 I think we're live now and I want to welcome you all. Thank you very much for your patience today in DC. For those of you who are joining us by webcast, we have a weather condition and thus there are many, many delays. So good morning and welcome to the event, Sexual Violence During War and Peace. My name is Kathleen Kinist. I direct the Center for Gender and Peace Building here at the US Institute of Peace. And for those of you who are new to UCIP or USIP, as we fondly call the Institute, we are an independent federally funded institution established by Congress over 30 years ago and dedicated to the mitigation of international violent conflict. USIP achieves its mission through active engagements in world's conflict zones through teaching and training, research and analysis and practical application. We are webcasting today's event and so we would like to welcome our virtual viewers for this 90 minute program. If you are interested in tweeting, please see us at hashtag USIP gender. Since 2009, one of the key issues that the Center for Gender and Peace Building has focused on has been conflict related sexual violence. Our Missing Peace Initiative has sought to close the gap in our analysis, especially bringing together researchers, practitioners and policymakers to address this most difficult nexus of issues. Annually we bring together a group of young global researchers from different academic disciplines to discuss their research challenges and to find better ways of communicating the results of their studies with practitioners and policymakers. We will do this again this spring so I hope you will revisit this effort through our www.usip.org, our website and learn more about this effort. So to begin, one of the ways that the Institute and our Center has really expanded their understanding of this nexus of work has been through both our Peace Scholars Program and our Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow Program. Dr. Yelka Buston, to my right, has played a significant role in helping to shape our ideas, understand our research and to look at how all of this is applied in our practice. She was one of the Institute's first Jennings Randolph Senior Fellows to address sexual violence and conflict settings. And most recently, she has published her book which is right here, Sexual Violence During War and Peace, Gender, Power and Post-Conflict Justice in Peru. Not only does she ask critical questions about truth and reconciliation commissions and their utility for addressing trauma at the community and individual levels, but she also draws attention to the use of sexual violence by state actors as well as by extremist groups. In the case that Yelka will be discussing this morning, it takes us back several decades to a group called The Shining Path and Its Impact in Peru. Her insights from research are particularly relevant today as the White House draws together international experts looking at countering violent and extremism. And so we're most interested, again, in trying to bring all of these areas of focus together and to find out how we may do more to prevent such violence. We will begin with Yelka presenting her findings and then I will introduce our two discussants, Dr. Kimberly Tiden and Dr. Tanya Adams, who will both bring their research to bear upon Dr. Bustins. And so without further delay, Yelka, I'd like to ask you to take the floor, so to speak, and the microphone is right there. And thank you very much for coming in from London last evening through the storm and happy to see you back here. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Kathleen, for having me, for inviting me here to present my book at USIP. Part of this book was written here in 2011, 2012, during the winter, facilitated by Jennings Randolph, Senior Fellowship. So it really is a pleasure to be able to actually present the results here. Thank you all for coming, for being interested in the theme of sexual violence and conflict, but also for being interested in this particular case study, which normally does not receive a lot of political interest. So it's good to have you here. And I'm very grateful to Tanya and to Kimberly to share this with me. Now the questions that I raise here in this book were a product of a conversation that I had more than 10 years ago with an elderly woman in the town of Ayacucho, in the highlands of Peru. I was then doing research for my first book. I had no, I was not questioning yet this particular theme of sexual violence and conflict, but Ayacucho, this place where I did my research, had been the center of political violence between shining path, as Kathleen mentioned, and the army in the 1980s and 90s. And I was carrying out interviews with women who had actively defied such political violence. And this woman, Senora Theodora, she told me about her heroism, her and her friends, how she went to army bases and police stations to demand information about disappeared friends and family, how she organized a network of women throughout the department, by, with lack of phones and the internet of course, walking the mountains to exchange information hidden on pieces of paper in her multiple skirts. And in 1988, she told me then, she organized a march in the middle of the town in Ayacucho, openly defying the army and shining path who was trying to infiltrate her march. And these were no mean feats in an environment in which any political expression was easily and violently attacked from either side. But then, Senora Theodora, in the same breath as telling this story of defying political violence, she said that she had to withdraw from this activism, this group that she had established, because her husband beat her so badly that she had to go to the hospital. And that's where this research started. I asked, how can violence have such different meanings? How can you interpret in principle similar acts of physical violence in such different ways? So the notion that seemingly equal acts of physical violence can have a range of different meanings, consequences, and responses, led me to think about how sexual violence in so-called war and peacetime is understood differently. And if so, how such differentiated meaning then affects the way in which society and the state respond to such violence. Understandings of violence shift over time, of course. Over geography, it depends on the social, political and cultural contexts in which it takes place. But it does shape how individuals, families, and communities make sense of their experiences. And today, the latest shift in understanding sexual violence has brought it to the center of the global political agenda, a relatively recent shift in how we understand such violence. Currently, the general understanding of such violence is that rape is used as an effective weapon of war. And I'm sure that most of you are familiar with this idea. Rape terrorizes and destroys communities by attacking the bodies of women, deliberately and strategically. Such an analysis of rape as a weapon of war has been useful to get the issue of sexual violence in conflict on the global political agenda. However, increasingly evidence from different war zones shows that the reality is much more complex. To return to Signora Theodora in Highland, by Kucil, how can sexual violence that Peruvian women endured from soldiers and other armed actors from shining path in prisons, in army bases, in village squares, and indeed in their own homes be clearly distinguished from the everyday violence that husbands inflict on them? What use is such a distinction and to what extent do women feel that there is a real distinction? Many women who testified before the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission said that they were raped and beaten and were forced to cook and clean over several weeks. And they said, he treated me as his wife. Now what does that say about peacetime relations? In addition, how should we understand gang rape of bodies when there is nobody to intimidate? And even the raped woman will die or is already dead. Where is the strategy in those actions? How do we understand racist and sexist language in rape scenarios? This book is a reflection of those questions, not necessarily an answer. So first the book examines how sexual violence was used by the different armed forces who participated in the conflict between shining path and the government during the 1980s and 2000. The analysis is based on the testimonies given to the Truth Commission which was established between 2001 and 2003. And that offers a collection of testimonies from both victim survivors, witnesses and perpetrators of such violence. The cover picture of the book which you just saw here is one of such testimonies. The image was painted by the survivor of the conflict and this one as well. So the Truth Commission concluded that rape was used systematically and was used as a weapon of war. Looking closely at the testimonies from the Proven Truth and Reconciliation Commission showed that sexual violence was indeed not random. Certain groups were more vulnerable and the army was more prone to using such violence as compared to shining path. Although shining path used different types of sexual violence to attack the broader populations as well. So sexual violence was definitely used as a weapon, as a tool. But what I found particularly interesting was that the perpetration of sexual violence reflected patterns of such violence in peacetime. Instead of destroying communities which is central to the idea of rape as a weapon of war, sexual violence appeared to have an