 Good morning. Thank you. Welcome to the United States Institute of Peace and to this public event, Female Soldiers and DDR, Sierra Leone, Nepal, and Columbia. My name is Kathleen Kienist. I'm the director of the Gender and Peace Building Center here at the Institute. I want to recognize US aid, who has been instrumental in bringing Dr. McKenzie to Washington, DC, from New Zealand for a series of meetings this week. So we wanted to acknowledge them. For those of you who may be new to our events and for those of you who are a part of our webcasting audience today, may it suffice that the United States Institute of Peace is an independent, non-partisan, national institution established 26 years ago and funded by Congress. Our mission includes assisting the international community in preventing, managing, and resolving conflicts. Today's public event is a part of a year-long effort to examine the issues of war and women and will include the book launch of USIP's edited volume by the name Women in War, Power and Protection in the 21st Century. This book will be launched in early May, so we hope to see you then as well. Today, Female Soldiers and DDR. Let's set the scene for a moment. 10 years ago, the Security Council, UN Security Council, set up a resolution, 1325, on women, peace, and security. It has specifically addressed the issues and reaffirmed the relevance of gender to the DDR processes. In paragraph 13, the Security Council emphasized that all those involved in the planning for disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration to consider the different needs of female and male ex-combatants and to take into account the needs of their dependents. The 1325 resolution recognizes that whether they are combatants, citizens, or agents of change, women are an asset to the peace and DDR process and must be afforded their right to participate fully. Practitioners and policy makers in the field of DDR often define the combatant in a narrow social context as armed men with or without dependents. But the reality is that women may also carry guns or else play key roles in conflict, including as operation specialists, as nurses, spies, cooks, and logistic specialists, and even as temporary wives. The traditional assumption that combatants are men with guns fails to recognize that many armed groups are constituted of men, women, and children in both forced and voluntary capacities. Our panelists here today will examine these, quote, working assumptions about men as soldiers and the implications of the actual reality where women are key actors in conflict. They will also explore what reintegration means for communities, especially where this is a huge, where there is a huge gap between those living actors who receive compensation of some sort and the many who are left with nothing, including widows of dead soldiers, war babies, and the silent victims of sexual violence. Without any further delay, I wanna introduce our speakers and panelists and discussants, excuse me, in the order in which they will present this morning. I want to note that one of our discussants, Colette Roush, unfortunately, is ill with the flu. It's that season in Washington and will not be able to join us. I will make a few remarks on her behalf later in the program. Our first speaker is Megan McKenzie. Dr. McKenzie is a lecturer in the Department of Political Science and International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. It's a long title. She has completed a postdoctoral fellowship in residence at the Belfer Center for International Security and the Women and Public Policy Program at the Kennedy School, Harvard University. She has been working through development studies, women's studies and international relations. Her related research interests includes the influence of the liberal family model, conjugal order on development discourses, and critical security studies, war, and identity. She has a long list of publications, including the one that is out on the table today and that we will connect to our website later on in the afternoon. Dr. McKenzie, welcome. I will just briefly also introduce the other discussants for just smooth flow into our discussing period. Louis Alexander Berg is a Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar here at the Institute of Peace and also a PhD candidate at Georgetown University where he's conducting research on the politics of security, sector reform in post-conflict state. He's currently on leave from US Agency for International Development's Office of Democracy and Governance, where he serves as a rule of law advisor there. More information on all of their bios will be on our website later. And our final discussant today is Virginia Ouvier. Jenny joined USIP about a decade ago. She is well acquainted with our fellowship program, but really in her current role as the head of our Columbia Conflict Team, she has really served as a leader for us in terms of looking at gender related issues in the post-conflict arena. She is well noted in the field throughout both development studies and also security studies and editor of a recent book on Columbia. So I wanna welcome each of you here today. We will make sure that there is plenty of time for comments from the audience, Q and A. We have mics on both sides of the room. And we will look forward to hearing from all of you. So I want to welcome Dr. McKenzie, who has a presentation that will begin now. Thank you very much. I wanted to start by saying thank you to Kathleen for inviting me here and thank you to USIP for hosting this event. And thank you to you for attending, as well as the discussants today. The presentation today is based on research that I've been working on for several years. And it started with some of my doctoral work, which involved extensive interviews with female soldiers in Sierra Leone at the end of 2005. So this research involved approximately 75 interviews with women who participated primarily in the rebel forces in Sierra Leone. So I'll just get straight into it by introducing some of the questions that I'd like to think about today. I should start by saying that I'm in New Zealand, but I'm Canadian and I lived in Boston. So if you're wondering where the accent is, I don't have a New Zealand accent. So the first sort of the central question of parts of my research, and this color is quite difficult to read. Anyway, it's not essential. The first question is why, if women participated as soldiers in Sierra Leone, were they largely ignored in mainstream accounts of the conflict and overlooked in the DDR process, the disarmament demobilization and reintegration process? So this is the specific question of my research. And some of the broader questions that I'd like to draw on today or focus on today include what gendered stereotypes might influence post-conflict policymaking. Is post-conflict a good time to address gender inequality? Why does gender sensitivity matter when it comes to conflict and post-conflict policymaking? And how can we improve conflict programs by acknowledging gender? So first I'd just like to start by looking at or thinking about stereotypes associated with third world women and war. So throughout the literature and in the mass media representations of conflict in Africa, we see two sort of dominant themes coming out. The first is that this assumption that women aren't major actors in war. So on the right hand side, you have a photo at the top of one of the most popular movies right now, recent movies about Sierra Leone blood diamonds. If anyone's seen it, you know that women are virtually absent from the movie except the love interest. Ishmael B, who when we think about child soldiers, we often think about his book, which is one of the most popular written by a child soldier. And this bottom image on the right I use quite often. If you Google image children in war, this image has been used in so many different contexts for so many different reasons. I'm sure some of you will recognize it. And often we don't know where this child comes from. In reality, he is a Sierra Leone and he's probably in his late 20s now. But this image sort of captures some of the stereotypes we have about youth and conflict. So the second assumption that comes through when we're thinking about third world women in war is that when war is over, women are happy to quote unquote return to normal. So often the process of reintegration is depicted as a return to normal or return to the way things were. And so we're gonna unpack those today. And I'd like to