 OK, I think we're going to go ahead and get started. Good afternoon, and welcome to the US Institute of Peace, which many of you know is founded by Congress in 1984 as an independent national institute dedicated to the proposition that peace is possible, practical, and essential for our national and global security. So thank you for coming today. My name is Rosarie Tucci. I'm the director of peace processes and inclusive societies here at USIP. We'd like to welcome you all here today and those who are participating virtually via our live stream. And you can follow us on Twitter. The hashtag is Columbia Peace Forum. And we do have interpretation. If you saw outside, channel one is English and four is Spanish. So thank you again for coming to this Columbia Peace Forum, which is hosted in partnership with Oxfam and the Latin America Working Group. I'd like to thank Stephanie Burgos and Lisa Hagar for working very closely with USIP on organizing today's event. Just a quick word on the Columbia Peace Forum. They were actually, the concept was created by the late Jean Bovier, who was our close, who was our partner, who ran the Columbia program here at USIP for over 14 years. And she established this Columbia Peace Forum back in 2012 as an effort to produce creative analysis to inform the Columbia internal armed conflict and to discuss the challenges of the peace process. It served really as a mechanism to elevate the voices, particularly the voices of marginalized people who often don't get a platform to share their experiences and perspectives. To date, we've convened over 15 forums that have covered a diverse set of topics, a lot related to inclusion, the inclusion of women, the victims, how to bring victims to the table, the inclusion of Afro-Columbians and indigenous groups and the role of ecumenical groups and the church. We've also unpacked a variety of challenges, ranging from technical challenges in the implementation of the peace process to exploring how to locate the disappeared. I do want to welcome Steve Hegge here today and Tonis Montes, who helped organize this event as well. Thank you so much. They are currently running the Columbia program here at USIP. So moving to today's Columbia Peace Forum, the event today seeks to address the prevalence of sexual violence in the context of internal armed conflict with Columbia as a case study. The report being discussed today was led by Oxfam in Columbia and through a coordinated national campaign called Rape and Other Violence, Take My Body Out for More. The survey seeks to explore a number of components of sexual violence, including uncovering the diverse aggressions of sexual violence within the context of Columbia, identifying the individuals and communities that are most at risk and affected by sexual violence, identifying the perpetrators of the acts and the localities of these incidents, and ultimately helping to better understand how the peace accord seeks to address reparations and guarantees of non-repetition within the framework of peace. So as many of you know, Columbia finds itself in a critical moment right now. We are three weeks away from the inauguration of a new government with an executive and legislative body that in many ways is opposed to the structural decisions embedded in the peace agreement. So peace is fragile right now in Columbia. And we're here today to discuss how we as the international community and civil society can best continue to support a peaceful way forward. So thank you again for coming. Look forward to a rich discussion. Let me now invite Kathleen, who is USIP's director of gender policy and strategy to the stage to introduce our panelists. Thank you. Great. Well, thank you, Roe, and thank you all. Echo our appreciation for your interest and your attention this morning or this afternoon already. And I will say that as moderator, I will do my very best to make sure we have plenty of time for the audience to be engaged in this most important discussion today. So eight years ago, we were looking for reports like the Oxfam survey on the prevalence of sexual violence against women. At that time, the US government had just begun to explore the possibility of developing what is called a national action plan on women, peace, and security. But we had no data, none, to show that such a survey, such a national action plan, could really make a difference. The national action plan was inspired in the year 2000 with the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325. It called for the protection of women in conflict and the participation of women in peace processes. Finally, in the year 2011, the US adopted a national action plan. And then just last year, October 6, Congress passed the Women, Peace, and Security Act of 2017. And the president approved it into law. So I say these things to put this event into focus. This kind of research is critical for the international world to start to really begin to understand women, peace, and security. It is at the intersection of protecting women in conflict and the importance of women being a part of the peace processes. The Colombian case is particularly important as grassroots efforts by women, for women, and about women in conflict has been pathbreaking for the world. The survey has documented that between the years 2010 and 2015, 16 women every hour were victims of sexual violence. Now, that's a data point. I'm going to let you just think about 16 people, primarily women, were victims. That means the first three rows here every hour were victims of sexual violence. It's a very massive number. And so it is my great privilege here to actually bring this research, the process, and the actions to life with our panelists today. Through the course of the next hour, we're going to learn more about the results of the survey. We're going to interpret these findings, especially in the context of transitional justice. And third, we want to understand what it means for the Colombian government FARC peace processes, especially how are we going to continue to address sexual violence in the provisions? Again, this is pathbreaking work. The rest of the world is looking for answers as well. And we have some of those answers here today. So let me begin by introducing our panelists. I believe you have their bios. But because we are webcasting this, I'm going to take a few extra minutes here to introduce them in more complete form. Also, their bios are very impressive. So I have Olga Amparo Sanchez. Olga, please. She is a feminist scholar, researcher, and founder of Casa de la Mujer, a feminist organization in Bogota that has been working to promote, protect, and defend women's rights in Colombia since 1982. She has served as Colombia's national director of gender equity and has represented women's organizations in national and international fora. She has been instrumental in lobbying the Colombian government to pass laws in favor of women's rights and has played a fundamental role in creating several networks of women's organizations. Welcome, Olga. Next to her is Angela Maria Escobar, who is the coordinator of the Reddy Mujeres Victimas y Professionals. How's that for somebody who speaks Russian? Forgive me for my inarticulation of Spanish, but I will work hard. This is a national network engaged in supporting the rights of women victims of sexual violence in Colombia. Herself, a victim of rape in the context of Colombia's armed conflict, she broke her silence and fear of stigmatization in order to defend the rights of fellow women victims. She now leads capacity building workshops on prevention of sexual violence in various regions around Colombia. In the peace negotiations, she has been somebody who has spoken on behalf of the women victims at the 2017 Commemoration at UN Headquarters for the International Day for the Elimination of Sexual Violence in