important productive quality. It produced and reproduced inequalities based on race and class and gender whereby soldiers would target certain groups using racist insults against their victims. Rape helps reproduce military masculinities. It reproduces heteronormativity related to military masculinities and it was productive of hierarchies between soldiers. More important soldiers would, for example, get access and would get sexual privileges over better women whereby better women was defined according to race and class. So I found in this particular case study that rape was productive in ways not new or extraordinary but along lines of known scripts and hierarchies or the existing inequalities in society. These known scripts were to a certain extent also reflected in how the Truth Commission dealt with cases of rape or more broadly how mechanisms of transitional justice, Truth Commissions, reparations programs, human rights trials were implemented. In the book I discussed several examples of how interviewers imposed their own interpretations of victim survivor's stories. Sometimes denying rape because they felt, the interviewer felt, that it didn't fit the script of what a perpetrator would be or what a victim would be. Women who might have agreed to sex in exchange for information about loved ones or in exchange for a promise to be released or women who learned to live with the continuous threat of rape by committing to one or two regulars were these women and girls raped or were they not? Perhaps these are old questions from where we sit to ask them but these were very real questions for the women, for the interviewers and of course also for the prosecutors and the courts. Sometimes very well meaning members of the Truth Commission dismissed women's suffering by imposing good motherhood upon women who were struggling to raise children product of rape. Again, I discuss a specific case that is exemplary in the book. In addition, we could look at with all the attention for sexual violence that there is very little attention paid to women's other stories of violence and of resistance and of defiance. It is as if being a victim of sexual violence precludes any agency and if women are not involved in defying the political violence in the first place or in shaping the circumstances under which that violence takes place. So the understandings of conflict related sexual violence tend to be framed by preconceived ideas of what it means to be raped. Perhaps unsurprisingly, no cases of sexual violence were ever prosecuted in the Peruvian case. And as I'm sure that many of you know, prosecuting rape is in any circumstance very difficult in peacetime in whatever institutional space. And it's also very difficult in the case of war-related human rights trials. But in this particular cases of war-related human rights trials, rape tend to be seen as a lesser crime in comparison to other crimes against humanity. And there are several other reasons in particular in relation to the Peruvian case why it's so difficult or why it seems to be so difficult to prosecute cases of rape in the current series of human rights trials and the prosecutions about which we can talk later if you want to. Now the idea that wartime rape is productive of existing inequality, reproducing stereotypes and social relations that are known and understood stands in contrast to the idea that the violence of soldiers or armed actors is different from the violence of husbands. As Senora Theodora then indicated. So in order to further investigate this link defining that the conflict-related sexual violence cannot be divorced from peacetime normative frameworks and lived realities, I examined how the state deals with so-called family violence in order to make that link between wars what happened to Senora Theodora during war and her colleagues during war to what happened to her during the war but in the private space of her home. So I looked at what happened in peacetime after the war with non-conflict-related cases of largely domestic violence. Now first we need to realize that domestic violence including sexual violence, both sexual and physical violence in Peru is very high. The estimates are between 50 and 69% of Peruvian women experience physical or sexual violence and or sexual violence during their lifetime. This is very high also in relation to other high prevalence countries. And that has to be seen of course in light of a confluence of factors including a history of racial and class violence, colonial patriarchal violence, persistent structural violence marginalization and indeed the recent history of conflict and related violence. But my main interest in this book was to look at how come the state, despite 20 years of implementing programs or at least on paper and reforming legislation in support of women, very little changed in relation to the protection of women, mitigating violence, reducing violence or actually prosecuting perpetrators. Now why that is, you can read in the book. But the main point is that there hasn't been during those years of programming, including the years of the Truth Commission and the highlighting of sexual violence in war, there has not been really a cultural societal change in how people look and how people judge sexual violence or physical violence against women. So what can we learn from the proving case study in relation to the broader field of gender, peace and security? Considering the current international attention to sexual violence in conflict, it does seem important to come up with some lessons despite the fact that this is a specific case study relevant to Peru. I do believe that there are lessons to be learned that are relevant broader beyond Peru. First of all, sexual violence in conflict might be extraordinary in scale and cruelty, in specific cases, and we know that of those cases that are highlighted, especially these days. But still, such violence is framed by the inequalities, especially the gender inequalities, that exist in societies. To a certain extent, it is an exacerbation of existing violences. That means, this means that to fight such violence in conflict or after conflict, one has to explicitly address and change the normative frameworks that make such violence possible in the first place. Secondly, how sexual violence is defined and understood determines how institutions at national and international levels respond in post-conflict interventions. It determines who is seen as potential victim and thus who is not seen as potential victim. Such definitions often include men and boys, as well as specifically targeted groups such as LGTB, which was very much in the case of the Peruvian Truth Commission. Although violence against transsexuals was addressed very briefly in a last paragraph to one chapter in a volume in the final report of the Peruvian Truth Commission, there is a lot of research to be done about the scale of such violence and what that means in the context of thinking about sexual violence against women. I'm largely talking about sexual violence against women, but that's also largely because of those excluding definitions in this particular case. Definitions also influence who is labeled as a victim and what stories can be told, i.e., they put limits on victims' experiences of violence and of resistance, what can be told, what can be heard, and what can be repaired. So that has consequences for so-called post-conflict justice processes. So thirdly, to have a more lasting transformative effect on peacetime gender relations and prevalence of gender-based violence more broadly, it is important that domestic courts do prosecute conflict-related sexual violence as crimes against humanity, showing the population how serious leaded state takes such crimes. At least it's very difficult to prosecute and there are a lot of people, a lot of victim survivors who do not necessarily want to go to court, fair enough. All very good reasons, there are very good reasons why people would not want that, but there are people who would and it might be important to actually prosecute exemplary cases. And I'm mentioning that specifically in an international context because there are very few cases successfully prosecuted, not only in the case of Peru, the ICC has not prosecuted specifically cases of sexual violence, so that is important to remember. Now fourth, ideally post-conflict reparations programs are comprehensive and adequate according to the need and to the suffering, but more than anything with a focus on the future in order to actually instigate change. And the only way to do that is for the state to show political will and design collective social programs that can help support victim survivors and their children, as well as help mitigate and prevent current and future gender-based violence. This is again why I think it is really important to make that link between domestic violence, public violence in so-called peace time in relation to conflict-related violence. There is a need to break through the societal silence about sexual violence. The recognition and debate has to help bring about cultural shifts and not only a focus on individual victims or individual communities and the social stigma that might be present in those smaller spaces. It's important that broader society starts talking and recognizing these problems and talking about and recognizing them. Right, briefly in conclusion, the current global tension to sexual violence in war is a very important moment to try to get this right. We need to keep the momentum going, of course. But the way that such