 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 Heggie here today and Tonus 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. Well, thank you, Ro, 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 E-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 Asvedo, 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? Thank you. I had already forgotten that I had a microphone. Good afternoon. First of all, I would like to thank you for the invitation and the possibility of meeting us here to be able to talk about sexual violence and the implementation of the peace process in Colombia. We formed the campaign, Violations and Other Violences. They take my body out of the war since 2009 because we realized that there was, that there was a very serious problem of violence against women, but that we didn't have figures to understand what was the magnitude and what was going on in the country. So we joined organizations of human rights, feminist organizations, women's organizations, and later also the women's organizations victims that have been formed in the last few years to be able to do research in that first moment, to be able to have quantitative figures that realize what was the magnitude of the phenomenon of sexual violence against women in Colombia. Because that research base would not serve to be able to develop programs, projects, but also to be able to do incidents against the government in terms of public policies, prevention, attention, and sanctioning of sexual violence. We also wanted to contribute to exceed the high levels of impunity against sexual violence in Colombia that have been maintained above 96% from the ordinary justice. So we understood that it was the possibility to work together and together to also sensitize the public opinion that this issue was denied because it tended to stigmatize, to point out and to blame the victims because it did not give them importance and because it was not in the public-columbian agenda. Since then, the campaign emerged and we were given the task of conducting different types of investigations. One of them was the first survey of sexual violence against women in the context of the armed conflict that took place in 2001-2009. Then we were conducting research on the recruitment of children and girls in the war. We were conducting analysis of the public policies of the governments of the two periods of saints. And last year, we took the risk of documenting the 2010-2015 period to look at those years in which the process of negotiations of the peace agreement had already begun in Havana to know what was going on with sexual violence in the context of the armed conflict. And from that, I want to give the word to Olga, who is precisely the house of the woman who led the implementation of these two surveys. Before I give the word, I want to tell you that we wanted to generate tools, strategies and methodologies to do the research from the same social and basic organizations, because that also allowed us to gain academic expertise, to gain rigidity, and in alliance with academics who integrated into the research, we wanted to do a joint work. But to clarify that it was not a consultation contract, but rather a work that, ordinarily, we were discussing from the three organizations that we are part of the campaign. Because we believe that, in addition to the research, it must provide an experience that strengthens itself to the organizations, both based on victims and human rights. Good afternoon. Thank you for the invitation and for being here. For us, women are victims of sexual violence on the occasion of the conflict. And outside of it, the campaign takes my body out of the war, like other campaigns. It was something very important and important for us, because it allowed us to break the silence. Because we saw that we were many and we saw in the campaign the most strategic way of being able to break this silence, break the fear, break that stigma that we call the guilt that we feel women are victims of sexual violence, break that shame that generates us sexual violence. The campaign did not allow it. And the campaign also showed us that we are not alone, that there are organizations that work for women's rights. And they made us feel that they are with us and that this path, this journey that we take to the victims of sexual violence, to be able to be seated here like Angela María and like many victims to feel accompanied and supported by organizations has been a very big challenge for us. Good afternoon and a very special thank you for having come to visit us in the summer. I would like to start with what the director of the Institute proposed, the need that Colombia has at this moment of international support. We are certainly in the course of the talk, we are going to talk about it in a situation of much vulnerability to go through the war page and start building the book of peace. But, well, the prevalence survey that would be two, three precisions, one, the survey is done in a country of 60 years of war, in 60 years of war, where at this moment in the official record we have 8 million victims of those 8 million victims, almost 56% are women and depending on the crime they are mostly women, as is the case of forced displacement, where 52% are women, children and children. Let's say that it is a very critical panorama in terms of what has meant the 60-year war in the country. The first survey is done in a context of conflict without hope that the dialogue and the second survey that is the one we presented at the end in one of the tables is the executive summary in English for those who are interested, so I'm just going to show the most important figures of where we started. We started from one, in terms of investigations, of cuts, more, let's say, that they would like to take into account the phenomenon of this investigation, part of one of the knowledge that we had of women organizations of the women's situation, and we would like you to look at the figures that are reflected here, they are life stories, they are women who have suffered, they are women who have been raised too, they are women who have been able to say I was raped, I was forced to abort, I was forced sterilization, and I think that with that vision of the investigation, there would be women, the pain of women, the history of those women to be able to put it in a figure, in a figure that, as Marta said, would allow the Colombian society to gain sensitivity to the magnitude of the problem, and that the Colombian society and the institutions of the state would take into account that it was not a second category problem. And also because we were interested in this second survey, already in the process of conversations in Havana, that there would be a figure that would allow us to reach the table and say, this is a problem that