just ask this question or think about the question, are females only victims in war? And what are the sources of this stereotype? Why do women get depicted primarily or in some cases exclusively as victims in civil conflicts? So there's a few reasons that I'd like to draw attention to. The first is the emphasis on sexual violence when we're talking about conflicts. And I'm very happy that there's an increased amount of attention to sexual violence. It's necessary, it's important. But when we talk about places like Sierra Leone, often when there is literature on women in Sierra Leone, it's only about sexual violence. There's not a lot of attention to women as actors, women as agents. Second is that women are often removed from the policymaking process. So when we're thinking about or listening to stories of war, we're not getting women's perspectives. So for example, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission an 8,000 page document in Sierra Leone, it almost only mentions females as victims, which is important in terms of archiving a conflict. And then in terms of literature and research, there's lots of literature and research that supports this idea that women are primarily victims or women are less likely to be actors in war. So first, work by maternal feminists that sort of the argument that because women give birth they're more naturally peaceful, less likely to participate in wars. And this argument still pervades in a lot of the research. And also some of the research that happened mostly in the 70s that supported the argument that women are averse to risk. Women are less likely to take risk taking behaviors and therefore they're less likely to participate in conflict. And then finally, any attention that there has been to violent women tends to depict them as exceptions or even monsters. So we have Laura Schauberg in Karen Gentry's book, for example, called Mothers, Monsters and Horrors, focused on violent women. So I'd like to shift now to this question of female soldiers or what I sometimes say is the problem with female soldiers. And the reason I call it a problem is female soldiers represent a problem for both academics and policymakers for a couple of reasons. The first is that female soldiers really challenge a particular understanding of social and gender order. So many female soldiers in Sierra Leone, in particular, achieved positions of power that they never would have achieved before or after the conflict. Many of them aren't married or marry more than one partner, which is unusual in that context. Many of them are a part of or what are considered illegitimate relationships. So they get married during the conflict in marriages that aren't authorized by their family. Some of them have children that are born as a result of rape or children that are born as a result of so-called illegitimate relationships. So in that light, in many ways, they represent a challenge to social order. Disrupt how we think of gender order. Also, female soldiers really challenge or disrupt gendered binaries associated with war. So we're thinking about sort of these archetypes like the male warrior and the female victim. Female soldiers really disturb that binary. And also dominant myths about war. Again, thinking about this presumption that women are naturally peaceful and men are more naturally violent. So this is what I'd like to start with in terms of the problem with female soldiers. And based on my research, again, because of time, I'm just gonna give a broad overview of some of the conclusions or some of the findings from the research. So the first thing that came through after conducting this research is that the numbers of female soldiers was much higher than initially expected. So we didn't know, before I started doing research, there were various different statistics. And most of them indicated that women represented between 10 and 20% of the fighting forces in Sierra Leone. Now, based on my interviews asking women how many other women were with them in the fighting forces, asking program officers how many women they thought were part of the fighting forces. This number jumped to between 30 and 50%. So this is a big difference. And the first thing that people tend to ask when I give that number is, well, what were women doing? So if there were 50% of fighting forces, were they really soldiers? And I get that question a lot. And I think it's an interesting question when we're thinking about who is a real soldier? Do we ask that question about men? And one of the things that came out, and I'll show you on the next slide, is that women participated in multiple and diverse roles. They weren't simply there as support roles or as abductees. And so we'll talk about that in a minute. Next is that female soldiers, as well as male soldiers, were often perpetrators and victims. So again, this binary between who are the victims and who are perpetrators in conflict gets blurred. So most of the women I spoke to experienced sexual violence, and many of these same women participated in violent acts themselves. So this binary is just completely disturbed. Again, there was a distinct effort, especially in the post-conflict moment, to distinguish between those who participated in combat and those who participated in support roles. And this distinction was primarily, there was not this effort to distinguish between male soldiers who were in support or male soldiers who were combatants. So again, going back to this question of who are real soldiers, what constitutes a real soldier. Another finding was that many of these female soldiers experienced sexual violence. So the rates of sexual violence for female soldiers was somewhere between the 70 and 90% range, which is extremely high. So when I asked women, what did you do during the conflict? This is a list of some of the responses, and I'll just leave it up. I know the first few you can't see, but you still get a very good sense of the diversity of roles. Would you mind repeating them just for our webcast audience? Sure, so the first, the ones that you can't see, the leading lethal attacks, screening and killing pro-Rebels civilians, combatant, poison, inject, captured war prisoners with either lethal injection or acid. I trained with AFRC, bush camp, how to shoot a gun, fighting, killing and maiming pro-government forces and civilians, gun trafficking, killing, planning and carrying out attacks on public places, due executions on commanders of my age group, murdered children. So clearly women participated in unexpected and diverse activities during the conflict. So I wanna go back to how women are addressed or how women are talked about in the post-conflict moment. What I found interesting in much of the literature as well as some of the policies that were created to address women is that women were retitled. So there were a lot of different titles used to address female soldiers. So a lot of them were called camp followers, regardless of their activities, abductees. So for example, many of the women I interviewed were part of a program that was exclusively set up for abducted women. So in order to qualify, you actually had to identify yourself as an abductee. Sex slaves, domestic slaves, and then these two last titles, which you can see are quite ambiguous and I think indicate sort of this hesitancy with identifying women as female soldiers. So girls and women associated with the fighting forces and vulnerable groups associated with armed movements. So what's interesting about these titles is it seems to distance women away from the soldier title, right? And I think there's a few important points to draw out of this. First is the importance of combat duty to the soldier title, but it seems like this is only important for women. Second is this reclassification tends to reclassify women as some form of victim. So abductees, camp followers, bushwives, all indicate victimhood rather than any agency. And certainly, as I said before, most of these women experienced violence, were victims of some kind, but also had acted as agents. The third point to draw out is this classification tends to ignore or prioritize the diverse labor required to sustain warfare. So it's true, many women did participate as cooks, domestic workers, sex slaves, but prioritizing the kinds of labor or distinguishing between real soldier and supporting role really ignores the kind of labor that's actually required to sustain a rebel movement. And most importantly, I think, it ignores sexual slavery as what I call a wartime currency and a