violence is currently viewed in national and international, transitional and criminal justice does not necessarily challenge the gender binary that is at its heart, but it sometimes reinforces those binaries and thus the inequalities. Through rape myth, which we have addressed in some of the activities we did at USIP and in the Missing Peace Conference, myth around motherhood and what it is to be a mother in cases of children produced through rape, debates about coercion and consent, i.e. when is rape real? This is a debate that is held in relation to peacetime sexual violence, everyday sexual violence, and it returns in post-conflict trials as well. It's the same debate, when is rape, well, it's a slightly different debate because the social political context is different, but the debate around coercion and consent continues to be there. And that is a binary, a very difficult debate where we have to get over that. There's a debate around common crimes and crimes against humanity, especially related to conflict-related sexual violence, but also and persistently around the natural seductiveness of women and the natural urges of men or the vulnerability of women versus the power of men, which are different sides of the same coin is important to recognize. So I would like to break down the binaries to show the complexity of sexual violence overall, both in war and in peace, but also of the gender causes and consequences of war and of gender-based violence more generally. And I'll leave it at that, thank you very much. Thank you, Yelka, and I think we could spend hours now beginning to unpack everything you've just laid out, but certainly you have captured many of the issues that we are talking about in terms of this binary. I like that term, gender binary and the debates that happen in war and post-conflict and in peaceful times as well. Certainly the United States is addressing this not only in the military, but at university college campuses. These are very topical issues today. I realize that those folks who are on webcasts do not have the benefit of the biographies that I hold here. So let me back up for a second and just note that Dr. Boosten is a senior lecturer in emerging economies and international development at King's College London. Before joining King's College, she taught at the University of Leeds and held a research fellowship at the University of Bradford. She holds a PhD in gender and Latin American studies from the University of Amsterdam. Yelka, we'll come back to your comments after the two discussions speak and then after that we'll open it up for comments and questions and answers. Our next speaker that is discussant to talk about Yelka's book is Dr. Kimberly Tiden. She is a medical anthropologist focusing on Latin America. She is currently at the Woodrow Wilson Center here in Washington DC as a fellow. After she ends her fellowship, she will begin her new appointment as the Henry J. Lear Chair in International Humanitarian Studies at the Fletcher School Tufts University. Kimberly, we look forward to your comments. Thank you. This wonderful, thanks so much. And Yelka and I have been in conversation for many, many years. So I'm really delighted to be here, have read and absolutely enjoyed, if you can say enjoyed, reading her book on this topic. What I thought I'd do today is push in a slightly different direction and pull from a book that I'm writing now, Sex of the Security Council, A Greater Measure of Justice. And the chapter I wanna focus on is Hidden in Plain Sight, Children Born of Wartime Sexual Violence. And the spirit of the missing pieces of larger debates. It was late in the day at Lehman College in Brooklyn, New York when Rwandan Genocide Survivor and Activist, Shaqueline Murakete, walked to the podium to recall those lethal 100 days in 1994. She was only nine years old when her entire immediate family and most of her extended family were taken to the river and slaughtered by their Hutu neighbors. There was much to haunt in the memories she shared. I'll focus here on just one. Ms. Murakete referred to the thousands of children born as a result of rape. Noting that for many women who had lost their entire families to the genocidal violence, the baby they birthed might be their only living relative. She paused before adding, these are complicated children for their mothers. Complicated indeed. Over the last two decades as we situate our conversation here, you're all aware that there's been increased international attention to conflict related rape and sexual violence. I won't rehearse the various stages of that. You're aware of it. We get the UN special report on violence against women. We have the two international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. All of this has certainly been a major achievement that we can attribute to international conflict feminism if you will. This jurisprudence is important because it indicates that no longer do we consider sexual crimes to be moral offenses or indignities to honor. Now you have these developments on a complimentary front as you're all aware. We have a series of UN security council resolutions focused on the important role women play in conflict prevention, resolution and peace building efforts while simultaneously denouncing the use of rape and sexual violence against women and girls in situations of armed conflict. As you know, these series of resolutions are referred to as the women, peace and security agenda. Each one demands the complete cessation of all acts of sexual violence by all parties to armed conflicts and ends by lamenting how slow the progress to date has been. Now, in addition to insisting on the need to protect children from rape and sexual violence and armed conflict and post-conflict situations, resolution 2122 specifically notes, quote, the need for access to the full range of sexual and reproductive health services, including regarding pregnancies resulting from rape without discrimination, end quote. There is nothing more said about the outcome of those pregnancies nor about their meanings for the mothers and their children. The women, peace and security agenda and various sexual violence summits and celebrity spokespeople such as Angelina Jolie have overwhelmingly focused on women and girls as victims of sexual violence during armed conflict. Strikingly absent, and I chime in here with Yelke, strikingly absent in this agenda are I would say three groups. Women as perpetrators of violence, we are not necessarily peace-seeking creatures in all settings. Men and boys as victims of sexual violence, not just perpetrators, massively under-reported and under-studied. And children born as a result of wartime rape. What do we know about these children? During the last decade alone, it's estimated that tens of thousands of children have been born worldwide as a result of mass rape campaigns or wartime sexual exploitation. What about these living legacies of rape and sexual violence? In my dream world in which I have more than eight minutes, what follows is all these things I won't talk about. But I do want to say, and I'll chime in with Yelke, great admiration for the Peruvian TRC. I worked in the Ayacucho office and I saw the tremendous commitment people had. But I think we should look at it as an important case study of what a gender focus was understood to be and who was understood to have gender. So influenced by the feminist incitement to break the silence around rape as an intrinsically emancipatory project, the TRC was particularly interested in first-person accounts of rape. Rape understood to be the emblematic womanly wound of war. That focus brings certain things into our field of vision and it obscures others. As I would argue, if I had more time, in between that trope of the unnameable violence and unspeakable atrocities and the call to break the silence, a great deal was being said and women said a whole lot of that. And if you go back and reread the TRC's final report, you find women frequently spoke about rape-related pregnancies, but in the voice of the witness rather than that of the victim. I'm also interested in local biologies and theories of transmission from a medical anthropologist. So I'm interested in focusing both on children in utero when their mothers are raped and children conceived as a result of rape. Anecdotal evidence, which is all we have, I might add, anecdotal evidence suggests that children conceived of rape face stigma, discrimination and infanticide in many, many societies, which I think in part reflects the theories of transmission that are operative in any given social context. Although DNA, the double helix and genetic codes animate scientific discussions of inherited traits, local biologies, the theories people have in various cultural contexts, those local biologies are more apt to involve bodily fluids, toxic memories and wounds of the soul. Looking comparatively in my work, I explore some of the characteristics people understand to be passed from parent to child via blood, semen, breast milk or while the child's in utero. And when you look at those theories of transmission, it led me to consider something that I call strategic pregnancies, again highlighting women's very many forms of resistance and resilience in the face of really bad choices. I became very intrigued by women who strategically got pregnant by a member of their community before the soldiers lined up for gang rape could get to them. This is some effort to exert control over bodies, reproductive labor and to identify the father of the child. The effort to determine paternity involves names and naming practices and the patriarchal law of the father. And then I conclude this chapter of the book by some thoughts on the methods and ethics of researching public secrets in which there is a tremendous amount at stake both in concealment and in revelation. Michael Taussig, an anthropologist, suggests that the drama of revelation often amounts to the transgressive uncovering of something that was already secretly familiar. Although children born of wartime rape have remained largely invisible on the international agenda, empirical data indicates they are not so invisible in their families and the communities in which they live. At that level, these children are likely to be hidden in plain sight. Do I have another minute or am I done? Okay. So as I said, I was intrigued by figuring out, okay, this whole, women don't speak, women don't speak. Yeah, they speak. They speak a whole lot. And in most, every single truth commission, they give the majority of the testimonies. Peru is no exception. 