Conflict. Welcome, Angela. And on my left is Marta Londonio Asevedo, who is the program officer in Oxfam's Right to Justice program in Colombia. She has worked for Oxfam for the past eight years, focusing on supporting women's rights, and in particular the right to live free from violence. She's originally from Medellin and graduated there in several degrees. And then our discussant today is our colleague and neighbor, Mary Ellsberg, who is the executive and founding director of Global Women's Institute at the George Washington University. She has more than 30 years of experience in international research and programming on gender and development. Prior to joining the university, she served as vice president for research and programs at the International Center for Research on Women, ICRW, known to many of us here in Washington. She also earned a doctorate in epidemiology and public health from UMEA University in Sweden. And she will be giving some comments after we have spoken with our colleagues from Colombia. Welcome to all of you, and thank you for being here today. So we want to begin with just a round of questions. The panelists are going to decide who's going to answer what, which it's a very kind of more living room conversation than it will be a delivery of a speech. We thought this might be a good way to see the different views of on the ground at the policy level and then at the international level. So I want to begin with why you all think that the campaign will make a difference in the peace processes. And how was it formed with that in mind? Sorry, I forgot I had a microphone. Good afternoon to all of you. I want to thank you for the invitation and the ability to be with you here today to talk about sexual violence and the implementation of the peace agreements process in Colombia. We formed the campaign rape and other violence take my body out of the war in 2009 because we realized that we had a very serious problem of violence against women in the country but that we didn't have any numbers or statistics to talk about the magnitude of what was happening. So we brought some human rights organizations together with feminist organizations, women's organizations, and later also victims organizations, women who have gathered together in recent years. And the campaign is to begin doing some research now, to have some quantitative information that would help us to understand the magnitude of the phenomenon of sexual violence against women in Colombia because that base of research would help us to develop programs and projects but also would help us do advocacy with the government for public policies to prevent and sanction sexual violence. We also want to contribute to overcoming high impunity rates in the cases of sexual violence in Colombia. Impunity right now is about 96% in these types of cases. So we wanted to be able to have this possibility of working together also to raise awareness in the public who didn't really want to listen to this issue because there tends to be a stigmatization and a blaming of the victims because this hasn't been considered an important topic and because it hasn't been on the agenda of public policy in Colombia. And so the campaign came out of that reality and we began to talk about different types of research that we needed to do. The first was the first survey of prevalence about sexual violence against women between the years of 2001 and 2009. Then we started doing research about the recruitment of girls and boys in the boys. And we analyzed public policy during the Santos governments and last year we decided to take the risk of documenting the period of 2010 to 2015. Since the process of negotiations had already begun for the peace agreements in Havana, we needed to know what was happening with sexual violence in the context of the armed conflict. And so now I want to make sure that Olga has a chance to talk. It's the Casa de la Mujer, actually, that led these two surveys. But before she begins, I want to tell you that we wanted to generate strategies and tools and methodologies so that organizations themselves, social organizations, grassroots organizations could do this kind of work. They would get academic expertise and rigor working with academics that were helping with this research and to do that work together. But I also want to say that it didn't have to do with hiring consultants. It was a work that everyone did together in a coordinated fashion. And the 13 organizations that were part of the campaign talked about what we were doing every day. Because in addition to the research, we wanted to have an experience that would strengthen the organizations themselves, the grassroots organizations of victims, and also human rights organizations. Good afternoon. Thank you for the invitation and for being here. For us women who are victims of sexual violence during the conflict and in the campaign to take my body out of the war as other campaigns, it was something that was very important for us because it allowed us to break the silence because we saw that there were many of us. And we saw in the campaign the most strategic way to be able to break the silence and break this fear and break the stigma, which we call the shame that we feel as women who are victims of sexual violence. The campaign allowed us to do this. And it also showed us that we are not alone, that there are grassroots organizations that also work for women's rights. And it made us feel that they were with us and that this past that women who have been victims of sexual violence are on allows us to be sitting here like Angela Maria and many women victims so that we can feel that we are supported and that organizations are with us. And this has been a grand challenge for us. Good afternoon. I really want to thank you for taking a day in the summertime to come and hear us. And I want to start with what the director of the Institute started with. Right now, we have international support in Colombia, and we're going to talk about that during this talk. We want to turn the page, the page, on the war and start writing the book on peace. But there's two or three things I want to mention. One is that this survey was done in a country that had suffered 60 years of war. And right now, in the official register, we have 8 million victims. And of that 8 million, almost 56% are women. And depending on the crime, it might be mostly women. As when we talk about forced displacement, we're 52%. Our women and girls, boys, and people. And so this highlights what the 60-year war has meant for the country. The first survey was done in a context of conflict without any kind of hope that there would be dialogue. And then the second survey, which is the one that we present at the end, you'll see that there's an executive summary on the tables in the back for those of you who are interested. So I'm just going to highlight the most important bit. And we start from a place that's one, in contrast to some research that might be more, let's say, that just want to report on the phenomenon. This research was coming from a place of women's organizations that already had some knowledge of this position that women were in. And so these statistics that you're going to say, these are life stories of women who have suffered, but who have also stood up and been able to say, I was raped. I was forced to have an abortion or to be sterilized. And I think with this vision that the investigation of this research was going to show the pain in the stories of women to then be able to put it in the number of statistics that Ismarta was saying would allow the Colombian society to really understand the magnitude of this problem. And for a Colombian society and the institutions of the state can really be aware of the fact that this is not a second rate problem. And we were also in the second survey interested since we were