldiers during the 1990s conflict in the former Yugoslavia. From 1992 to 1995, the Serbian Army carried out a campaign of terror that was responsible for subjecting an estimated 200,000 women to sexual violence, forced impregnation, and forced maternity (Seifert 1996; Stiglmayer 1994; Niarchos 1995; Bos 2006; Hansen 2001). Although it is widely recognized that both Serbian and Bosnian women were subject to systematic forms of sexual violence, the initial motive was to intimidate, terrorize, and expel Bosnian-Muslims and Croats from the region. Systematic rape and impregnation were used as a strategy to achieve this goal and as a way to ensure that one ethnic group suffered the long-term detriments of humiliation and shame that is often associated with rape (Stiglmayer 1994; Hansen 2001; Allen 1996; Daniel-Wrabetz 2007).
Alen Muhic was born in a Gorazde hospital in 1993, but was adopted by Muharem, the hospital caretaker, after his biological mother abandoned him. Up until the age of ten, Muhic was not aware of the details of his conception; instead he believed he was the son of Muharem and his wife, Advija. In 2003, Muhic was in a playground fight and his opponent told him that he was adopted and that he is a “Chetnik bastard” (Anthony 2015a). Muhic’s story sheds light on the plight of children born of militarized sexual violence and introduces the complex question of how the international community reconciles with subjects that have been silenced in peacebuilding and postconflict reconciliation processes. More importantly, it further questions why this specific group of children has rarely been mentioned in the broader literature on conflict and peacebuilding, sexual violence, militarized prostitution, and children’s rights. Children born of wartime sexual violence represent a distinct group of waraffected children whose well-being has been compromised due to their complex beginnings (Carpenter 2007; Carpenter et al. 2005; Watson 2007; Seto 2013). Consequently, their complex beginnings further subject them to a number of abuses such as infanticide, abandonment, social discrimination, statelessness, and malnutrition.
The lack of research and attention concerning the plight of these children is curious. In recent years, discussions on sexual violence in war and militarized prostitution have considered the experiences of children born of war; however, this process continues to connect the discourse with their mothers. Rarely has the literature focused on the agency children possess and how children born of war have navigated the complexity of
discriminatory restrictions such as the lack of citizenship, access to education, and knowledge of their identity. This chapter positions these children born of war at the center of the wider literature in order to question if the current discourse can adequately represent these children. It further sheds light on how children born of war are political agents that can shape the politics surrounding motherhood, national reconciliation, and international adoption procedures. In doing so, I pose three pertinent questions: 1) How has this unique group of children navigated their identities, especially in a landscape that has protected the mothers over the children? 2) How do these children understand and negotiate a sense of belonging, especially in cases where they do not have recognized citizenship, which is normally required to ensure the basic protections are guaranteed? and 3) What do these children reveal about the responsibilities of their biological parents, their birth communities, and their adoptive communities?
This chapter will primarily focus on the experiences of Amerasian children who were offspring of American military personnel and civilian Vietnamese women. The Amerasian case in Vietnam is noteworthy as it highlights the complexity of sexual violence and relationships in militarized situations. As some of these children resulted from consensual relationships or from the burgeoning prostitution industry in the region, their experiences demonstrate similarities with other groups of children born of war. Despite the differences in origin, Amerasians in Vietnam, Korea, Japan, and the Philippines faced abandonment, discrimination, and social ostracization because of their presumed affiliation with the identity of their fathers. In Vietnam, the Communist regime and the ideological vacuum that resulted with the departure of American forces left Amerasians in a particularly difficult situation. Seen as collaborators with their foreign fathers, Amerasians were deemed incompatible with the national identity of Communist Vietnam and, more poignantly, the children were physical evidence that their mothers had betrayed their own country (Varzally 2017; Bass 1996; DeBonis 1995; Yarborough 2005; Lipman 2011). However, in the early 1980s, the Reagan administration saw the opportunity to use Amerasian children as a tool to reinvigorate American morale by casting these children as their “own”; this ploy further provided the impetus to denounce Vietnam and its failure to protect children (Varzally 2017; Lipman 2011). As will be discussed, recognition of Amerasians by the US government changed the fate of many of these children, who were young adults or adults at the time, while further altering their position in their communities. Their communities and distant relatives utilized the “newfound status” of Amerasians as a possible route to migrate to the United States. Consequently, this period witnessed a number of illegitimate relationships or familial claims involving Amerasians, where the spouse or extended family member would later abandon the Amerasian counterpart once they gained the right to stay in the United States. In considering this, this chapter questions how these children form a sense of political agency in such uncertain and discriminatory sociopolitical circumstances. The Amerasian situation provides a notable case as their identities shifted from a marginalized one to one of temporary privilege. Children born of militarized relations or of wartime rape represent a complex and multifaceted issue that complicates the study of war, postconflict efforts of recovery, and the development of international norms intended to protect children worldwide. This chapter blurs the definitions between children born of wartime rape and children
born of militarized sexual relations (such as in Vietnam) as there are similarities in the treatment of the children. The chapter will conceptually use both terms to describe this group of children, as well as use the term children born of war. The shift toward a broader term that encompasses different origins helps to shift the focus from the suffering of their mothers to the experience of the children. Children born of war occupy an invisible nonspace in regards to their ability to rightfully access the liberties set out by the international child protection regime. Their precarious and complicated identities as children outside of the existing norms reveals that existing practices enshrined in international norms such as the Geneva Convention on the Rights of the Child (1924), Declaration of the Rights of the Child (1959), Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948), and the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (1951) relies on a particular form of childhood that may not best represent the experiences of war babies. Childhood, as defined by the children’s rights regime, requires one’s membership to a particular state, community, or family, which can protect and ensure the rights of the child are secured (Arendt 1967; Donnelly and Howard 1988). Consequently, many children born of war lack citizenship in their birth country, are raised in orphanages, or ostracized by their birth community; thus they lack the basis to ensure their bests interests are represented, let alone their basic needs. In considering this, their identities as outsiders can help formulate a different way of thinking about childhood and war.