required duty for many women. So what we've found from research and Chris Coulter has done some excellent work on this area is that sexual violence was used as a currency. It was used as a reward, a punishment. Women could find ways to protect themselves from rape. So you see that it was used systematically throughout the conflict. And finally, this lack of attention to gender resulted in inefficient DDR policymaking, which I'll get to in just a minute. So I'll shift to the DDR now. Like many disarmament programs, the one in Sierra Leone was grossly underfunded, partly because there was an underestimation of how many soldiers would turn up for the DDR. Initially, there was an estimation that 20,000 would show up and over 75,000 came to the disarmament process. And of that 75,000 for the adult DDR, only 5,000 were women. And for the children's DDR, only 8% of those disarmed were girls. What's important to know about the DDR in Sierra Leone and many other DDRs is that there was a real emphasis on the first D. Most of the funding, most of the attention went for the disarmament phase. And by the time the reintegration phase, that they were in the reintegration phase, many of the funds had run out. A lot of the programs, training programs had been taken from six months to six weeks to three weeks. And so this really impacted women in a particular way, which I'll get to. So for those women who did participate in the DDR, which is quite a small number, it's important to think about what reintegration looks like for these female soldiers. How do they reintegrate back into communities? So first of all, for reintegration, reintegration programs typically offered four training options. So tailoring, tie-dying, soap making, and weaving. So we see that they're very gendered, not very lucrative, not context specific. And especially when you think about women who participated in a rebel movement for 11 years, it seems almost condescending. So these were highly problematic. What's interesting, the second point is that reintegration for females more generally was seen as a social process that would happen naturally. We even had the National Commission for DDR in Sierra Leone talking about the reintegration process as something that would happen naturally. And what this meant was marriage was often talked about as a mechanism for reintegration, a way of women going back into the community or returning to their family as a source of reintegration. So there was a little input on training, as I said before. I did talk to many policymakers who knew that these training options weren't effective and weren't working, but by this point that the reintegration process had been initiated and it was too difficult, it was seen as too difficult to make any big changes at that point. So in this sense, I really think that the post-conflict moment is a perfect opportunity to address gender. If you think about an 11-year civil conflict, any ideas of social order are completely disrupted. And so in many ways, it's a perfect opportunity to institute or encourage positive kinds of social order instead of a return to normal. So before I get to some of the broader conclusions, I do want to mention that there are some major differences between male soldiers and female soldiers. I certainly don't want to give the impression that women just need to be included into the existing reintegration process. And some of the main differences, again, sexual violence. So when you have women, 70 to 90% of a cohort of women who've experienced sexual violence, they have very different kinds of needs, right? We also have some indication of, as Kathleen mentioned, war babies or children born as a result of sexual violence. There's not enough research on this area. We have some indication that there may be around 20,000 in Sierra Leone. We don't know what their long-term reintegration needs are or the challenges that women who have children born as a result of war face. And women face different kinds of stigma post-conflict. So some males who are in the rebel forces or in the Sierra Leone Army might be recognized as heroes, their activities might be recognized as positive, women who participate as soldiers almost never are recognized in a positive way. So most of the women I spoke with, part of their reintegration strategy was not talking about their activities during the war. Silence, trying to hide where they had been during the war, what they had participated in. And men, in some cases had to do the same, but didn't face the same kinds of stigma. So because of time, I just want to get to some of the broader conclusions and policy recommendations. So one of the things that I think is important to think about is the importance of dialogue between scholars and practitioners, which seems obvious, but it doesn't happen as often as it should. And not only dialogue between scholars and practitioners, but between beneficiaries and practitioners. So the only reason we have sort of this shift in statistics of female soldiers is because I spoke with female soldiers and they told me how many women were with them. The existing statistics aren't available because they didn't show up to DDR programs. So it's very difficult to know what women need post-conflict if we don't talk to them. It's very difficult to know their experience if we don't have ways of speaking with them. Second and probably the most important point to make here is that we need to think about gender consistently. So we have this term gender mainstreaming, which means different things to different people. But what I'd like to say is that I think gender needs to be thought about consistently and before the implementation phase. So what tends to happen, especially with a disarmament process, is there's a model that's used, it's often a securitized context, there's a need to instigate something quickly, and so we rely on models. So if we're not thinking about gender consistently before that model or while that model's created, it becomes difficult to think about broader issues of gender in a securitized context. So again, thinking about the impacts of securitizing, what I call securitizing post-conflict. So there has been more of an emphasis on security when we talk about post-conflict and development. There's been more attention to security sector reform, very warranted, but this tends to impact women in different ways. Because we assume that men are more naturally violent, that men are the primary actors in war, often this means that women get left out of post-conflict policies. Right, if we think about the term idle youth. Idle youth is almost only used in reference to men, this assumption that men or boys if left without jobs will become a source of insecurity. And again, I think we need to recognize sexual violence as a currency of war, not just an impact of war. So I think we have moved beyond understanding sexual violence as just an inevitable impact of conflict. But really, there hasn't been enough attention to the systemic use of sexual violence and trying to think about it in that way in order to prevent its use. And then more broadly, I think there's a need to rethink the meaning of post-conflict. So what I mean by that is this idea or this idealized image of representation of post-conflict as a positive transition, a positive period of time. For many women I spoke with, it's a time of silence, of stigma. It's often represented, we hear empowerment of women. Post-conflict is often represented as a time of opportunity for women. Many of the women I spoke with, it's a time where they lose a lot of power. They lose a lot of status in their communities. And so it's not necessarily a time of opportunity. And certainly it's not a gender-neutral process. Men and women don't go through this post-conflict period in the same way. We also really need to rethink the timeframe of post-conflict. So I was in Sierra Leone in 2005 and you had policy makers under pressure to stop using the term post-conflict. Because it was three years after the conflict we need to now shift our policies away from that language. When in reality some of the same issues, some of the challenges of conflict were still prevalent. And certainly when we think about sexual violence, the long-term impacts of sexual violence, these are long-term issues that require sort of an extended thinking in terms of post-conflict. So I know that's a lot of food for thought and a broad range of topics and I'm happy to answer questions on any of them. Thank you for listening. Thank you very much. Megan, you