already in the process of dialogues in Havana. And so we wanted to have that data that would let us come to the table and say this is a problem that has to be one of the axes in the process of negotiation and of the final agreement. And from that perspective, women's organizations and victims' organizations and human rights organizations were able to make sure that sexual violence would not have amnesty into the final agreement, but that this would be a crime against humanity. And I think that this is something that is very important. This is a qualitative research project that tried to dig deep in the municipality that according to the People's Umbands Fund, in the conflict of the armed conflict, it means that there was more than one armed actor so it could be the police or a national guard, paramilitaries or insurgency. We did not include just common crime. We excluded that because it has different features. We chose 12 municipalities with a five research strategy and we had 1,950 women who we were interviewing by going house to house. And to collect this information, we trained women from the women's organizations who had already had some process to really reflect on what had happened. We did it in higher interviewers, but we trained women who had experienced some kind of violence and would have that experience and sensitivity to then be able to carry out these interviews, taking into account the psychosocial tensions that might come up when the woman is telling her story. So we really had some marvelous experiences because of the 12 municipalities of all the houses that we went to, less than 1% did not want to answer our interview questions. The rest did and so this showed us that we hadn't really hit upon the correct mechanism to carry out the research. So what did this tell us? One, as our presenter pointed out, each day 16 women or each hour rather, 16 women meaning 800 and 700, 8,700 women suffered some kind of sexual violence and what are the categories that we chose? This is a very important discussion but I'm going to try to go through this quickly so that I don't use up all the time on this. But we linked categories that had to do with forms of violence that were listed in the statute of Rome or in the national statues or regulation of social life. You might wonder what that is but that's something that comes out a lot in people's realities and the municipalities, the paramilitaries and the insurgents and the public forces have regulated women's lives and how, what they should wear, who they should have relationships with, emotional relationships with, what places they should visit and the paramilitaries carried out practices like making women stripped down, putting them in a public plaza or shaved their heads, maybe put them in a public place and saying, this is what happens when you don't obey. So this is a category where it's been discussed a lot in academic context because it has to do with sexual violence and so for us we consider that sexual violence doesn't have to do with actual sexual acts but that you have to think about how you recollect a woman's sexuality and also because it's a way of sanctioning and controlling women and so with these categories we created a survey and like I said, there are situations that are critical in this study and one of those things is that Afro-descendant women are black women in Colombia, the youngest, meaning between 15 and 24 years of age, who lives in lower economic strata are the women who were most affected and so that is a triple layers of discrimination and so we find that only 20% of women actually report and this has to do with the institutional responses to this reporting for a couple of reasons, one, because let me just leave it that way, why am I even gonna go through the travel of reporting because they don't believe in the institution and because they consider that getting to the authorities is another way of re-victimizing as we say, or reliving the situation and so what this also shows is the greatest prevalence of sexual violence is in major cities or medium-sized cities, so we have the biggest problem in those areas and I just wanna close with this, that research does not look into this, to municipalities when there's, if there's no armed actor, what happens with sexual violence? We didn't look into that and nor did we look into the relationship with violence with each of the family members, but the other funding is very serious, which is that women associate an increase in violence in the public and the private sphere with the presence of arms or of military personnel and it was very dramatic to see that such a grand number of women are victims in the private sphere so we can say that the first war against women in Colombia is something that happens at home and I'm gonna leave it there and we can talk a little bit more about the statistics in this feature and we're gonna have Mary Elbergs here who is going to comment more and really illustrate what we're talking about. Thank you so much for each of your outlining of this campaign and I think where we have to maybe take a moment if you would and each of you help our audience, our viewing audience as well, how does sexual violence transform communities and what happens to the victims and can you give us a better understanding for those who may not have really dealt with this issue from a conflict side or thank you for bringing forward the domestic side but can you talk a little bit more about this kind of cycle of normalization that occurs in conflict settings in particular around the very dimensions of sexual violence and I really appreciate how you expanded on those types of sexual violence and most people just think it's rape but really looking at the multiple ways in which women's lives become regulated and that their sexuality is regulated I think adds a level of nuance to the study overall. So I'll turn to each of you. For us women victims who are in these processes of leadership and empowerment, we came to the conclusion that sexual violence is a power in the public and private spheres. For example, armed groups have power over the victims with their arms and with their uniforms and in the household, I wanna talk a little bit about in as an organization, we have workshops and schools in the nine regions of the country where we're at where we see a very high rate of sexual violence with girls and boys. The Colombian state is required to look after the home and the school, which are two places where we see the greatest amount of sexual violence. In the home, the father rapes because he's the father, the stepfather because he's the stepfather and so we come to the conclusion that it's abuse of power, that's what sexual violence is. That abuse of power happens when we're raped or intimidated with threats and that's why we are silent for so many years because the greatest threat is that if we say anything, they might kill us or our families. So for us, we find the better option is to stay silent for years because we take care of the family, we take care of our children, all of this familial environment, we take care of it so that nothing happens to them. But in this process, we want to break that silence and raise our voices and no longer have fear of those threats. This is where we all come together against sexual violence and raising this voice and we have a voice. This is where we raise awareness so that more women come forward and we make the entire society aware of the fact that it's not our fault and that the problem is stigmatization. When we're first raped, we feel that it is our fault because we were on such a street because we were wearing a shirt that we liked to wear. Also in that moment, all of the things that happened to us, how we're dressed, it takes us a lot of years to really think about it and say it was not my fault because I was wearing