Defining Children Born of War
Helen Brocklehurst’s poignant study of childhood in Who’s Afraid of Children (2006) unpacks the meaning of childhood as a constructed phase that has not been immune from politico-economic milieu. In her study of the Boer War and World War I, Brocklehurst notes that scientific scrutiny traced the poor health of soldiers to inadequate care and nutrition in childhood. This recognition of children’s health and the strength of the nation fostered efforts to develop child-specific medical practices, such as nurturing activities and specialized care for children (Brocklehurst 2006). Contemporary warfare has further demonstrated that children are not innocent bystanders; rather, war has exposed children to various experiences such as armed combat, sexual violence, forced labor, displacement, and captivity (Huynh, D’Costa, and Lee-Koo 2015; Watson 2008, 2006; McEvoy-Levy 2006; Seto 2013). In many respects, children effect and are affected by conflict and peace processes in competing ways that warrant youth an important presence in current discussion of political agency. Unlike other groups of war-affected children, the identities of children born of war are constructed based on violent modes of personalized warfare such as forced impregnation, sexual violence, and militarized sexual exploitation (Carpenter 2007; 2000) or, in cases of militarized relationships, were rendered as the enemy due to their physical difference. These practices employ the psychological and emotional aspect of conflict while also involving complicated issues related to identity, gendered norms, national recovery, and trauma. Moreover, the precarious beginnings associated with these children further expose them to a number of complex situations such as exploitation, displacement, statelessness, and (re)militarization (Seto 2013).
Children born of war has been broadly defined as “a child that has one parent that was part of the army or peacekeeping force and the other parent a local citizen where the weight is on the stigma these children can be subject to as a result of their background” (Carpenter et al. 2005). In Born of War: Protecting Children of Sexual Violence Survivors in Conflict Zones, R. Charli Carpenter writes that these children can refer to “persons of any age conceived as a result of violent, coercive, or exploitative sexual relation in conflict zones” (Carpenter 2007, 3). Recent studies on children born of war rape in the 1990s conflict in Bosnia-Herzegovina reveal that the sociopolitical detriments continue to extend into adolescence and adulthood (Erjavec and Volcic 2010; Anthony 2015b; Jasmila Zbanic 2006). Thus, the definition includes cases of children who are born as a result of militarized rape and sexual enslavement, as well as sexual exploitation committed by occupation forces, peacekeepers, humanitarian workers, and private militaries. Furthermore, the situation of Amerasians adds further complexity to the definition. As will be discussed, situations of sexual violence did occur, but the militarized climate of war significantly altered the socioeconomic climate of southern Vietnam while fostering a culture of militarized prostitution and opportunity to “purchase” women. Engineers and other personnel were also present in the region for long periods of time, which further disrupted the culture and gendered norms by providing women with job as clerks and translators (Yarborough 2005; DeBonis 1995; Bass 1996; Moon 1997). Michael Goodhart observes that children born of war “exist in numerous contexts. The social, cultural, and political milieu in which the conflicts, the rapes, and the births take place affects how rights questions play out, as do the actions of states and international actors, including the media and aid agencies” (Goodhart 2007, 308). Although the definition of war babies is broad, it does help to shed light on the complexity of gender in war, and how cases involving peacekeepers can often blur the lines between militarized violence in conflict and postconflict periods (Enloe 2004; 2000).
The application of the existing definition of children born wartime sexual violence does not suggest that their experiences are entirely uniform. The suffering experienced by these children is largely dependent on how they have been treated or perceived prior to their birth, either as a military strategy or enemy child; by the mother who is a survivor of war rape; and by the birth community which may embody the taboo associated with accepting an unwanted child who is viewed as belonging to the opposition. Although many of these children are consistently the subject of neglect, abuse, discrimination, stigmatization, and even infanticide (Niarchos 1995; Stiglmayer 1994; Grieg 2001; Carpenter 2000), some children escape such marginalization either through “luck, adoption, or silence about their origins” (Goodhart 2007, 309). For instance, after the 1971 Bangladesh-Pakistan conflict, the Bengali government actively supported abortions for rape survivors in order to ensure “children of the enemy” were not born (Sharlach 2000; D’Costa 2009). In another context, after the 1995 genocide in Rwanda, an individual account from a rape survivor suggests that the creation of a child brought her hope in an otherwise harrowing experience (Mukangendo 2007).
At the center of the marginalization of children are their complex yet contradictory identities as “secondary (rape) victims” (Daniel-Wrabetz 2007) as well as physical reminders to their mothers of the rape and their birth communities of their defeat in war. The precariousness of their experiences, however, is deeply rooted in the construction of their