54% of the testimonies at the national level come from women. If you go to Ayakucho, the epicenter of the violence, 64% of those testimonies were from women. So I went back, right? And of course, there was the lament that they just won't talk. They won't talk about sex, pardon me, rape in the first person, but they talked a lot about rape-related pregnancies. So I went back to volume six of the final report into the chapter of the Elinte sexual contra la mujer, sexual violence against women, pause. Of course, that title right there has something that we might want to critique. So evidently sexual violence only happens against women. I appreciate the work they did, but just the title sets you up to understand that we are not gonna be talking about a whole other victim population, which would be the men and the boys who were also systematically violated. Every community in which you had a military base, I've worked with many of them, you had sustained chronic sexualized forms of violence practiced against women, against men, and sometimes against children as well. So I go back to that chapter, wondering exactly what's going on here. In that chapter alone, there are 37 references to girls and women who were impregnated as a result of wartime rape or exploitative sexual relationships. In most cases, these are third-party reports, and the women speaking refer to the phenomenon of unwanted pregnancies in the plural. Salían embarazadas, resultaron embarazadas, they were coming out pregnant, they were getting pregnant over and over again. The army, the police, and the gorillas of both Shining Path and the Tupacamaru Revolutionary Movement are all named in women's testimonies about rape-related pregnancies. There's one paragraph, and I think I have to end now. There's one paragraph in the report that does acknowledge sometimes women found themselves obligated to assume a forced pregnancy, and their children still continue to suffer the consequences of the violence. We are left with no further information about what those consequences might be. The women do indicate that the gorillas, and this would be true of the FARC, if there's anyone in Colombia, I've worked a lot in Colombia, the gorilla movement frequently forced girls and women to have abortions, and in those instances in which somehow a pregnancy was carried to term over and over the women say the babies were forcefully taken away. We don't know what happens to them. That singular focus, however well-intentioned it was, of focusing on compiling first-person accounts from women of rape and sexual violence in order to break the silence about these crimes, somehow reduced children to a mere coda. What happened to all of those babies, and who else was talking about them? I'll conclude by saying we should look at the names and the naming practices. I now realize the finger points right back at me. I didn't get it either. I was surrounded by these children in the communities in which I worked. I was surrounded by children who were given very painful and injurious names, and it's something that's my last thing I'm gonna say. What we will see over and over again in post-conflict settings, this is not limited to Peru. This is not just some linguistic idiosyncrasy over there. They do it that way. No. Kosovo, Children of Shame, Rwanda that collectively referred to as unwanted children, Children of Braden Memories, Children of Hate, individual names that I found in the literature. I'm at a loss, Little Killer, The Intruder, East Timor, Children of the Rebel Babies, Vietnam, The Dust of Life, and American Infected Babies, Nicaragua Monster Babies, Guatemala, Sobaldito, Little Soldier, Uganda, three individual names that are so resonant. Only God knows why this happened to me. I'm unfortunate. Things have gone so bad. And I'll conclude in Peru, among other names they're referred to as Los Regalos de los Soldados, the soldier's gifts. Ijo de Nari, Nobody's Kid. Fulano, what's his name? And Chichara, Stray Cat. I've got there. For time. Thank you so much, Kimberly. I will add that prior to this discussion this morning we agreed that Kimberly would come back and we would do a program that focuses on children, peace, and security. Thank you for opening this door here today because I do think this theme that you began to draw forward is these public secrets, these hidden messages, and even in the naming of these children. So thank you very much, and we look forward to more discussion. Tony Adams is a Guatemalan and American anthropologist and practitioner whose current work focuses on how chronic violence affects human development. Tony was also here at USIP as a Jennings Randolph Senior Fellow in 2008 and 2009. We welcome her back here today to give us her views on this piece of work. Thank you, Tony. Welcome back. Now you can hear me. Okay. And I really appreciate reading your book. It's a really strong piece of work. I read this book as a practitioner, as Kathleen mentioned, who's been increasingly concerned with understanding how violence works and how long-term violence works. And more than that, what do we do about it? Because what we're doing isn't working. Problem's getting worse. So I was really heartened by your starting point where she says my starting point is in no manner neutral. I aim for the possibility of change. So I'm gonna use that reto, that challenge, and that job that we all have, I think any of us who are working on these kinds of issues aren't there just for the academic interests were there because we can't stand what we're seeing. I became aware of violence as a problem in Guatemala in the years after the peace accords. As this post-war form of violence started emerging, I was struck by the dissonance between how people were living it on the ground and the discourse of the people in the transitional justice community and the human rights community and the post-war reconstruction community of which I was a part. Like Kim, we were in the middle of it. What were you seeing, right? And this dissonance still plagues the contemporary violence prevention field and as Dr. Bustin points out, the gender-based violence work as well. This dissonance led me to spend the last several years working on this, developing this conceptual framework that systematizes how chronic violence affects human development from the macro, from the maternal or parental infant bond to macro-level institutions. And to work with governments and NGOs and academics to figure out how to better approach this problem. So I'd like to offer some thoughts on three of groups of findings, Dr. Bustin's findings and honoring her focus on change to reflect a bit about where this analysis leaves us in our challenge to develop a stronger understanding of how violence works. I think we can't miss that step and then a stronger, to develop a stronger agenda for change. So much activism just skips over the problem of understanding. It's fatal. Anyway, a first critical finding of the book is the need to approach sexual violence and war and peace on a continuum. And so it's a better discern the underlying norms that, and social patterns that uphold this practice. This is a critical and essential break from the a contextual and a historical notion of, as she notes, war-related violence or the idea of rape as a weapon of war that informs so much of the transitional justice literature. And in fact, the violence prevention work as well. Dr. Bustin elegantly shows through the case studies from life and from literature, Peruvian literature, how sexual violence forms part of a continuum of violence that her informants linked back to the Ascendados who had abused them on the Haciendas and links to the soldiers that were abusing them during the war and to their own family members throughout life. Her critique of this narrow and exceptionalist view of violence and her call for a more contextualized understanding totally resonates with my experience in Guatemala and elsewhere. And it shines a critical light on the similarly narrow and a contextual terms of art that inform violence prevention efforts today. Terms like youth and gang violence. Terms like drug violence. Or more recently, violence extremism. What do these terms mean? What are the social contexts in which they develop? A wonderful quote from a staffer at the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission names this dissonance really briefly. And I just want to quote it. I still remember, I hope the translation works. I still remember the faces of the people from the rural areas who came to the