a low-cut shirt. But it takes many years before we were wearing a low-cut shirt again because we have that scar. So stigmatization is a problem but today we have been able to have the society become more aware and families as well because we're very stigmatized by families. In my case, I was highly criticized by my family and for many years I had to stay quiet, stay silent but now I've told my mother who's 86 years old what had happened to me and she was able to understand that and now my family is proud of me, they support me, I have two wonderful children who have become men and they have learned from me how you also need to prevent sexual violence within the household. So we need to think about research in Colombia from a feminist point of view. We have to see violence as part of a continuum in the life of women in Colombia. Women inevitably in the whole period of their lives do confront violence but even before we're born and after we die we suffer violence. A lot of times people want boys and not girls and so there we are from the very beginning but I think the violence that we're seeing as Angela says is an exercise of power. The patriarchy uses it as an instrument to discipline and punish women to control women and to take control over the bodies of women and take away their sexual and reproductive autonomy from that perspective. We understand that sexual violence is not just rape. It's, if we begin with the idea that it's a threat against the autonomy of women to have control over her reproductive and sexual health if we talk about forced prostitution, forced sterilization, forced domestic labor, that kind of violence exists in families and so there are women who are forcibly made into domestic servants in the family level so we were very clear and we started from the assumption that violence and sexual violence is not something that is invented by the armed conflict or by armed actors but rather in the context of an armed conflict, armed actor who has control of weapons and has power over various spaces ends up taking this private violence into the public sphere and you see very grotesque examples of this. There's torture in the household but if you put a 15-year-old girl in the public plaza with her hair shaved off, that's another level of violence that happens in the public square as well. So sexual violence is associated with other forms of violence and that's an important thing to keep in mind. Women in general haven't just experienced one episode of violence but several episodes of violence in the course of their lives and that's something we discovered in this survey as well. I'd like to take up a question you asked from the beginning. How does this help the process of peace? We also believe that in the country or in any society but definitely in the Colombian society, it's a very patriarchal society. Sometimes the world sees it as a very modern country, maybe open to new realities, highly developed countries but it's a country where patriarchy is alive and well and it naturalizes and justifies violence against women. As Angela Maria was saying in Colombia, her experience is that women are blamed for being raped because maybe they were drinking or they went out with their friends or because of something that she did or I don't want you to be pregnant so you have to have an abortion. All of us, no matter what country we live in, know about these types of situations. So how does this contribute to peace? I think one of the biggest challenges that we have as women in Colombian society is to really guarantee that these types of things are not repeated, that there's no recurrence. With transitional justice, we're not going to be able to reach the great majority of women but we have to make sure that these types of things don't happen again and that's why the survey is so important to show the magnitude of the problem and to say that the country can't turn its back on more than a million women if we talk about the women represented in this survey and the past one. And so women need reparations and I think the only way to make sure the reparations happen is to ensure that these types of behaviors don't continue. I think we all understand because we live in societies where patriarchy is strong but I think this is a very important aspect of the work. Well, we tried to divide up the labor a little bit so we wouldn't all have to respond to everything but I have a few things to add in the survey. It was very difficult to identify and de-link armed actors in the public and private spheres. In other words, many women were able to identify what kind of armed actor raped them or abused their power against them but there's another matter which is that in the daily life, many men are linked in one way or the other to the armed groups. So they may say that something happened in the private sphere but they didn't identify that member of the family with one of the armed groups at the moment and so that's part of the complexities of what we're having to deal with. The other thing is the use of weapons. In one of five cases, some type of weapon was used in the expression of sexual violence against the women and that's also very serious and the organizations that are part of the campaign have also realized that the militarization of daily life is an important factor so you don't necessarily have to have armed actors but the war in itself has generated some sensitivity and has permeated relationships in both public and private spheres and so there's expressions that are exacerbated because of the war. I wanted to share about the campaign and the survey when we were starting it was a big challenge to make sure that women victims would also share their voices and share their cases and I'm telling you it was very difficult because very few women wanted to talk about their stories and they didn't want any kind of sort of yellow journalism about how horrible it was. They needed to understand that the truth was being told so that these things wouldn't happen again and as Angela was saying, so many other women have gone through this and so it was important for them to speak up to help those women to understand they were not alone and so the challenge was to find someone like a journalist, Jeanette Melodia, who we involved. She has an important role in a big newspaper in the country and she shared her own experience. Her case has not been investigated or punished and so she talked about the whole problem with the access of justice and I think her voice helped others to raise their voices and to create organizations for victims and it made it possible for the issue of sexual violence to begin to be questioned instead of so normalized because it was a topic that very few people spoke about and then after that, there have been a number of campaigns and it has become a point on the public agenda and so with women's organizations, feminist organizations and victims organization, sexual violence was a primary topic on the negotiating table in Havana as well. This last point for a moment and just ask you, how were men engaged in the story? Thank you. I'm so engaged. Just keep talking to all, sorry. I'll let everyone in on this discussion now. So my question to you is really the engagement of women's groups and for the most part this campaign has been about violence against women so I'm interested in how you have engaged men in this process and men allies and champions and I ask this in anticipation for my next question which is about your upcoming new government in Colombia so I'm going to turn it over to you to help us understand how you've engaged the other 50%. Well, in the campaign itself, we have some mixed organizations and men have participated as delegates in the campaigns and the discussions that we've had and we have reached the agreement that war and sexual violence in private spheres have