 Hi, my name is Sabrina Karim and I'm the hardest family assistant professor of government at Cornell University. I also direct the Gender and Security Sector Lab here. My research makes two main claims. First, the Gender and Security Sector Lab has conducted over 5,000 surveys of security force personnel from all over the world, including but not limited to Ghana, Norway, Zambia, Cambodia, and the Uruguayan police forces and militaries. This research from the surveys shows that security force personnel who have more gender-equal views are less prone to use violence, including sexual and gender-based violence. The research also shows that when members of the security forces are primed to be hyper-masculine, they are more likely to behave in an aggressive way. This includes both men and women. In fact, the surveys show that women and men equally tolerate sexual misconduct within the security forces. This means that one solution to preventing violence among security forces is to create cultures that are less hyper-masculine and more gender-equal. The second claim of my research explores the negative effects of peacekeepers who commit sexual exploitation and abuse. This research uses unique data from one-stop centers for sexual and gender-based violence in Monrovia, Liberia, and pairs it with survey data from 2012 on incidents of transactional sex by UN peacekeepers. The research finds that in communities where there were higher levels of transactional sex by UN peacekeepers, there are higher levels of rape by local men. We believe this is because that when we have an influx of male soldiers enter into a new place, into communities, they change the relationship market and increase costs for local men to find partners. The qualitative interviews with perpetrators and local leaders indicate that cash violence in quotes occurs whereby local men rape because they can't afford girlfriends. This research shows and renews the call for ending sexual exploitation and abuse by peacekeepers because it could be one of the leading causes of why we see rape in countries that have hosted peacekeeping missions. Thank you. Hi, I'm Annette Brindal-Höge. I'm a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Health and Society at the University of Oslo in Norway. My research on conflict-related sexual violence focuses on the privileged role of criminal justice and the derivification of societal understandings and political maneuverability that this entails. For all its achievements, criminal justice also reduces sexual violence into clear categories of individual evil opportunist perpetrators and powerless broken victims. Ideal causality on the one hand, massive suffering in need of legal catharsis on the other. The cost of that reduction is that the understanding is largely separated from its enabling social structures and the broader social economic political and health related impacts. As for policy recommendations, my advice is to be careful about isolating conflict-related sexual violence from the conflict of which it is part and from the continuum of violence that spans both war and peace and to not reduce the challenge you're up against to something that criminal justice can solve in isolation. Do not reduce justice to criminal justice and never mistake criminal justice for closure. Thank you. Hi, my name is Dr. Jocelyn Kelly and I direct the program on Gender, Rights and Resilience at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative. In 2020, the United Nations reported the highest number of displaced persons ever recorded and the number of global conflicts is high and rising. Climate change will only exacerbate these trends. As part of a larger project with the World Bank and UNHCR, my team and I developed a novel method to track how conflict and displacement are related to different forms of gender-based violence. Looking at places as diverse as Colombia, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Liberia, we found some key takeaways. Firstly, that both conflict and displacement each independently increase the risk of multiple forms of gender-based violence including non-partner rape and intimate partner violence. The second takeaway is that the impact of violence can have hidden and insidious effects years after formal peace is declared. One way to think about this is that public violence turns into private violence and can be harder to identify. We know that women bear the brunt of conflict but they are often systematically excluded from the development of peace processes. This has to change. As part of humanitarian state and peace-building efforts, women have to be acknowledged as vital actors in peace processes and post-conflict reconstruction programming and holistic programs to address violence must occur well after the end of conflict violence in order to break cycles of community instability that we often see when gender-based violence occurs. Thank you. Hi, my name is Pugyu Wu and I'm a recent doctoral graduate from Griffith University in Australia. My research focuses on understanding the role of state in preventing and responding to conflict-related sexual violence. Most international efforts to prevent CRS-V relies on states to lead the process of prevention and response mechanisms at a domestic level. However, in most instances it is the state actors such as in the form of military actors who are responsible for this very act of violence. In my research I questioned can states play an effective role in preventing conflict-related sexual violence. A common international approach to responding to conflict-related sexual violence with signing the joint agreement between the state government and the United Nations, Myanmar was one of them. I traced the process of implementation in the context of Myanmar and explains why these approaches not only fail but may have created additional harm. It is also a message to policymakers there is a