has to be an axis in the negotiation process and in the process of the final agreement. And from that perspective, we achieved the organizations of women, the organizations of victims, and organizations of human rights that in the agreement, the sexual violence would be like a crime, not admissible, that the sexual violence would be like a crime against humanity. And I think it is a very important advance, let's say, on the subject. I think it is a qualitative type of investigation that what he tried was to intimidate the municipalities that, according to the defense of the people, considered that they were in the context of armed conflict and the context of armed conflict was that they had more than one armed actor, or public force, army, police, or national army, or police, paramilitaries, or insurgency. We do not include common crime. We do not include common crime because it has other different characteristics. So they selected 12 municipalities with a stratified legislative sample. Of those 12 municipalities, they selected 1,950 women who were home-to-home equals. The operation for the collection of information was to enable women from the women's organizations that had already had a reflection process. It was not hired by investigators, let's say trained only for women, who had already had a training in terms of violence, but who also had sensitivity to women so that they would do the surveys with a training too, of immediate social attention. If he read the case, when the woman narrated her story, she agreed to go there. Let's say, wonderful experiences because of all the houses we have in 12 municipalities, more or less, less than 1%, we did not want to answer the rest. And that's what we were showing, was that we had made the right decision in terms of the mechanism. What shows the survey in a very general way? As our presenter did not do, every day 16 women, or every hour 16 women, that means almost 870,000 women were abused, in some form of sexual violence. What were the categories we chose? And here was a very important discussion, I'm going to quickly try not to get into this, we linked categories that we had to see in form of typical violence by the National Penal Code or by the Statute of Rome. And other categories, such as the control of social life, that you would ask, well, what is that? Or the regulation of social life. And it was a category that emerged a lot from reality in the municipalities, both the paramilitaries such as insurgency and the public force in the territories have regulated the life of women. How do they regulate it? They regulate it through what form they should be dressed, through whom they should have relationships, emotional and affective, to which places they should go, and the paramilitaries exercised practices such as nudging women, putting them in a public square, if they did not obey the rules of God, or raping women, and also putting them in a public square, this happens to them for not obeying, let's say, it is a category of a lot of discussion, surely, in the academic field, because, well, you have to see that with sexual violence, for us it had to be seen a lot because sexual violence is not only genital, but you have to look at it in its broader conception of how women's affectiveness is regulated, the sexuality of women, and also in a form of control and decantation of women. With these categories, we made a questionnaire, and, as I said, it stayed. There are very critical situations of the study, and it is that black women, or Colombian Afro-descendants, between 15, more young women, the younger ones, between 15 and 24 years old, who live in strata, one and two, are the most violent women. That shows us a triple discrimination, a triple situation. The ones that show us very critical, too, is that women do not report, only 20% of women reported, and the reasons for which women did not report have to do a lot with the weak institutional response. So they did not report, one, because it is better to leave it like that, I am going to report, because they do not believe in institutionality, and because they consider that reaching institutionality is another way of revictimizing it, we say, they say, of reviving this situation. What it shows, too, is that the greatest prevalence of sexual violence is given in large cities or in intermediate cities, that is, there we have a very big problem, that I want to close with this, that it does not account for the investigation, the investigation does not account for the municipalities where there is no armed actor who goes through sexual violence. We do not argue about that, we do not argue about the relationship with violence by each of the members of the family, although it was asked, but if the other result is very serious for the country, if it is that women associate increase in violence, both in the public space as private, with the presence of military or weapons, and dramatic that the largest number of women are victims in private space, that one could say that the first war that is exerted in Colombia against women is the war that is in the house. I would leave there because it has the numbers there and later on we can talk if you want a little more and we will have our commentator who will illustrate a little more as well. 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. I think 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. I'll give you an example. The armed groups exercise the power in the victims, with the weapons and the uniform. In the home. I want to tell you a little bit about the organization. We have workshops in schools, in new regions of the country where we are, where the index is very high in the sexual violence in children and children. The Colombian state is in the obligation to rape in two protective homes, which is the school and the home, and that's where the most sexual violence is experienced. So in the homes, the father rapes because he's the father, the father-in-law because he's the father-in-law, and we get to that consequence of what the power is, the abuse of power, is what the sexual violence is, and how that abuse of power, in the middle of when they rape us, they intimidate us with threats. That's why victims keep so much silence for so many years, because the biggest threat is that if we count, they kill our families or they kill us. What we do is better to keep that silence, so that it doesn't last for many years, because we take care of the family, we take care of our children, we take care of the whole family environment so that nothing happens to them. When we decide, with all this process of raising the voice, because we have that voice today, to break that silence, to fear, to threats, it's where we all get together, if we do all this, let's say, the valuation of sexual violence. Also with this voice that