affected women primarily and so that's at the center and so the men have helped us a great deal to make the situation visible, to question relationships of domination the prevalent forms of masculinity that we have and I want to let other people talk about this. Well, I'm not as generous about this man as Marta is in the sense that while it's true that some men have been sensitized to the issue but even the men in human rights organizations who are allies on this theme continue to believe that violence against women, sexual violence is a secondary problem and so that's why I'm not so generous sometimes with the men who are trying to be our allies. I think we have won some space little by little in some sectors but we're always sort of on a second level of priority that maybe disappeared people are more important or kidnapped people but in a proof of this in a proof of this is that in the mobilizations that we do for example in November last year in our not won less campaign there were very few women, very few men sorry it was very remarkable how few participated and I think if you, well I do believe that men need to transform the kinds of masculinity that they are embodying now and they need to talk not as individual men but men as a group about why this kind of violence is being exercised against women. We as feminists are primarily looking to increase the autonomy of women that more women will speak up for themselves and say no I'm not gonna let you to do this and so it's true that we can have partnerships with men and groups where there are men involved but I think we don't have enough allies who are really willing to make sexual violence and violence against women a priority for them so I think we're still on that path I don't know if Angela has another opinion she's maybe more optimistic or less optimistic no in our organization we have also found men who have been victims of sexual violence and it's very hard for men to talk about being victims because obviously they've been violated by other men and they say oh I feel more ashamed and so I agree with what both Olga and Marta said there's very few men who are really committed to this struggle to really support women's organizations and victims' organizations so it's a lot of work that needs to be done with men we understand we need to do that work from the time that they're little boys because that's the only way of transforming the situation for example I was raped three times once when I was 14 once when I was 35 and when I was 35 there were three members of the paramilitary groups and once again when I was 42 I was raped by my life partner and so I think this campaign has helped women to talk about the different types of violations that we have experienced we know women who have been victims of rapes by different actors different armed actors and this has also led to a situation in which women are the ones who are really having to work on building a new kind of masculinity in our areas. Thank you for now that was it is a long struggle and an important one nevertheless and before I turn this over to Mary I would like just to have you think about how you're going to translate this campaign to the next government what is your strategy? I'm trying to figure out sort of how to change the question I think with the new government that's going to begin on August 7th and those of you who don't know it will be now the presidency of Ivan Duque who's from the Democratic Center Party but we have a challenge right now with the Congress that is just going to start on next Friday their new session when we talk about sexual violence which is the main issue we're trying to get on the public agenda in Columbia it's been really hard to get the implementation of the negotiated peace agreement already and with the new government and the new Congress we see a number of threats that the agreement may not be implemented one of the primary achievements of the agreements was that women and victims were present at the negotiating table we were they were invited on a number of occasions to put their topics on the table victims were there for the signing of the agreement and the gender focus was mainstreamed throughout the six points of the agreement and in the chapter on ethnic groups and so we need to defend the implementation the full implementation of the peace accords in addition to talking about our specific issues and that's at risk now because there's efforts to disarticulate and to take apart issues that are at the very center of the peace agreements and I'm going to let my colleagues talk about that I think the new government won't have too much problem understanding that sexual violence is a crime against humanity and that we have to punish those who are responsible for those crimes but they deal with it in a different way they're more permissive about violations committed by the army than they are about violence committed by the guerrilla groups and so I think it's critical and we've talked about this recently that the new government is from the Centro Democrático Party and they were opposed to the dialogue process and they won the referendum process when the question was asked whether people agreed or not with the peace process there's very few countries in the world that vote against peace but the no vote won in Colombia by a very small margin and that sort of set the horizon for what could be done on the agreement and there's three main weaknesses in the party that's going to have control of the government now one is that they want to have a new referendum to modify everything that has to do with transitional justice and reparations and the special jurisdiction for peace and the Accords on Participation because now the guerrilla group is able to participate politically but they want to reverse that and the other issue is that the there's some constitutional issues coming up and what I mean to say that there was part of the agreements that need to be incorporated into the constitution and they want to have a referendum to modify those three points and it's possible that they could win and so those of us who want peace want to need to be working on that as well. When we're talking about sexual violence with the victims of the conflict most want is to know the truth. There was a female senator who proposed that sexual violence for people under 18 years of age passed to a process that leads to impunity but most women suffered sexual violence when they were underage so these women are never going to know the truth. This is part of the disarticulation of the agreement is to have a special chamber for members of the military so there's going to be total impunity they're going to have, there's going to be a different treatment for them that's going to favor the military and the democratic center so recognizes so we see the business challenge for the new government how are they going to start changing things that are in the agreement? As organizations we are concerned with the implementation of what was agreed upon in Havana we need to make sure that that is fully implemented or if not we're going to be facing many risks in this country. Really moving to the future with what are your new challenges in front of you I'm going to turn us for a few minutes a reflection from Mary Ellsberg on the study itself Mary has been doing a similar prevalent study in South Sudan she's going to talk about its possible use for policy shaping and really what kind of impact did these studies have not only on the individuals and the society but certainly the governance so thank you Mary. Thank you. First of all I would like to congratulate my colleagues here for an excellent study and as far as I know one of the very first prevalent studies on sexual violence in Latin America and one of the few that we have internationally this has really been a problem in addressing