gave us a great deal to think about and a wonderful way to launch our discussion. And we're looking to Alex now who's going to look at DDR in the Liberian case and bring out commonalities and differences. Thank you, Alex. Okay, well, thanks very much and thanks to USIP for the opportunity to speak on this I think very interesting and useful panel. And thanks to a great presentation by Megan and I also commend to you her paper that's outside. It's a great paper and a lot of the other work that she's done so I recommend you check it out. It's based on some really important and interesting research. And I think in terms of this presentation one of the I think most useful contributions in addition to bringing out specifically the role of women in DDR is that it moves us beyond the focus of DDR on the impact of DDR in terms of immediate stabilization and immediate peace. A lot of the literature as well as practice on DDR really looks at what its impact is in terms of stopping the conflict bringing peace in the short term. And in that respect there actually has been quite a bit of success sincerely owned for good reason as lauded as a successful model. But as we know DDR also can and does have long term impacts and we know that one of the areas where DDR falls short is in the reintegration phase as Megan pointed out. Where it can and it should be able to bring improved livelihoods and economic opportunities for a very significant group of people and contribute to peace and stability. And Megan sort of focused our attention on the impact specifically on women in this process and that while there's a real opportunity not only to provide opportunities but to remake and to ship some of the pre-existing social relationships that that is often a missed opportunity. And in fact DDR can even disempower women in particular. And so what I wanna do is just build on this insight and on Megan's talk and talk even a little bit more broadly about how the broader social relations within communities and the impact of DDR on those relationships affect the reintegration process and especially for women. And I'm gonna focus mostly on Liberia and research that I've done there as well as a little bit on Sierra Leone. And the key point that I wanna make is that again we need to look beyond the individual combatants and the individual beneficiaries of these programs to the communities and the institutions in which they're gonna be reintegrated. And what opportunities you're creating or potentially closing off in those institutions and communities. And this requires making much more explicit links between DDR programs and other things that are going on in the post-conflict environment like security sector reform programs like other community and economic development programs. And the reason is if you take I think one of Megan's really important points if you look at post-conflict societies broadly in almost every case there's this kind of disruption in social relationships. You can think of it in our own context but we're all familiar with images of Rosie the Riveter in World War II that inspired women to come out and take new roles in society. And arguably after the war that whole process contributed to opening up space for women in the US context. And if you look at Sierra Leone and Liberia the disruption is even more stark. The conflict led to many of the traditional leaders paramount chiefs, local notables to flee the area creating a lot of space and communities for other actors including women including people who were left behind to take on new roles. The fact that women were fighting and active fighters created a whole new set of relationships for women which with profound implications on their roles. And so the question is what happens after the conflict? Is new space opened up as it was in this case in the US? Or are they closed off again? And also what is the impact of DDR on that? And what I wanna do is I wanna make three points about how DDR tends to reinforce pre-existing divisions and close off that space and then get to how it could be done a little bit differently. So the first way is that immediately DDR programs tend to reinforce existing social networks and particularly wartime social networks. So in the Liberian context it's pretty well documented that many of the allowances that were given to ex-combatants in the initial phase of the DDR program where they were given allowances to start participating when they handed in their weapon were paid directly back to their commanders and this kind of reinforced existing the combatant structures. And a lot of these structures remain till today where you've got sort of former groups of ex-combatants in economic activities, politics, even criminal activities. And this is especially problematic for women because a lot of these relationships with these commanders were abusive and exploitative. So for example, an Amnesty International report quotes several women ex-combatants who said that their commanders made them trade sexual favors in order to get access to weapons so that they could come to the DDR program and participate. In fact, the DDR program in Liberia actually tried to address this and it was actually quite an improvement over previous programs, recognizing that up to 40% of combatants were women. There is specific mention in the UN Security Council resolution in the program to addressing the needs of women and children in particular and they had a provision that women and children actually did not need to bring a weapon to qualify their process. They also had separate screening and holding places for men and women so that they wouldn't encounter abusive commanders. Women receive special medical treatment and so forth. But unfortunately, there weren't enough resources and the implementation really fell short on these. And as it turns out, a lot of women just weren't aware that they didn't need to bring a weapon. And part of the reason is that in order to get the word out, they tended to rely on these wartime networks to let people know instead of going beyond those networks and trying to get out to places where women might actually get the information. And there are other barriers of course, for example, there was a childcare provided. So women with children were not likely to show up or complete their reintegration process. So without some additional measures like this, we can see how the program itself reinforces some of these immediate social networks. The second way is that not enough support is provided within the communities and the institutions in which people, combatants, men and women are to be reintegrated. So Megan mentioned as part of the DDR process in Sierra Leone and Liberia, participants were provided either formal education or skills training. As she said, many of the women did things like tie dyeing, soap making or tailoring. They were given an allowance and then a startup kit, a little bit of money to go out and start a business. Well, you need a little bit more than a kit to start a business. You need some capital, maybe you need a workshop space. But most importantly, you need a clientele, right? And a clientele requires a social network. It requires the ability to develop a reputation, to develop some credibility in the neighborhood. And this is a problem for all the ex-combatants, men and women alike, and I think was a major impediment in the reintegration process. But women face even higher challenges in this respect. Women are disadvantaged in terms of access to property, in terms of purchasing land, access and credit. And all of the stigma issues that Megan mentioned, when you have that high level of stigma, it's really a barrier to developing and establishing yourself in a community as a business. And a lot of the research in both Sierra Leone and Liberia finds that one of the most important determinants to ex-combatant success, especially women, is their acceptance in their communities and support network. And DDR programs, with a few exceptions that we can talk about later, rarely address that. And the third way that DDR programs reinforce this is that they don't actually work with these new social networks that are created during the war. So in Liberia, for example, there are numerous examples of all women combat units commanded by women. And in some cases, these women explicitly saw their role as challenging male dominance, either because they were abused, because they were fighting abuse by men, and they saw this as the reason they were fighting, at least in part. And I want to read