commission. They explained how violence had been the air they had breathed ever since they arrived in this world like the bread they eat every day. They didn't understand why we were only interested in the violence between 1980 and 2000. Only that practiced by the armed forces, the police and other armed groups. The violence didn't come from the outside. It's intrinsic to the daily life of these people. For us, the violence was an affront to our dignity, a shock, a violation of our fundamental rights. For them, it was normalized, something that they feel each time they breathe. This is the difference between how people live it that I've seen on the ground in many countries now the way so many of us who work in the field look at it. And I think it's a very significant difference because it plays out in how policies are designed. Dr. Boosterin points to broader web of forces. I think on to number two now. Dr. Boosterin points to a broader web of forces that continue to reproduce sexual violence today in which she includes social class, race, ethnicity, the forces of the state, the international community. When she seeks to explain, for example, why sexual violence has intensified since the war, which I think is a very important finding, it absolutely coincides with what I'm seeing in this dynamic of chronic violence elsewhere. She suggests some other contributors, traumatic replication, mental health problems, alcohol and employment. I'm hungry to know more. What is this broader web of forces that reproduces the violence she's writing about? What has changed that today these historical patterns of gender-based violence have intensified? Given how ineffective our efforts to date have been in reducing violence of any kind, these are critical questions. But in fact, there are very few models with which to pursue them. I wanna highlight the work, the analytical approach, for example, developed by Clara Huzidman and Encida Social in Mexico, is very promising. Huzidman mapped out a complex web of economic, political, social factors that I think do an enormous job in explaining femicides and gender violence in Ciudad Juarez. There's nothing else. I've seen very little other work of that caliber. And it does much more to illuminate the drivers between the phenomena of feminized and the more politicized and narrowly focused work of someone like Victoria Sanford, who just names it as a political act, but she doesn't really analyze it. The conceptual framework that I've developed also helps, it gives us an operation, a basic conceptual way to begin to pursue this question, but we're still operationalizing how to really apply it. This model incorporates everything from the psycho-biological and social dynamics of fear, trauma, traumatic replication, explores how violence affects the successive phases of human development and visualizes the broad array of macro-level factors that also reproduce violence from climate change, economic policies, state dysfunction, et cetera. By incorporating also the notion of violence as a self-reproducing systemic phenomenon, the notion of chronic violence also moves us beyond the idea of violence as a linear cause and effect process to understand it as a complex systemic phenomenon. And that's very important. We have to get away from the idea of cause and effect when we're thinking about violence. Whatever model we choose, though, the challenge is how to move beyond Boston's awareness of the broader web of forces to forge a robust picture of the complex of factors that reproduce sexual and other forms of violence. And there I think we have to place sexual violence in the context of the broader phenomenon of violence. It's also not an exception. It's part of a more systemic way. Second, I'm sorry, I have four points. Third, let's look at the issue of the judicial proceedings to which she dedicates a full chapter. Wilson accepts the assumption of the Truth Commission and the Transitional Justice Committee, the judicial proceedings and other transitional justice mechanisms are essential to a lasting peace. Having watched the transitional justice process in Guatemala up close and having followed various judicial proceedings on the ground as an anthropologist in Guatemala, I have to say that I don't know if I any longer believe in the formula that truth and justice lead to reconciliation. I think we have to unpack this. I'm happy to discuss it in the question answers. I know it remains a fundamental tenet to the transitional justice community and many others, but I think human experience is much more complex than to say truth plus justice equals reconciliation. We have to prove that. An initial doubt arises by simply looking at who can expect to be helped by judicial proceedings. Winston mentions that in Peru, 16 out of 538 cases were taken by, were pursued in court. That's about 3%. That's about the level of legal accountability for homicides in a country like Honduras. I mean, those are to begin with where the women were brave enough to testify. Right, so clearly that's not how we're going to be solving accountability for rape cases or violence. What about that, the 97%. But then there's the personal cost of pursuing such cases for the plaintiff. In a genocide case brought by one community that I followed closely in Guatemala, which involved also all kinds of sexual abuse, there was a strong but unexpressed tension between the interests of the plaintiffs who were seeking economic reparations and that of the human rights groups who were seeking to win the case, right? And who were wanted to establish precedent and win the cases. Here we run into the dissonance problem again. The experiential view of poor, rural, monolingual indigenous women and the normative and idealized internationalist view held by mainly professional or all professional, mainly Latino and mainly men who were pursuing the cases. I suspect we find similar patterns in some of the cases in Peru. Where and how should the anthropologist or the change agent situate ourselves in that continuum of positions and function of whose interests are we seeking change and what's the change we're seeking? Because in the case of these women, what they were seeking, what they came to the lawyers to say is we want to get our cows and our chickens back. We want money to replant the fruit trees that they ripped up to rebuild our house. They didn't get any of those things when they won the case. They weren't able to talk about the sexual violence but the case got spun into a different case and they weren't allowed to, they had no control over how that developed. Dr. Bustin also notes the failure of the state to pursue these kinds of cases in many countries and concludes, among other things, that the lack of judicial accountability for cases of sexual violence in Mexico, Guatemala and indeed Peru, she says, leads us to question the nature of the democratic state and the judicial capacity and independence. This question's been on the table now for well over a decade. I wonder if in fact this conclusion shouldn't have been the starting place. In 2003, for example, Thomas Carruthers was insisting that we bury the transition paradigm when we're thinking about democratization. When we're analyzing events in which too many people continue in countries like Peru that too many Peru, Guatemala, so many countries that we continue to call democratizing countries, democratizing towards what? I think what we have to say is where we are now, the kinds of states we have, that's what we have. This is the scenarios in which we're going to affect change or not. Instead of asking how countries were proceeding with democratization, Carruthers was saying, a decade ago, he was suggesting we ask a more anthropological question. I love that from a political scientist. What's happening politically, he says, we should ask, how is Peru actually governed? What is governance? Who governs? So the World Bank in the 2011 report said, over a quarter of the world's population is living in conditions where there is no effective state rule. That's gonna be the reality long term. So we have to start thinking, how do we affect social change in scenarios where we can't keep flogging the dead horse and say, do it, state, get it together, and it may not happen. So Luis Pasar as recent analysis, the Peruvian, how do you know, the jurist, of the failure of three decades of judicial reform in Latin America just drives the plane in further. I mean, when you look at all the billions of dollars spent on judicial reform that has gone really very, very short distance, it leaves us with a much broader question of how and where we focus our efforts on for social change. So finally, in one other important contribution, Boston calls for moving beyond the binary notion of women and victims and men as perpetrators that Kim already referred to. On the one hand, she notes that it's critical to understand men as victims as well, as we've already just heard. And on the other hand, she notes that we need to move beyond the binary distinction between women and victims and men and males perpetrators given the repressive and militarized socialization of soldiers. This reminds me of a moment in 1982 when Ricardo Faier, who was the first to expose the genocide in Guatemala with his anthropological study of the massacres and the Iskang, he stood up at a meeting with Guatemala military representatives in Austin, Texas. And right after the expose had been given to the press and he asked them, what will become of the soldiers, the young men and boys who committed these massacres? Who's