sexual violence in conflict we have very little prevalence data and if you can't show often with numbers how common or what the impact of violence is it's very hard to get policy makers often most of whom are men to take it seriously so some people ask why do we have to do these studies and in my view that's the reason one story of a woman being raped should be enough for policy makers to take it seriously but usually it's not some of the things that I think are real strengths of the study is that it really shows the intersection between conflict and violence against women both in public and in private spaces measuring violence against women is already difficult methodologically and ethically and through studies organized or led by the World Health Organization we have a pretty good idea of how to measure different forms of violence in peace times when you add the issue of conflict it becomes methodologically more complicated because part of what we want to understand there's more emphasis on who the perpetrators were and there's more emphasis on when the violence occurred usually we look at lifetime violence and we look at violence in the last year but here they studied five year periods because they're really trying to understand violence that took place during specific periods of the conflict and so that is something innovative and it's very hard to do they also paid a lot of attention to ethical and safety concerns and that's something that I also really want to acknowledge and congratulate you on we also know that doing this kind of research can put women at risk sometimes at risk of their lives for either reprisals from a perpetrator either in the home or in this case in the community but also it can lead to revictimizing and retraumatizing women most of the time we find that women really appreciate the opportunity to talk about their experiences with somebody who listens to them in a non-judgmental and empathetic way and the interviewers you trained clearly had that kind of experience but you still need to have lots of protocols in place as to what you do if a woman becomes very distressed or if the husband comes home or how to make sure that there's nobody else in the room and another ethical requirement is to ensure that you can give her access to counseling services or information that she needs to be able to heal from her process and I understand that that was also one of the issues that was very well dealt with in the study another strength of the study is that it looked at more than one type of sexual violence and this has been a big discussion within the field of whether sexual violence in conflict settings refers only to violence committed by armed actors outside the domestic sphere often in many studies that's all they ask about they only ask about have you been raped by somebody who was by an armed actor and we know that that's very incomplete rape is not the only form of sexual violence and I think one of the good things you did in adapting the survey to the conditions of Columbia was including forms of violence that I hadn't even thought of and didn't really understand when I saw the regulation of social life I thought that was talking about marital control your husband not allowing you to work or to go out or something and when they explained to me in our meetings prior to this that it refers to what armed actors are doing by humiliating women, stigmatizing them trying to control their actions in the public sphere that's very important to capture as well as all the other forms of sexual harassment and reproductive control which we're paying a lot more attention to either forced pregnancies or forced abortions so I think those are all really, really good and I also liked the fact that the study was done through a coalition or a partnership of researchers and women's organizations and this is very much the model that we've used with the World Health Organization to have both research institutions as well as women's organizations partnering as equal partners and we found that that leads to much better quality of results it's women's organizations first of all know which questions to ask they know how to ask them they know how to train and help to recruit high quality interviewers they know how to support the process and support both the researchers and the respondents during this process because just as an aside this kind of research can be held on the researchers as well who are reliving their own experiences of violence or just listening to these terrible stories of torture and humiliation over and over and then finally women's organizations know what to do with the results and we as researchers so often do studies that we think are amazingly important and we just can't believe that the whole world isn't listening to it and it's often because we haven't really engaged stakeholders from the beginning and so the way that you've done it as part of this campaign and this partnership I think is really important I'll say a word or two about how I think your findings fit into what we know globally about sexual violence and conflict and compared both to research we've done and that I'm completing right now in Nicaragua which is currently going through a very severe conflict situation but also research that we did in South Sudan last year and presented at GW and in London with IRC one of the big results and it comes out here is that not only is violence against women sexual violence by armed actors it's not the most common form of sexual violence even in countries like Democratic Republic of Congo or South Sudan which are known for enormous levels of sexual violence even in South Sudan where 30% of the women that we interviewed had been raped by an armed actor or in the context of conflict the number of women who had been raped by their husbands was much higher and it's not for us to say which one is worse we tend to think automatically being raped by an armed actor is the worst thing that could happen but I would like to ask Martha I'm guessing the three different ways that you were violated were all very traumatic and very painful in different ways so we need to be paying attention to that and when we talk as Olga said did about the continuum of violence we need to understand that women are experiencing many different forms of violence throughout their lives so that brings me to just a small piece that I'd like to say about how I think this kind of research could be even more strengthened and that's based on now because of studies like the two studies in Columbia and other research we now know a lot more about how to measure violence in conflict against women and some of the things that we think are very important is to not only study sexual violence but to include other forms of violence such as physical violence and economic violence and emotional violence which we know can also be devastating for women that requires a slightly different methodology we need to be able to distinguish violence in the home and exactly what's taking place so child sexual abuse by an uncle or a father is not the same as intimate partner violence so sort of how you frame it in terms of if it's within the home the relationship to the perpetrator and then what happens in the context specifically related to armed violence is really important and one of the reasons it's important is because we need to understand it if we're going to have good policies and services for women we need to be able to understand it for the peace agreements and how we expect the government to implement them and so that requires asking more than just the violence you've experienced in the last five years it's really important to actually because that will not cover child sexual abuse what Marta experienced as a child would not have showed up and so if you include those different experiences over a lifetime you