we raise, that we already have it, it's where we bring it, and we also sensitize women to speak. We sensitize a society that we weren't guilty. We get to an analysis that for us, the victims of sexual violence, the stigma of guilt, which is the first thing we feel when they rape us, as the colleague Olga said, we don't feel guilty because we walk on a certain street because we get a light that maybe we liked to put on. And also, at that moment, all the things that happened to us, like how we're dressed, we took many years to resume and say, I wasn't guilty because I had an exiled blouse, but we took many years to put on a blouse of the ones we liked because the brand that leaves us, for us, that's the stigma. But like all of us, today, we've been sensitized, we've been able to sensitize a society. We've been sensitized to a large part of the institutionality and especially to families because we're very stigmatized by the family. In my particular case, I was very criticized by my family. I had to keep quiet for many years. But today, when I tell you, I tell you, my mother was 86 years old, she had passed me on, I managed to understand her and today I'm proud of my family. They support me in everything. I have two wonderful children who are men and I've also been sensitizing them on how we have to prevent sexual violence at home. You were in touch with your question. There are several things. The investigation and the work of women in Colombia or the feminists. In Colombia, as a part of several presuppositions, we look at violence as a continuous life for women. And when we talk about continuous, it's not because a woman is inevitable in the entire period of her life of violence, but rather the continuous how women as a social collective, from before we were born until we died, we suffered violence. Violence is because the girl who was born and who was waiting for the child. And we left from another presupposition that violence is an exercise of power, but it is an instrument that uses patriarchy to discipline women, to punish women, to exercise control and to appropriate the body of women through the appropriation of their sexual and reproductive autonomy. From that perspective, we understand that sexual violence was not only violence, which is like the presupposition that exists, which is only violence, but that if we start that it is an attack against the body of my women, against their autonomy, sexual and reproductive, because there was another form of violence like forced pregnancy, like forced sterilization, like forced prostitution, like forced domestic services of what it is about and that families also have it. It is of those women who are forced to serve them domestically or to the army or to the family. From that perspective, we were very clear from the presupposition that violence, violence and sexual violence were not invented by the armed conflict in Colombia and the armed actors, but what it does in a context of armed conflict that the armed actor who has the power of the weapons but also has the power of intimacy like it takes out the private space of that form of violence and puts them in the public scenario and becomes much more, let's say, more grotesque in the private space torture but it is not the same to torture and put a 15-year-old girl in a public square every day with her hair tied or with her head tied. Let's say that starting from that presupposition then we understood that sexual violence was even more associated with other forms of violence. Of course not. And that a woman of the ones we investigate not only had a woman lived an episode of violence but had lived several episodes of violence in the course of the period that we investigate. I would like to resume a question that I asked at the beginning and this is useful for the peace and for the encounter. We also started that in the country or in any society but in the Colombian society in a very patriarchal society although it is shown before the eyes of the world as very modern very to the new realities of the highly developed countries is a very patriarchal society a society that still naturalizes and justifies the violence against women that as Angela Maria said dramatically in Colombia, many countries raped her because she took a drink and so that she took the liquor or because she was so high hours at night but as she went alone to where she was a friend or because she went through there or also I did not want to be pregnant you have to abort everything that I think that we know regardless of the country where we live so I think how it contributes to peace and I think one of the most important challenges that we have women and Colombian society is to be able to really guarantee the non-repetition of the facts to the transitional justice system they will not be able to reach the immense majority of women because there is no capacity but we do have to fight because this is not repeated again and that is why this survey is so important that is to say to show the magnitude that the country cannot cannot give the back to more than a million women if we count with the previous survey that they said plus the sub-register and tell them nothing happened here come, let's do it these women have to be repaired and the only way to repair them is to guarantee that that will not happen again and it is a utopia surely for us we also think because we live in patriarchal societies but that is at least the utopia that we have to reach well, in this we tried to make a division so that we all had to answer but I would note in all some additional elements within the survey it was very difficult the identification and the disligation of the armed actors in terms of the public and private that is to say many women did not identify what type of armed actor raped them or had some abuse of power and sexual violence against them but there is also another matter and it is that in the daily life indeed many barons are linked one way or another to the armed groups then it may be that they answered us that it was in the private but they did not identify that family as being part of one of the different armed groups this to also share some complexities with which we found the other matter was the use of weapons in one of each five cases there was use of weapons in the expressions of sexual violence against women which is also serious and from the organizations that we are part of the campaign we have also covered a term that seems fundamental and it is the militarization of daily life that is to say there is not necessarily to be armed but the war too has generated some insensitivity in some way but it has also permeated the relationships of the public and private then from there there are also expressions that are exacerbated and I wanted to share that even for the campaign and for the survey