ministering them to them? How will their mothers receive them when they go back home? What was done to them that they found it possible to commit these atrocities? What kinds of lives will they live now and will their families live given what they've done and what they've seen? To my knowledge, no one has continued to pursue that question in Guatemala and I don't think they've pursued it in almost any other, well, in Africa, yes. And it's very scenario in Africa, but in Central America, Latin America, I don't know. These have not been pursued. But I wanted to hear more from you on this. Although the field of masculinity studies advance much work on the masculine side of the violence question to which Dr. Buston's refers and organizations like Promundo and others are doing groundbreaking work on the ground with both men and women on the gender equitable problem. The naturalized notions of violent men and women victims continue to prevail just as do the notions of victims and perpetrators in the violence prevention field, which have to be unpacked. The Primo Levi victim of the gray zone needs to be applied to anybody who lives in the scenario of long-term violence. Final finishing up here, a third critical priority, and this echoes a little bit what Kim was talking about and moving beyond this binary focus, is how to transcend the adult diet of men and women to remember the children they produce. Absolutely absent in plain view, as Kim was saying from a different perspective. Not just the children of rape, but the children of all kinds of violence are just not taken into account in scenarios when we're talking about gender-based violence. And I include them because in any scenario, gender-based violence, the children are there, or they will be there in nine months. So she mentions that perhaps 85% of the children in Ayacucho suffer violence at home. These are the numbers we're seeing in Honduras, in Guatemala, 45, 55, 85. They're numbers that are very, very high. But it goes no further with this problem. But this isn't a problem, this is a problem that we see in most gender-related work, and that's why I'm glad to hear Kathleen talk about bringing it more frankly into the equation. Children remain by far the most silent in these invisible victims of violence, and childhood is the period during which many of the patterns of gender violence and social violence are established. Clearly in the ecological paradigm that I'm working with, most of the central reproduction of violence begins in intimate relationships and home, often in the first three years of life. What steps can we take to place the normalized violence that children suffer on par with the gender-related violence faced by their mothers and the chronic violence of the lives of so many of the families and communities that she's speaking about? How might researchers and advocates concerned with forging gender-equitable relations further expand their vision to address the fundamentally destructive effects of gender violence on children, both boys and girls? So I think that's what I had to add. Thank you. Thank you, Tani. Well, I think you have to agree with me that these comments made by our discussants have opened not only many windows to this issue, but actually quite a large door that we have not explored, and certainly how we begin to look at chronic violence is really a key because our frameworks tend to be, as pointed out by our last discussant, very much a cause and effect. I'm going to ask Yelka to give a response if you can briefly before we open it up to the audience for your comments and questions and answers. And I'm going to, with your help here, extend us for 30 more minutes, just a few minutes over our time just because we were delayed by the current weather patterns here in Washington. So Yelka, just a few comments, please, that's it. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you both, Kimberly, for sharing your insights, and Tani, for your very constructive, interesting comments that I can't respond to all at this point just because it's, I need to think about them, basically. I guess I just want to briefly pick up on the last point that you made around one gender as binary. On the other hand, chronic violence, systematic nature of violence, relation to the state, there's a lot, in your comments, there's a lot of things that I'd like to think about and a little bit more. One of the things that seems to me when we look at this type of so-called conflict political violence, which was China path or rebel groups, terrorist groups in the Peruvian context, against the state or the state against them, and which you also see in the DRC, in parts of the Great Lakes, regions in different, very complex conflicts that we've seen the last 50 years or so, I'm starting to question the nature in how far that violence is actually political or should we analyze it as political violence or should we think as well in addition in terms of social violence in conflict? And very much linking up to your work around chronic violence, and Central America is an obvious example in how political violence on the one hand sort of spills over into social violence. And I'm also thinking that in terms of Kimberly's work and the idea of intimate enemies and the violence that you describe or the aggression people have towards each other, the pettiness of a lot of disputes and the extreme violence that results of some petty small conflicts in people's lives. So the social sphere, I have the feeling that we all overlooked it a little bit in how a lot of contemporary so-called political violence of what we refer to as conflict or war is actually very strongly linked to the fragmentation of the social sphere. And that fragmentation of the social sphere is very much linked to institutions of the state because people work in institutions. State institutions are people by the same people that live in communities. So yes, I do see a systemic violence, gender-based violence that is institutional, seeing the family as an institution as well. The level of domestic violence against children in the same place in Aikuchu, and I'm not even talking about children born of rape, just the levels of domestic violence of the physical punishment that's completely out of proportion that parents use against children in this same place, Aikuchu, and it is probably related to a history of political violence. But that creates other sequels of violence, as you say. That's where children learn violence. So basically what I'm not giving an answer to anything here very clearly, and I'm aware of that, but I'm making it even more complex by trying to say that perhaps we need to take that complexity continuously into account. When we look at the causes, and I agree with you, it's very difficult to sort of talk about cause consequence. It's much more complex than that. But to have also a social or a sociological perspective upon what we tend to analyze as political violence or the responsibility of the state, the state is also composed of people and people are living in communities and so on. So it's more complex. Soldiers, I very much agree that we need much more knowledge about what happens to soldiers afterwards. One of the things that I'm interested in, I haven't done research yet, but in a near future, is wanting to look at how do soldiers actually become rapists. It's not so obvious. I do not necessarily believe in the biological explanation of men as rapists. So if we don't believe in the idea of men as rapists, we seriously need to ask, so what then makes them rapists? So we need to look in military masculinities, but there's too little, not very little, there's too little actually ethnographic work on military masculinities. What are hazing practices that leads men to rape? And then we go to Kimberly's point about sexual violence against men. I'm sure that we need to look into that as actually a practice that foments rapists as well. So there's a whole range of things that I think that we need to combine the social and the political from a multidisciplinary perspective in order to start understanding before we actually look at a policy program that tends to look too simplistic at a cause and effect type of explanation and thus response. Thank you, Yelka, and what we're going to do now is I'm going to ask if you would just hold your hand if you wanna make a comment or a question. I'm gonna take three at a time so we get a lot more of your ideas out here and I'll ask, thank you, right here. If you would mind introducing yourself and your affiliation that will be helpful for the speakers. Sure, hi, thank you so much. My name is Gabe and I'm with Women in International Security and a master's student at American University in the Peace and Conflict Resolution Program. All three of you at different points brought up kind of the cultural element that's sort of the cultural context or underlying element that contributes to this type of violence both during war and peacetime. And then at other points talked about the kind of accountability level of things, seeking justice and kind of bringing to light sexual violence against women. In a lot of my research, I've been sort of continually getting frustrated with sort of the as what was mentioned a few times accountability, the difficulties in seeking accountability. And so one thing I'm really interested in is kind of more than on the preventative side ways to shift culture and even college campuses in the United States are looking at that now, how to do sort of programs for students coming in to undergrad. So I'm just