you a quote from one of the generals of these groups. This is quoted from an ILO report. And she says, this was taken during the DDR process. She says, we first were fighting men with our guns. Now we have given up our guns, but we still have to fight men, this time with our pens. That's what I try to tell my girls now. So there are clearly some amazing possibilities here to engage groups like this, to help them play more constructive roles, politically, economically, socially, and so forth. But these groups were rarely targeted in any significant way. And not just combatant groups, but there are other groups that form, groups of widows, of groups in communities that develop these kinds of networks to sustain themselves during the war. These groups are not the ones that are targeted to help build those support structures and empower women. So how can we address some of these gaps in the DDR program? So I want to, in finishing, I want to just tell a couple of stories, which I think offer some possibilities. One is from Liberia, one is from Sierra Leone, and give us some clues as to how we might do this a little bit differently. So the first story I want to tell takes place in Liberia. So as I mentioned, there actually was a major focus in the post-conflict era on addressing the needs of women in particular. And one of the areas this was addressed was in the security sector reform program. There were programs to rebuild, to restructure the army and the police. And they specifically included goals to increase the recruitment and the leadership level for women. But a couple of years into the process, both the army and police were facing major criticism. The army, for example, recruitment of women was under 5%. But within a few years, and this situation has really turned around, as of last year, over 50% of the police and 10% of the army are women, which is not up to the 30%, which is the stated goal. But it's really a huge improvement over what it was previously. And this is, as a result of a real major push, President Ellen Johnson-Sterleaf of Liberia has really pushed this 30% across all government agencies. She appointed a woman as the first police chief in her administration, as well as a number of senior officers. There is a women's police union that's specifically there to reach out to women. And one of the sort of interesting twists, the UN deployed an all-women-formed police unit of Indian women that has gone out and done outreach in schools and is really credited with being a role model in encouraging women. But even with all of this push, one of the things they found was there is a major obstacle to recruitment of women, which is that they had hard trouble. They had hard time finding women who met the educational requirements. So the UN organized a course which prepared women in high school equivalency at the same time as they were doing their police training to try to boost women's participation. And I think this kind of illustrates, one, the kinds of things you have to do more broadly in society to increase opportunities for women. And I think this has really created sort of a set of role models for women for participation in an important area, but also the kinds of things you have to do to provide the opportunities and help women who are at a disadvantage relative to men in some of these areas to participate in a way that you can specifically link the DDR and SSR programs. The second story that I want to tell briefly takes place in Sierra Leone. And this looks more at the community level. So if you go to Sierra Leone today, you'll see lots of motorcycles going around. And a lot of these are motorcycle taxis. And these are actually a great way to get around, especially in the secondary cities where there are not many taxis. And it turns out many of these drivers are ex-combatants. And it's not necessarily completely a result of the DDR program that they're there. There was some training as mechanics and a little bit as drivers in the DDR program, but really there was a major need. Most of the taxis were destroyed after the war. Most of the roads were in bad shape. Market women in particular needed a way to get their goods to and from the market. But what happened, ex-combatants started working, but usually they're a wealthy businessman or somebody would own the motorcycles, rent them out, which they charged a very high fee, didn't leave a lot for the motorcycles. And there were also major stigma for these young men. They had major problems with the police. There were all kinds of conflicts. So in response, a group of ex-combatants who had these ties from during the war, from different groups of fashion that they served in, so they set up an association. They helped the motorbike riders to fool their money so they could buy their own bikes. They set up health cooperatives, all kinds of strategies like that. And when this dispute with the police really flared up, they helped organize, which led to a lawsuit, intervention by the senior leadership, which was British at the time, and which led to a very constructive engagement between the police. And one of the things that also happened is they linked with the market women, their major clientele, and they kind of worked together on this. So as this was happened, by this time, there was a lot of international support of NGOs, including Search for Common Ground and Consoliation Resources, which were working with motorbike riders. But this wasn't really a DDR success story. But it did achieve some of the things that DDR programs could. It built on an existing network of ex-combatants. It empowered them to improve their livelihood and to build a structure to integrate combatants into the community. It built this link with another group of women market traders. But these were still young men, and they had huge barriers with the stigmas and problems that they faced for women barriers are even higher. And I think it again points to the need to find these groups and to really help and empower them in different ways. So I just want to conclude here, and I'll just sum up briefly, I think three or four of the points that I think can help move beyond the current approach to try to find ways to build on some of the space that's created and empower women in particular in post-conflict environment. So the first, and I think Megan has pointed this out, is to include the needs of women in DDR programs, like childcare, like information. And the best way to do that is integrate representatives of women combatants and other groups in the planning process and management. The second is to link DDR more explicitly with security sector reform programs, with other programs to find those opportunities. And the third is to move towards a more community-focused DDR, where you're trying to identify and work with the support structures in the community and in the institutions to help integrate people. And finally, more needs to be done to find and to target these groups that are out there that could be really constructive forces in society if they had a little bit of information, a little bit of support in organization. And I will end there. Thank you very much, Alex, for helping us link the security sector reform with the DDR processes and really focusing in on the community of important addition to the discussion. Ginny Bouvier is now going to take us to her work in Columbia and other parts of South America. Boy, this has been such a rich panoply of ideas and concepts and I think a really important success in highlighting the missing pieces in our policies and in our understanding of how things work in conflict and how things work in resolution of conflict. I want to mention a couple of things just in response to Megan's presentation. I think the first question that we need to think about when we think about DDR is the role of DDR in peace building and how the role of DDR might be different in a conflict situation as opposed to a post-conflict situation. Kathleen introduced me as working on Columbia, which is in a post-conflict period and I actually don't understand the reality of Columbia as being in a post-conflict stage, although they are implementing post-conflict programs of DDR while a conflict is going on. And I think that creates some porous boundaries that may be a little bit slippery for those of us in the community of conflict resolution because basically you're talking about a counterinsurgency approach when you're looking at post-conflict peace building and trying to get ex-combatants to inform about what's going on