will get it will be much more than 18% I can promise you that even the demographic health survey a few years ago in Columbia found that about 44% if I remember correctly of women were abused by an intimate partner in their lifetimes so that's that and then I think the last thing I'll just say very quickly about does it make a difference and in my experience doing this for example in Nicaragua 20 years ago in 1995 I had that experience of policymakers who were not willing to talk about changing the laws unless we had these numbers and once we developed the numbers did these surveys and found that 50% of women had experienced intimate partner violence it only took us less than six months to get a unanimous voting on new domestic violence on the first domestic violence law and that's not just because we had the numbers but because the women's movement knew how to use them and you know all the parliamentarians with petitions from women signing that they urged them to pass the laws it took a lot of lobbying and sitting outside the parliament and a lot of TV and radio spots telling parliamentarians listen we vote just remember we're half the electorate and we expect you to pass this law and when it had no political viability when we started the study you know all together less than a year later we got unanimous voting because nobody wanted to be the guy who voted who did not vote against violence against women so again I really acknowledge you and I think what you do now in terms of using the data to to monitor what the state is doing and to make sure that they implement the agreements and then also to to strengthen services to make the case for the importance of increased services for women and to make the case for why it is so important that the women's movement have a strong voice at the table and that's just the last thing I'll say is that in a study of many many countries over 50 countries looking at what was the major factor that led to or that could predict whether a country would have strong domestic violence programs and laws it was having a strong autonomous women's movement and so again I congratulate you all and really look forward to hearing what you do with the research Thank you so much Mary and thanks for really connecting the dots around research and the partnership with civil society and particularly women's groups very important to eliminate that we have just under 15 minutes for some Q&A and I'm looking to my colleague Thomas we have already people raising their hands what I would like to do is just get as many questions on the floor and then turn it over to the panel so if you could stand up state your name your organization and very briefly your question will move this forward I think your hand was up first your hand is second do I have a third I feel like I'm in an auction a third okay and do I have a fourth thank you very much please I'm going to have you take the mic because we're on video live streaming I have several questions but I'll summarize them into one Thank you my name is Colin Sodongo I have an organization that initiated for peace and development but I'm finalizing my PhD in police and administration with Walden University in public police and administration measuring on terrorism, peace and mediation my question goes to the last speaker Mary I was a little bit concerned on when you mentioned that the policy implementers are very resistant to integrating issues of women but I was very keen when you're giving a presentation my real question is how does the research integrate the traditional cultures because I'm realizing that sexual violence sexually within the context of culture is very sacred in other cultures people don't even debate it publicly they're whispered in the corridors so sometimes when you go out there and you want to engage the community about sex violence and all that I'm concerned how do you integrate the traditions and cultures in mainstreaming sexual issues so that there could be behavior change because I'm seeing one danger of sexual violence being a monologue from the advocacy component and leaving the perpetrators who will happen to be men because ultimately they must be in the equation to be part of the change process so my concern is how do you mainstream cultural diversity to address and mitigate sexual violence and the last question is for the Colombia congratulations on taking this courage are you addressing such of sexual violence in isolation or there are other main root causes that needs to be addressed from the policy so that at least there would be some long lasting solution to the problem thank you for those cogent questions I'm going to go to the back here thank you my name is Nyaashen Quathroma I'm a youth leader currently at the USIP South Sudan youth leader I work with an organization called Assistant Mission for Africa as the piece of the community security officer and I also participated in a project called beam of hope I dealt with women who are sexually abused and so far we got a number of 125 women who are sexually abused and they managed to come out and talk about their experiences and also we provided psychosocial support and some other things for these women my question is as I was doing this research I went through the cultural barrier in South Sudan culturally you are not supposed to talk about sex live alone being sexually abused if you talk about it you are rejected by the community you are rejected by your own family because as a girl if you are sexually abused your family are going to lose being married or getting a husband nobody from the community will be willing to marry you which is a big shame to the family so your parents automatically they don't want to be associated with something like that so they make sure you are silent and if you are married your own husband can leave you for that and the whole community will look at you like someone who is having a big problem so automatically you are being blamed you didn't have any hand in it you are a victim but you are not being considered a victim you are being punished for what happened to you all these community barriers and all these cultural barriers in South Sudan they made so many South Sudanese women to be in silence they made them not to come out they made them live under the fear I don't know in Colombia does it relate to South Sudan how the community takes it is it okay to talk about it community wise and how your parents or your family takes it that's my question thank you so much the third question is right here thank you all so much for your presentation today and for conducting this research my name is Opta Garga I work with Prune I have a very quick question are there any plans or how do you plan on continuing to track rates of violence going forward we know that violence is not the prevalence of violence is not going to diminish now in the transition and especially with youth who have born witness to violence throughout their lives are highly likely to either exhibit or perpetrate violence going forward so how to keep this going forward and any initiatives to prevent violence in the future wonderful I'm going to stop here and I think we have a set of questions for Mary and then I'm going to ask each of you beginning with Olga to comment on the question and bring your final statement so Mary to you first and then we'll work back and Marta finish and thank you for the two questions and comments about South Sudan it's great to have people with much more experience than I in the room around the question of how we talk about an integrate culture and tradition and also how do we get women to talk about something that is so secret and so shameful I would say in a few ways from the survey side that comes back to safety and confidentiality and the kind of rapport that you can develop with women and having field workers that are very well