curious if you could speak about that intersection and sort of cultural preventative approaches how they interact with accountability. Great, thanks Gabe. Another question or comment? Please, right here. Just one second because we are webcasting. I'm sure they'll want to hear your question. I'm Michael Ochoa. I'm a recent graduate at the University of Colorado and I'm trying to get into the mental health profession. And sexual violence is something I've been combating since my sophomore year of college. I've volunteered for a sexual abuse hotline called Moving 10 Sexual Assault. And I guess I come at this from a little different perspective being on the micro side of things having worked in a community and kind of piggyback off the last question are there any programs that you find that are more effective than others when it comes to combating sexual violence on a micro scale in a community versus, I mean I know we were talking about in a macro scale this entire time but I'm just trying to get both ideas out there. Great, thank you for that. And right here, Stephanie. Hi, my name is, oh wow, Stephanie Breitzman and I'm with Women in International Security as well as Gabe. And my question is for Dr. Adams. You mentioned that truth and justice don't equal reconciliation. And I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about what you think some of the missing factors are to that equation. And do we have one more? Anybody on this side? Yes, please. Hello, my name's Anne Schneider and I work with the US government's Human Rights Violators and War Crime Center. And I wanted to ask a question. Human Rights Violators and War Crime Center which investigates and prosecutes human rights violations. My question sort of piggybacks on this about the role of prosecutions and the limits of prosecutions. But I wondered if any of you and perhaps particular Tony would offer some reflections on the role of the testimony of sexual violence in the Rios Mont case. But also I wanted to ask more generally the state of conversations if any on rape as torture in Peru or elsewhere. Any others just before? Cause I'm also looking at the time. Anybody else? All right. I'm going to turn it over first. Yelka, I'll let you do the final comments. Tony, I believe somebody asked you directly a question then I'm going to move to Kimberly and Yelka with the final. Three quick points on the first two. You know, in efforts to deal with, I can't speak to local efforts in the United States but in the violence prevention field that I've been looking at working with in Central America, particularly the last years, more broadly not just sexual violence. What's been the big absent issue in the toolbox is how to deal with trauma. It's like it's never been addressed. It's, you know, they're working with gang members and families that are dealing with unbelievable levels of trauma and no one understands how to deal with trauma. And to train up a group of psychologists in a country with 30 psychologists and six million people is not the solution. You know, there's some really, really interesting models for this. I mean, the work that Teresa Batancur is doing, Sierra Leone, the work that Promundo is doing with the Living with Peace Project, the Center for Victims of Torture. There's a lot of different interesting models coming out of Columbia, Argentina, Israel, drama therapies, all kinds of efforts. You have to deal with very carefully because of the danger of retraumatization. You know, so these are not things that you can deal with facially and in the wrong hands they can be very dangerous but trauma has to be frontline and center and it has to inform the work, all kinds of other work that's going on with people who have been traumatized. You can't, it's like a person who has a significant disease. You can't say, oh, okay, so the disease you deal with over here but then go get a regular job. No, when you work on livelihood issues you have to work from what they call, using a trauma sensitive lens and thinking about livelihood training, educational training, it has to inform the whole gamut. Your question about why truth and justice doesn't simply equal reconciliation? Truth is a very important thing as is justice but they both cause conflict, right? I mean, just think about any judicial proceedings. Someone wins and someone loses. In the Rios Mont case, there's half or more of the population of Guatemala who love Rios Mont. So the idea that, oh, once Rios Mont got nailed, as some of us would call it, that wasn't gonna make a lot of people feel better. It deepened the social wounds in the country. So the idea that it would solve the problem that this was now gonna bring peace and reconciliation to the country was, I don't know how we can continue to say these things when we look on the ground and see. Anyone who's looked at the local effects of any judicial proceedings when you, every time you open up a mass grave in the estimations of Guatemala, as Kim knows very well from the mass grave department but in terms of looking at finding out who did what in a certain community, the minute you start opening up these questions, the question is, ooh, what are they gonna find out? They're gonna find out who of us killed the other members of us in this community. That's, so estimations are also not one of these very simple events where all of a sudden people are, everyone's hearts are calm because they finally can bury their dead. I mean, those very idealistic ideas for some people that may be true, but there's intimate enemies is exactly what we're talking about in so many cases of wartime violence at the community level so that when you find out who's killed who, then you have to still live with them and buy tomatoes from them the next day in the market or walk by them on the street. And when you get, when you start working with people and say, well, what do you do when you have to walk by the person who killed your husband every single day on the street? He says, well, we just, we haven't looked at each other for 30 years. Yeah, so how did, so these are, so this, you know, that if you, if anyone did the ethnography of what the Pios Mont case meant to Guatemala in terms of rebuilding social fabric, complex story, you know, but those are questions that really have to be explored. Very, very important questions to explore. And I think a lot of the literature that Kim pioneered and I have the manuscript I still haven't published on the similar story in Guatemala, those, but those stories are written on many countries now, many countries that Africa, of course of all, they're repeating how the sort of the local level conflicts that need to be teased out. I think that was the- Thanks, Tony. We can talk later about your question. I'm going to ask you to turn off your mic, Tony, and then Kimberly. Great. So thanks, lots of really interesting questions and discussion. And I guess I'll just say I've been trying to cluster my first a word for anthropologists. People always say, oh, you anthropologists make things so complicated. And I say, no, they are complicated. That's just the way it is. And if you want simple minded responses, go for simple stories. And that's not the story I have to tell. So there's the anthropological intervention there. So one of the things that hovers here as well is the explanatory value that's been given to the idea of militarized masculinity. I've used the term and most of us have at some point in time because it seems to catch something you recognize. I work a lot with former combatants in Columbia. There was something about the posture, the body, right? The actual physical something that happens when you've been militarized into a fighting force, particularly a state army. And yet, it's overly predictive and this is what I'd like to throw on the table in part a response to the question there. On one hand, we want to get at the fact that military socialization frequently is misogynist. It seems to be, you can look at the rates of sexual abuse in the US armed forces. What is that? It's not small group norms. It's not a few bad apples. So what is it about the socialization that produces that? However, militarized masculinity is over predictive of the use of violence and of sexualized violence. There are very militarized fighting forces in the world who engage in virtually no sexual violence at all. And they would say it's their discipline and training that's precisely why they do not. So we need to understand and differentiate being militarized is not per se, now go out and be a rapist. That is, we really need to disaggregate that and understand the elaborate hierarchies within any sort of fighting force. And you're a question about, you mentioned campus sexual assault, so thank you. There is something about what is about homosexual, not homosexual, homosexual environments in which the kind of hazing is so frequently sexualized. So I feel like we need to tease this out, stop assuming that militarized masculinity has explained it all so we can close that chapter and move on. I don't have time to go into the lacerating stories. I could tell you about former soldiers, young recruits who talked about the level of sexual violence visited upon them within the barracks. And this is very much the racialized, and I really appreciate that you mentioned this. At one o'clock in the mall, it's the same thing. Or we could go to Bolivia or if you haven't. There was a profoundly racialized dimension to the violence in Peru and a racialized dimension both through the sexual violence practiced on civilians but also within