in communities. So I think there's a very different slant that you would have on what it means to reintegrate ex-combatants while the conflict is still hot and going on. So I think that's one word of caution that I would throw out. I wanted to comment on Megan's, I think, assessment of the silence of women and I think we see this at many different levels. In Columbia, we've seen efforts to break the silence. I think since about 2000, we've started to see autobiographies of women who have been ex-combatants. We've seen academics who are studying the demobilization process and how it affects women and I just highlight the work of Mario Kenyavazquez who has her book escrito para no morir. Vera Grave, Patricia Lara, Luz Maria Londoño and Joana Fernanda Nieto have a book called Mujeres No Contadas, Processes de Desmovilizacion y Retorno a la Vida Civil de Mujeres Ex-Combatientes en Colombia, 1990 a 2003. This is a study of, and it's entitled interestingly, Women Who Aren't Counted. And I think that that's really a theme that we see throughout, that the women are there but they're not counted, they're not seen. And so forums like this I think are really important to trying to zero in and say, where are the women? What are they doing? How are they being considered or not considered? How can they be considered as we design programs that will affect them? Those are just a few, and then there are academics, many academics who are studying this issue increasingly in Columbia and I think that their work can really clear some paths and highlight some of the questions that are being asked. One of the questions that I think is being asked is what do gender roles and gender relationships mean in terms of conflict? It's not just a question of counting the women. I think we're getting past that stage. We are counting the women, we see that they're there, we see for example in Columbia that of some 54,000 people who have demobilized in 2002, 32,000 are receiving services and of that group 14% or a little over 4,000 are women. So we can look at the numbers. I think we're getting better. The data is not by any means comprehensive or systematic. It's difficult to do comparisons because of the lack of data regarding women in many cases but I think we're getting to the point where we have to start thinking about what are the questions about gender relationships that make women's experiences different and it has to do with discrimination. It has to do with this lack of visibility of women. It has to do with the sexual violence but that's one piece of the whole and I think we need to start looking at a more integrated approach to looking at women. One of the things we see about these gender roles is that men who are ex-combatants have really taken the assigned gender role within society to an extreme and they've performed it well. So this is something, they're heroes in a way and if you think about it, men who go into the military are also performing that same kind of role. The difference being that there's an illegality, there may be, I mean there are other factors surrounding whether they go into legal military armed forces or illegal military armed forces but the roles in what they're doing is very comparable and so you see actually there have been some conversatorios, some conversations and dialogues that have been set up between ex-combatants and military and what you find is they have a lot in common. They think in the same way, they think about military strategy. When it comes right down to your actual work, what you do in your work world, there are not that many differences. For women ex-combatants, this is very different. Women who choose to go into war both within the traditional legal military and within the illegal military armed groups run into the fact that they have chosen a path for themselves that really goes against the grain of what society has said their best made to do which is to stay home, be mothers, be nurturing, be peaceful, resolve conflicts and so they're really fighting a different battle. So when you talk about reintegrating women who have transgressed norms and the reintegration programs look at trying to shoehorn these women back into traditional roles, you're really creating a number of very different kinds of dynamics and problems. Many times these women have taken on leadership roles in the armed groups that they've chosen to join. They go back and they're really not expected to take prominent roles. In fact, they're a disgrace to the community. They've taken up arms and they've done something that they were not supposed to do and they better keep that part of their history quiet or they'll have problems getting babysitters. They'll have problems having play dates for their children and what you find is that the DDR programs actually intentionally or not seem to have a standard component in that women are more likely to follow up with studying rather than working whether it's that they don't find jobs or the programs don't create jobs. Some recent statistics from the Fundación Ideas para la Paz show that 71% of the women who are participating in DDR programs are studying while 31% are working. It's the exact reverse for men. Men, 71% are working and 39% are studying. A slight portion are doing both. But I think that that's very telling about how the programs are creating structures that are not challenging current relationships that would enable women to be empowered and to be actors in society. I think that many of the points that Megan made, the question of are women returning to normalcy is a good one, what is normalcy? Is this a desirable condition for women? And if you think about gender relations in relation to the conflict cycle, some very interesting findings emerge. One, in many cases, recruitment, some 20%, in one study that I saw, some 20% of those who were recruited into illegal armed groups said that they, the reason that they joined the armed group was because of domestic violence at home. So you have a factor of gender relationships, really dysfunctional gender relationships at home being a contributing factor of war. You have sexual violence during the war being something that women are affected by and yet when women come out of war, the recourses that they have legally are very few. Cases of rape and violence against women are rarely prosecuted and when they're prosecuted they're rarely brought to completion with a prosecution of somebody who's been responsible. So there's really, there's an access to justice that affects women around these kinds of issues. And then when you get to the period of the resolution of conflict, there are many studies around the world that show that when ex-combatants go back to the communities and this is not just talking about women's ex-combatants but this is ex-combatants in general go back to communities, violence against women, skyrockets. This is something we know, this is something we can anticipate, this is something that no one is thinking about in policy terms. No one is creating prevention programs in the communities to address the likelihood that domestic violence will be on the rise when these ex-combatants return. So this may, let me see if there are any other, any other thoughts I wanted to throw out. I think the question of DDR and the emphasis on the demobilization and disarmament components I think does affect women in a negative way in that the reintegration and reconciliation pieces are probably the ones that are more important for them if they're not the ones carrying guns. And I should also go back, I think one of the questions that was raised by Megan's presentation is, why are we seeing such a discrepancy in the rates of people who come forward to participate in these programs and what was thought to be the numbers that would come forward. And she mentioned in Sierra Leone, 75,000 people came forward where they expected 20,000. Well in Columbia the same thing happened, when the paramilitary demobilized, the numbers were 15 or 16,000, a paramilitary that were expected, over 30,000 stepped forward to claim benefits or to try to step into the process and to be demobilized. And I think for women, if we think about why women are underrepresented, one of the things that we've seen is that women are more likely to self-demobilize rather than to join these programs. And I think there are a lot of reasons for this, some having to do with the social stigma, but some also having to do with the fact that most of these military structures, irregular military structures though they are, are