requirement to obtain more sophisticated understandings of political domestic political complexities as well as institutional legacies that can have huge impact on implementing in preventing conflict-related sexual violence in Myanmar and the similar context. Hi, my name is Grace Drango. I am a PhD candidate at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. My research examines the impact of conflict on gender roles and household dynamics amongst South Sudanese refugees in Nairobi. My initial findings have revealed that some of the refugee women experience intimate partner violence as they navigate changes in gender roles and take up roles as heads of households and as the men reassert their authority at the household level. This was especially noted when there was a lack of economic empowerment programs that specifically targeted the men. One of the main recommendations is the need to strengthen coordination and commitment among the various agencies and actors in an effort to advance equity and inclusivity among refugees and other marginalized groups. My name is Kerry Crawford and I'm an Associate Professor of Political Science at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia. My 2017 book on conflict-related sexual violence demonstrates that states and security-focused agencies are more likely to recognize sexual violence and condemn it when they view it as a weapon of war. So key global actors often neglect the cases that don't fit that frame. Survivors don't always get access to the resources they need and perpetrators don't always face the accountability that they should. The big question I'm researching now is what specific practices, norms, or policies effectively prevent conflict-related sexual violence? What changes the battlefield calculations of armed actors or civilians caught up in the breakdown of the rule of law? The whole of my research on conflict-related sexual violence specifically and human security more broadly suggests that it's imperative for policymakers to prioritize the long-term efforts to prevent atrocities as moving beyond a responsive stance to a preventive one is more cost-effective and more conducive to peace, stability, and security. I don't mean to suggest that this is easy, but the most important efforts seldom are. I'm Paul Kirby, Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London. I study efforts to prevent sexual violence in conflict and my research has highlighted the damaging effects of a fixation on international criminal justice, the stereotyping of survivors, and the failure to implement existing promises. My recommendations to policymakers are, first, to engage as closely as possible with subject and area experts, especially civil society and survivor networks. Second, to ensure policy coherence and a holistic response to all forms of sexual and gender-based violence. And third, to think critically about who is presumed to be a victim, including on the basis of refugee status, gender, military affiliation, or political views. My name is Sumin Lee, an ASIS assistant professor at Texas A&M University. My current book project based on my doctorate dissertation finds that state actors strategically adopt domestic accountability for complicated sexual violence in various patterns. Using an original data said, I find that legislative measures are more common when state actors try to frame accountability around prevention to cover their wrongdoings, while judicial measures such as prosecutions are more common when leaders try to distance themselves from the perpetrators. Two key recommendations from my research is that first, we should carefully scrutinize why and how some governments are willing to adopt accountability for complicated sexual violence. And second, beyond welcoming adoption of these measures, we should carefully monitor the long-run implementation of accountability for complicated sexual violence. I'm Summer Lindsay, assistant professor of political science at Rutgers University, studying sexual violence in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Sexual violence is described as a weapon of war that tears apart the social fabric of society. My joint research with Carlo Kuzh shows that survivors of sexual violence do experience more stigma relative to other forms of violence. But the mapping from rape to stigma is not uniform across communities. A rape victim is much more likely to be stigmatized in villages where people tend to blame women for rape than in villages where people do not tend to blame women for rape. This reminds us that communities are responsible for some of the secondary trauma that rape victims experience. One way to improve the lives of victims and combat the effects of conflict-related sexual violence is to support international programs designed to change community attitudes about rape victims through social interventions. Hello, my name is Chantal Victoria Bright, and I'm a PhD candidate at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom. My research looks at the gender, water security, and peace nexus in conflict-affected countries using Liberia as a case study. Wartime rape was something that Liberia experienced during its 14-year civil conflict, and unfortunately sexual and gender-based violence remains. Therefore, my research is exploring water insecurity and gender-based violence. I will conduct walking interviews with women in the southeast region of Liberia which will provide an opportunity for me to understand the challenges faced in water insecurity and gender-based violence. This study is important to the scholarship of gender, water, and peace nexus in fragile and conflict-affected situations in sub-Saharan Africa. The research will increase the understanding of water security and feminist peace-building interventions, increase environmental awareness as a feminist issue, and offer an African eco-feminist perspective. Thank you.