the barracks. So many of the young recruits came from rural backgrounds. Kishwa was their first language. They were darker-skinned recruits, frequently forcibly conscripted. They would go through the countryside with trucks and if you didn't have your document papers or they managed to rip them up before you could do anything about it, you're in the army now. The officials tended to be lighter-skinned. They came from the coast. And in counter-insurgency, all brown-skinned peasants looked like a threat. So on one hand, afraid of the men they were supposed to be commanding, but also load them and were just, that the level of ethnic insult, the level of anally raping these young men, sorry, is a recurrent theme. There was an entire lexicon around who was raping whom and why. And I assume if people have come up with a specialized lexicon to describe something, it must have happened more than once. So I will end with that. I also think we want to learn, part of what I sex with the Security Council while I'm calling my book that, conflict-related sexual violence against women and girls, which repeats, it's sort of like one word, through the UN Security Council resolution. I can say it really, really fast. Conflict-related sexual violence against women and girls. Conflict-related, and this goes very much to your comments, conflict-related has both a temporal and a geographical effect. Who names the conflict? What kind of conflict wanted to start when did it end? That could have everything to do with, your gang rape in 1989 was tough luck. One of them married you and it's all resolved. You get gang raped in 1991. Ooh, well that was during the conflict. Maybe we have a war crime. These, so the temporal function of conflict-related, which brings in the exceptional, right, the spectacular, if I may use that term, and tends to minimize others. It also has a geographical effect. Where did the, where is the conflict? Oh, well not in the home, that's private sphere. So we also wanna think about the geographical implications of conflict-related, and we could certainly talk about enforced sterilization in Peru, which should have been on the docket. 270,000 women were forcibly sterilized during the Second Fujimori administration. But if you ask the commissioners of very well-intentioned people, they did not see it as conflict-related. They were looking into political violence. So we would wanna think about the effects. These terms have powerful effects. Finally, what kind of violence mattered and what gets erased? And I don't have time to go into it, and you mentioned in the book, and it's so important, Michelle Libby's work about the coding process that was used by the Peruvian TRC. Even when men came forward and said that they had had some kind of sexualized violence, it was coded as torture. If a woman came forward and said they did this to me with a police baton, I won't go into the details, and a man came forward and said they did this to me with a police baton, she got raped, he was tortured. I think in both instances, they're tortured, and in both instances, they would rape when it's up someone's anus. However, it was just understood certain kinds of bodies, suffer certain kinds of violations. There was the systematic erasure of the sexualized forms of violence that men suffered, even when the men did come forward and speak about it. Thank you, Kimberly. Reminds me of one of the key takeaways from the missing piece symposium several years ago was that the term sexualized or sexual violence really does not capture power. And so much of the conversation here this morning is about powered relationships. Empowered, disempowered, what you name things gives you power, what you don't name also gives you power. And it's another part of the conversation for another day. Yelka, this has been your day. How would you like to end the conversation? Could you resolve these issues? You're right. Hi, there's so many issues on the table that are very difficult to respond to, of course. There is an issue around what is sexual violence and we have been talking about that the whole morning and now you raised sexual violence as torture or sexual torture and Libby's work that Kim mentioned actually goes, she goes through all the testimonies and then picks out that or concludes that a lot more men experience sexual violence. Not only, I think that the Truth Commission estimated 1% or 2% and she comes to 25% of male victims of violence were sexually tortured but slightly in a different way than women and namely in the case of men, it was seen as torture and in the case of women with sexual violence. So these are discussions to be had but I think we should think carefully with what ends and that is almost a legal discussion. Why would we make that distinction? Well, for legal purposes. Militarized masculinities or masculinities and gender, who has a gender are very important questions I would like to raise again as I'm sure most of you will be familiar with the work by Elizabeth Wood who has done work around militaries that do or do not rape and what are the factors that feed into certain militaries or armed groups to rape which is again an important discussion and there's a lot of research still going on and it's not clear, there's no clear answer to the issue to the question and perhaps there shouldn't be as these issues are complex but it is related to cultural normative understandings of existing inequalities based on gender race class on differences between people and between groups and I think that the lack of accountability to your question earlier goes back to that. Why is it so difficult to prosecute sexual violence, conflict related, war related, politically in the public space, in the private space, in institutions, in colleges, in the Great Lakes Regions or in Peru or in the US or in the UK? It proves to be very difficult to prosecute sexual violence in all these contexts, independent of how well your judicial system works or not. The same rate of cases are being prosecuted in the UK of reported cases of sexual violence in the UK as in Peru. So the problem of accountability is much bigger. Now the legal profession would come up with a list of, yeah, but it's difficult, it's a question of evidence, it's a question of his word against hers. There's a whole range of legal problems around prosecuting rape and there are very few people within the legal professions but some do who say, well, that's actually nonsense because you could say, you could say the same point about murder or other forms of crime and they do have higher rates of prosecution. So I would go back to the normative framework in which one, violence is perpetrated, gender-based violence more broadly is perpetrated, independent of who the victim is. And secondly, so how it is perpetrated and how it is responded to, how it is responded to not only in the courts, I mean, this is not about saying the judges don't pay attention or they're sexists or no, it starts with the police officer who takes the report. And what I try to do in the book is look at that, at that process of how reports of sexual violence, both in cases of conflict-related violence and in cases of so-called peace, domestic violence, interpersonal violence, how police officers respond, how prosecutors respond, how judges respond, how social workers respond, how communities respond, judges of the peace respond, how do they respond? And the majority will respond saying, oh well, why don't you just try to solve it? Or why do you just, there are more important issues on the table or why don't we just look into this later? So it's the lack of a receptive audience which is important in the lack of accountability, one. The second point in the case of specifically violence against women, and I do think that that is different, there is something around violence against women that is even a long and even longer historical continuum and far more widespread than other forms of violence, I dare to say, is that women are systematically undermined to speak up, to be heard, to take care of themselves economically with a lack of an economic framework that allows them to have decent jobs or decent support around childcare, et cetera, et cetera. So what I'm saying is that gender inequality more broadly feeds into the lack of accountability because it doesn't support, it doesn't encourage women to speak up and to report in the first place or to sustain their claim for justice. So broader gender inequality, we haven't even spoken about that as we have spoken about violence and systematic violence, but I do think we need to talk about in the broader discussion about broader gender inequality. And again, it's more difficult to separate because we can all make reasons in a poor country or where a lot of people are still poor in the contemporary, it's a higher middle income country, Peru these days, but there's a large population who lives in poverty or just above the poverty line. It's very difficult for women to stand on their own two feet independent of men at all, but I also think that this gender inequality is still very much prevalent in the so-called richer countries with well-functioning judiciary. It is more difficult for women to sustain claims of violence more broadly considering the broader institutional grounding of gender inequality. So I think we should take that into account. Not very happy note to end on, but there we go. Thank you. Will you join me in thanking our speaker and discussant and thank you to all of you for your good questions and good thoughts. Have a great day. Thank you.