often headed by men. And the men are the ones who turn in the lists of who are the ex-combatants. Now if there are sanctions at the international level for child soldiers and for women, and there's a kind of protective attitude that these are victim groups, that these are vulnerable groups, there's greater sanction in the international world I think for women and children being part of these forces. So I think that the male commanders may have less incentive to include the women on these lists, and the women may not have control over it. I think some of it is self-selection. They choose not to go to attend these programs or to take advantage of the resources, but I think there's also a kind of discrimination element that can come into play whereby the women are not the ones that are calling the shots as to whether they will be entitled to the benefits or not. So maybe I'll leave it at that and then open for questions. Thank you very much, Jenny. As moderator here, I'm going to take a bit of a left-hand turn. I think the discussion so far is so rich. I imagine the comments and the questions from the audience are equally rich and full of interesting examples that I'm going to ask forgiveness of my colleague, Colette Rausch, and suggest that I'm going to bring Colette back in another month or two to talk about this access to justice gap in the SSR and DDR processes. That is her specialty in Nepal, and I am not going to read her notes but really move us now into a discussion even without her rich case study, but I will bring her back and we will continue this discussion. So that's my commitment to you and to Colette. So with that, I would like to take a moment and just lay out our ground rules because we are on webcast and VOA, I'd be grateful if, as you make your question a comment if you could introduce yourself, your organization, and if you would just take a slight 40 degrees shift so that the watching audience can also see who is asking the question, it will make a much more engaged process. So the microphones are ready for anybody who would like to make a comment and without any kind of delay, I will take the, all right, please, don't wait. You should just line up, otherwise we'll not get through all of these. And I'll take probably two or three questions at a time and let the discussants and panelists decide how they want to address them, please. Good morning. My name is Ceci Laptel, I'm Jennings Randall Fellow here at USIP. Could you speak closer to the microphone? Sure, can you hear me? Yes, Ceci Laptel Fellow here at USIP. Thank you very much for an amazing number of presentations and really raising a lot of questions that are absolutely critical, not only I would say to women, but in particular to girls. And that's one of the aspects that you have discussed throughout your presentations, but really we see with girls a category of former combatants that is discriminated against and have a dual problems of being undermined because of their age as well as their gender. So that would be my question, which is that what actually would you then recommend in terms of policy recommendations to better reintegrate former girls combatants? And in that light, I would like just to share an experience, I'm just returning to Nepal, in fact just flew back yesterday and had a number of consultation regarding the reintegration of girls in Nepal that are not only then young and female, but most of those that joined the armed groups were from the lower castes. And in a system like India where castes really do matter, we actually see that extra hurdle to their reintegration. But while this is very specific to Nepal, in fact in my experience of working in other conflict, we always see the most disempowered women and most disempowered girls, very often from rural areas, very often coming from abusive relationship or abusive family, where they were very often beaten, had no access to education, very little access to work. So how do you also add the actual disempowerment of most of the women and girls and how does that feed into their integration? Thank you. Thank you very much and thank you for bringing Nepal to our attention. Really, please. Hi, good morning. And my name is Michael Schabler. I work with Search for Common Ground. I'm also going to bring Nepal in. Was sorry to not see Colette's presentation. I hope she feels better if she's watching us. First of all, your presentations were really interesting and provocative and I have a couple of comments that I just love some response to. The first is I believe that I spent four years in Nepal working in particular on the DDR for children with as part of UNICEF's working group and my agency had a role in all of that. And my experience there was that I think that there was a lot of absorption of the meta messages, meta lessons from in particular Liberia and Sierra Leone. That almost at a doctrinal level. The, there's been a major shift in how people are meant to access DDR programs and the much more emphasis on long-term reintegration and a major emphasis on the programming for girls. And you can see this reflected for instance in the Paris Principles and Nepal was the first DDR that happened in a, well it was an on DDR but a sort of long-term integration program that happened after the passage of the Paris Principles. And you could see that there were all sorts of emphasis in programming that was done, particularly for girls. And one of the things that emerged out of that case that was very interesting is that it is the family unit which is the essence actually for the potential of long-term and stable reintegration. And as Virginia pointed out in Colombia it's fascinating to hear that this issue of domestic violence is a root cause of women and young women and girls in particular joining armed groups there. And Nepal was also a generational conflict that pushed a lot of women in. And it was about a lot of young women chafing against the traditional choices and options and structures that they were given. And sort of saying, hey, it wasn't always a case of domestic violence although that was very prevalent. It was often a case of like, what choice do I have? I'm a young Dalit woman with ambitions and the Maoists are offering me a chance to go and be a leader in my community and play a role in transforming my society whereas my family is offering me no choice but to marry the old big guy down the road. And that was often very starkly put. And so young women were joining. And so the reintegration process was actually about reorienting family and helping families to actually re-engage the way in which they saw their daughters. So the whole war there emanated from the family unit. And I think that that's very common particularly in South Asia but we're seeing all over the world. So I just wanted to see your comments both on sort of the bigger doctrinal processes that have changed as a result of Liberian Sierra Leone's experiences and then the implications on how we work with families for reintegration of young women and girls. Thank you. I'm gonna stop there because these are both related to Nepal and I appreciate contextualizing age, class, regionality, it's true. We often overemphasize gender and we lose track of the many other social processes going on in terms of dynamics. So I'm going to turn Megan to you and then we'll just walk through our panelists here. Sure, well I'll start with the first question related to girls. And I'll be honest, I've been very hesitant. So many of the women I spoke with were in fact girls during the conflict and I've been very hesitant to segregate that research for a couple of reasons. The first is that much of the academic work on child soldiers in my opinion has been overly sensationalized and overly simplistic. Academics have been raising awareness about child soldiers and getting a lot of funding to raise awareness for a long time and there hasn't been a lot of in-depth analysis or moving beyond that raising awareness stage. And so I didn't necessarily want to be a part of that cohort but also one of the reasons I'm hesitant is that even though I've never written a single thing on child soldiers because I do work on women I get called in as an expert on child soldiers all of the time which is quite maddening in a way. And so I did recently do some work separating the data and I certainly recognize that there are different challenges and there's certainly if we have a hard time thinking about women with guns we have an even more difficult time thinking about girls with guns. One of