and when we emerged it was all a challenge to achieve that women victims also put their voice to share their cases and we share that it was difficult there were very few women willing to tell their cases especially to not use them we say from the yellow press to wake up the weight, the pain but to tell it so that that can be claimed so that there is truth and so that it does not happen again and especially as I said also in Ángela so that you realize that there are other women who are living it who have lived it and who feel accompanied then we even had a first moment in the campaign where we look for that poetry that poetry was Jeanette Bedolla is a journalist has an important charge in the main newspaper written by the country which is time and she shared the main thing to feel all that support her case her case today is being investigated has not been sanctioned and everything that happens a little with access to justice but that also allowed that other women were raising their voice that organizations were created of women victims and it was possible that the topic of sexual violence began to question that it would stop being so normalized because it was a topic that little was talked about in fact later several campaigns have emerged but the idea is that it becomes a topic of the public agenda and it is so much that it was then achieved with the organizations of women, feminists and victims that the topic of sexual violence was also a central axis in the agenda of negotiation in Havana so I'm going to just pick up on this last point for a moment and just ask you how were men engaged in this story? I'm so engaged I want to just keep talking to you 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% in the discussion but it's true that we've achieved the agreement that the war but also the sexual violence affects and affects and has as a central victim to women so it's been our central bet and they've also been multipliers in terms of helping us to visualize the situation to question the relationships of domination from the questions of new masculinities and I'll leave it to you so you can complete it because we have several topics I'm not as generous as Marta in the sense that if it's true there are some barons that have been civilized but even the barons of human rights organizations that are our allies I think that the violence against women is a secondary problem that is, there are other fundamental problems in society that's why I'm not so generous I think that it's been gained in some sensitivity in certain sectors but I've always put it in a second plan so it's the most important the issue of disappearance the most important the kidnapping and a proof of this is that the mobilizations that women do to report for example in November last year in the campaign even less the barons shine because of their absence in that mobilization they weren't and this tells us that no, I forgot there was another important thing I think that if we consider that the barons have their masculinity I think that the barons have to also ask themselves why they do the violence against women, not as an individual but as a collective of men but they compete with them I think that and to us feminists they can contribute to that many more women gain in autonomy that many more women because if in that alliance with the barons they say well we want to transform we can make alliances but I really think that we haven't yet found sufficiently allied barons that play with us hugged, partied for the issue of violence against women and of all the violence so I think we are on the way to achieve it it's just as optimistic that Marta no, of course within the organization if we have found men who have been victims of sexual violence and there is something very particular to the man it is very difficult to talk about sexual violence because obviously the most violent are men yes but if they feel more let's say they say I am a baron and I share a lot with them they are very few men committed with this fight of the organizations and the victims the long-term task with the men to create this new masculinity and we understand that we have to create the right of the little ones because the only way to transform I, for example, have three violations I had one at 14 years old another at 35 years old for three members of the self-defense and another at 42 years old for a permanent partner and going back with a little bit of the survey is that the survey and the campaign has also allowed women to talk about the different violations we have suffered as we know women who have also been victims of violations by different actors by different armed groups and how all this has allowed also that in the territories women we build these new masculinity it is a long-term task 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? but also we have a challenge with the new congress which starts now on July 20 next Friday and it is that we face the issue of sexual violence but face the central issues that we are moving the public agenda in Colombia our central position is the implementation of the peace agreement and with the new government and with the new congress we see several threats that this agreement is not just really one of the fundamental achievements of the peace agreement is that women and victims were present were invited on several occasions to put their agenda there the victims are also central within the firm of the agreement and the approach of gender was in the six points of the agreement in the technical chapter so we feel that the central work before defending only our campaign is to defend the total implementation of the peace agreement and we feel that this peace agreement is at risk because it wants to start to disarticulate and affect points that are the vertical column of the peace agreement so if you want I don't take all the issues that are more conversational I think the new government would not have much problem in accepting that sexual violence is a crime of humanity and the sanction to the responsible of these crimes what happens is that the management is different it is a much more permissive in front of the crimes committed by the public force in front of the crimes committed by the insurgency and let's say there is a critical issue of the new agreement I consider if we have talked about it these days here and it is that the new government that its party is the democratic center which is a party that is opposed from the beginning to the dialogue process and which is a party that is a plebiscite when it was being referred if we were in agreement with the peace we were not in agreement and it is of the few countries in the world that vote against the peace so it won that we were not in agreement that let's say marks more or less a horizon in relation to what the exercise