trained it has to be in complete privacy they have to understand informed consent procedure that everything they say will be a secret and of course it's underreported still but you know 30% of women that's a lot of women who told us about their experiences of rape most of them probably had never told anybody and most of them probably their parents and their family did not know so again probably it was for many women that's actually a very very empowering experience that somebody want cares enough to ask you and wants to hear the whole story and we always end with a script that basically sort of says to her I know you've been through something very difficult you didn't deserve that nobody deserves to be treated that way and finally I can see that you're a very strong woman and a survivor so it's words that help to make her feel that what she's just done and contributed and what she's been through is something that she should you know if not feel proud of but understand that it's not something to be ashamed of so that's one piece in public we never ask women about their experiences of violence not in focus groups not with health providers or stakeholders that would be very dangerous and they won't talk about it but there we can talk about norms and culture so with our survey in South Sudan before we did the survey we did spend a year doing qualitative research and talking to community men and women from different communities and tribes different age groups we spoke to Boma chiefs the community local traditional chiefs we just talked to a lot of different people to understand what they thought the most important forms of violence were and what we got from the men and the chiefs was very different from what we got from the women particularly in the refugee camps and they see tradition in a very different way and that's how we found out that actually some of the traditions that are very common in South Sudan like polygamy bride price so basic which is not meant to be a commercial transaction but it has become a commercial transaction you can literally measure a girl's worth by how many cows she will bring in and obviously if she's been abused or raped she brings in less cows and child marriage which is very linked also to the acquisition of cattle and it's a strategy for regaining wealth after violence so it's really connected so I just want to say to end there that I think that sometimes some of these traditional forms that we don't normally think of as sexual violence or violence against women we just think of them as the way it's always been women often acknowledge that that's the way it's always been but if they're given an opportunity to think about it and to dream of or to hear that it's not always that way everywhere else those often become the most important forms of violence that women want to deal with thank you Mary Olga in Colombia like in all places of the world sexual violence is the only crime where the victim is shamed and the victim is made to feel guilty it's expressed in different ways depending on the cultural context of course it's very difficult to talk about sexual violence in indigenous communities in Colombia because of the types of organization the lines of authority that they have there and what happens in our work when we work with indigenous women is that we see they when they report the violence the authority decides not to punish the victimizer especially if it's one of the authorities that has been the victimizer and so some of the mechanisms that we have used is to tell women that anything she says is going to be secret and that they won't be identified in the database and that it will be part of commitment to women but that we would never use her name as part of the reporting that that's an ethical principle don't worry we're not going to use names and we also like to talk about working with women's organizations because if someone does need some attention or care we can refer them to a women's organization finally no women's group or feminist group in Colombia believes that sexual violence is the only problem that women have if we situate the situation to be redundant if we talk about women's place in a patriarchal society with many injustices and exclusion sexual violence is just one part of that system and sometimes women have more power if they have better jobs and what we are seeing that is women with fewer economic opportunities are more likely to be victims of sexual violence so we need to have comprehensive policies that keep in mind cultural and psychosocial needs of the women but I think the fundamental problem is that women need to have more autonomy and more control over their lives and they need to be able to make decisions about fundamental aspects of their lives when you're a victim of sexual violence that's a very critical situation for women and we have to figure out whether or not we're going to report it because we have to prove to the government structure the police structure that we are innocent and that means we sometimes try to work together however it's very hard because you get re-victimized and there's a lot of stigmatization in terms of culture we've always said that sexual violence is not cultural in indigenous territories yes it's very difficult to talk about this because they have their own laws they have laws that we can't go over and above and so sometimes it's hard to encourage them but we do see that indigenous women want to have more justice and they also realize that they are more likely to be judged than the perpetrators themselves the women are always considered more guilty so when we join together and work together we can work on prevention talking about it is part of prevention when you don't talk about what happened to you you're preventing the same kind of violence from happening to another woman silence makes people more vulnerable so talking about it is a way of preventing sexual violence well it looks like it's my turn last more than the questions I'd like to focus on a couple of topics and that is that we are in fact here and the topic of sexual violence has been essential in Colombia but we are also in a moment where we want to make sure that the agreement is implemented because that is what can guarantee that women who have victimized sexual violence but also other victims be able to have access to the truth justice reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence because that's what's really going to lead to a lasting peace we also need and also want to continue working on the topic of sexual violence not just in the context of armed conflicts but also in the household we want to make sure that the state focus on what it needs to do prevention, sanctioning and reparations for women who have suffered all kinds of violence also, before we step up I want to mention that there is a phenomenon that is really concerning it in the last month we've seen threats and murders against leaders and advocates and people who have been demanding their lands in the country we think that they need to be guaranteed for people who are in these roles if not there will not be any lasting peace in the country thank you very much I'm listening outside we have a thunderstorm so I think a few extra minutes to avoid the rain isn't a bad idea but in closing I personally have moderated many many events over the years here and I have just been I've learned a great deal really thought provoking ideas really leadership at its very best in terms of bringing together research advocacy and a plan moving forward and I just also really want to congratulate you for your leadership it's global leadership it's not just leadership in Colombia so on behalf of USIP the organizers and others I want to thank you Marta Angela Olga and Mary for your inputs today thank you for the audience inputs and I hope you'll join me in thanking them