is going to be during 4 years in what is in agreement so there are three fundamental issues of weakness of the government that we hope that it takes enough distance from its party that we hope one that they consider they are pushing again to make a referendum again make a referendum in three fundamental issues one is being able to modify everything that has to do with the integration system of justice and reparation of the special jurisdiction for the peace the whole issue of participation that has to do with the insurgency insurgency now that it is a party can participate in politics can not participate and a political reform that the country needs and the other issue is that the agreement as a way that it could remain more beyond this government as a constitutional block means that part of the agreement that entered the constitution they want to make a referendum to modify those three points and very factually they can win but it will depend on those who want peace to win let's say in question of sexual violence the G where they can tell the truth what we ask the most victims of the whole conflict to know the truth there was a senator who proposed that sexual violence in minors of 18 years will pass to ordinary justice where there is a total impunity we do not know no case resolved then most of the women victims of sexual violence being minors of age then never these women will know the truth that is a part of the disarticulation of the agreements having a special room for the military because there will also be a total impunity it will be a different treatment that will favor the military this also did so as we see that is a big risk in the new government how they will change the things that were left in the agreement and one of the that we have as organizations is that what was pacted in Havana the implementation of the agreements and how it was because otherwise there is a big risk thank you for really moving to the future with what are your new challenges in front of you I am 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 is going to talk about its possible use for policy shaping what kind of impact did these studies have not only on the individuals and the society but certainly the governance so thank you Mary 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 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 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 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 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's 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 de-traumatizing 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 is 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 and 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 violence and for 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 hell on the researchers as well who are living their own 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 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 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 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 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 where it'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 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 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 took us less than six months to get a unanimous voting on a 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 monitor what the state is doing and to make sure that they implement the agreements and then also to make you know to strengthen services to make the case for the importance of 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 Marion 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 and A and I'm looking to my colleague Tonus 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 and succinctly 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 fourth thank you very much please I'm going to have you take the mic because we're on video I have several questions but I'll summarize them into one thank you but please introduce yourself my name is Colin Sodongo I have an organization that I initiated for peace and development but I'm finalizing my PhD in police and administration with Walden University public police and administration measuring on terrorism, peace and mediation my question goes to the last speaker Mary yes I was a little bit concerned on when you mention 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 outside 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 Columbia congratulations for taking this courage are you addressing sexual violence in isolation or there are other main root causes that needs to be addressed from the policy confines so that at least there would be some long lasting solution to the problem for those cogent questions I'm going to go to the back here thank you my name is 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 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 the 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 it's 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 for something that you didn't have like 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 how like does it relate to South Sudan how the community takes it like is it okay to talk about it community wise and how your parents or your family takes it wonderful 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 Aptagarg I work with Perundo I have a very quick question about are there any plans or how do you plan on continuing to track some 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 borne witness to violence throughout their lives are highly likely to either exhibit or perpetrate violence going forward so how to track this how to keep this going forward and any initiatives to help 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 about 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 report 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 in the informed consent procedure that everything they say will be a secret and of course it's under reported 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 says that basically sort of she 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 contribute in what she's been through is something that she should you know be ashamed of but understand that it's not something to be ashamed of so that's one piece in public we never asked women about their experiences of violence not in focus groups not with health providers or stakeholders that would be very dangerous and they don't 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 were here 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 the 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 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 I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I