the things that happened in Sierra Leone that I'll point out is that when I was working with an organization called Children Associated with the War and what happened for girl soldiers, girls who were put through the re... When they were going through the intake process girls tended to be classified as unaccompanied children rather than child soldiers regardless of what kinds of activities they had participated in. So most of the unaccompanied girls had participated in various activities in labor that contributed to the conflict but I think 80% of the girls that I read their intake forms had been classified in this way. So you see another instance where there's this shift away from the soldier title. So I certainly think there's more of a challenge in thinking about violent girls. There's also the challenge of resources. So for those women who were girls and then become adults, what programming do they have access to? How do we address a 20 year old who for an 11 year civil conflict most of these women joined when they were children and are no longer children at the end of the conflict. So that causes a lot of challenges in terms of policy making where you have this distinct line at 18. So I'll just, yeah, I do recognize it as important and should I just leave the same question? People have lots of time. Please, Alex, do you have any comments? Sure, yeah, I think both questions sort of raise this issue which I tried to get at a little bit but this question of when you're dealing with girls in particular but women as well and you're trying to reintegrate them into a social structure and the structure itself is not working for them is dysfunctional because of domestic violence because they no longer have a structure that will incorporate them. So what do you do in that kind of situation? And I think it's a real dilemma and it requires a lot more sort of thinking and working at that grassroots level within the communities and identifying those groups than we tend to do. There are a couple of examples in Liberia of a number of NGOs set up these things called Women Action Centers which were sort of community centers where they took in girls and women, they did psychosocial support counseling, specialized medical treatment, legal aid, the whole kind of peniply of work but that's I think you start to scratch the surface dealing with all of those issues that are inevitably coming out of anybody going through a conflict but girls and women obviously have the greater vulnerability but then the question is how do you move beyond that and the challenge is thinking about it really at that sort of family level, community level and working through those issues as a community and one thing I will point out is the studies point out that there is some variation and to the extent that women, combatants and fighters were integrated into the community. So some communities figured out how to do it and some didn't. So I think there's something that we can learn in terms of what those structures were that enabled that and which ones didn't. Thank you and Ginny. Could you move that mic closer to you? I guess on the first question, thinking about differential approach to girls and women and girls and boys and I think we need to break it down to girls, boys, men and women when we're thinking about DDR programs because I think you do have different needs at different stages and in thinking about the Colombian case girls are more likely to join the guerrillas in particular at a younger age than boys are. I think it's age 12 to 14 has been shown to be the norm for girls to join and 14 to 16 for boys. So in fact, most of the girls who would be ex combatants coming forward in DDR programs probably have spent most of their formative years in the guerrillas. And so I think that the focus on education for females versus males and the fact that it's so much higher for females may actually as I'm thinking about it may be in response to the fact that you have young girls who have not been educated in the formal system and so they have a real need. I think in terms of policy recommendations though we need to think about the longer term kind of sustainability of reintegration for these young girls. Education is not going to be enough. Educating them to what? Are these the next generation of beauty queens in Columbia? Well if they've been out there carrying a gun and trying to fight for social change or engaging in other activities that might not be so savory, the likelihood that they're going to be satisfied with that kind of lifestyle is pretty low. So I think we have to think about alternatives and we have to think longer term than most of these programs have been able to do. Going back to the question of role models on the question Michael raised for Search from Common Ground. There are two things. I think the first question is that DDR programs actually offer an opportunity to model new gender relationships and that should be part of their goal. They should have women in authoritative responsible positions as models to show that this is an appropriate role for girls and women and I think until you have those kinds of conscious decision making about creating and shaping models that male ex-combatants and female ex-combatants coming out of war can look to, I think we need to use our creative imagination but we need to have real practical examples to hold up and I want to link that to the question of how to work with families. The Nepal experience sounds fascinating in trying to find ways to basically model better family relationships and I think that is a key. I think we have to recognize though that with the prevalence of sexual violence in so many of these societies, not just in the conflict but in the society at large, the family is often the most dangerous place for women and that's a hard cold fact but it is a fact from what we've seen and so we need to think not only of the family as the place where women will find protection and possibilities of social reintegration but we need to think to the community and to support systems that can be given to women who have or are experiencing sexual violence. Thank you and I'll just add on that note just to expand our definition of gender here. Some of the earlier results from research being done in the DRC on sexual violence is that among the perpetrators, many who are males, somewhere between 60 and 70% of them were victims of sexual violence as children so we do need to keep our full range of perspective here especially as we start to try to understand perpetration of these violent acts, how do we intervene at an earlier stage in these DDR processes? Please introduce yourself. My name is Agnes Fala Kamaram from Liberia. I work with Straight from the Heart and I've worked with ex-fighters, both boys and guys in Liberia, I'm still working with them. My question, I wanted to ask Virginia but she has already answered my question in reintegration and community. So I go to Omega and Megan, you have done a research in Sierra Leone on female fighters in Sierra Leone and you talk about vocational training. How do you think, because the problem is not just talking but implementing things that we do research on. How do you try to convince international angels that go to work with ex-fighters to do a long-term training for women? You know, sub-making, tailoring, six months. It's not anything for a young girl that has been raped and have been with these boys with so many men and have like four unwanted children and not been disarmed, you understand? How can you encourage or talk to international angels to put money into a long-term training and let's forget about the DDR part, the reintegration. It's not just like giving them a short-term training. So how can you, because angels will go, international angels will have money. They'll tell you they want to do six weeks. You can work with me six weeks with these guys. I have worked with them, I'm still working with them. Some of them in Liberia, Luizia, you have worked in Liberia. They are now into prostitution. They have HIV, I'm taking some of them to the Jordanian hospital to the UN to treat them. So how can you, as a researcher, encourage international angels to say, listen, this is done. Six long-term is not it. Long-term training. Health, they have local midwifery training. One year, you get these people to know about their health and move out in the communities. So these are the things that we have to talk about when we're talking about reintegration. And when you're reintegrating, it has to be with the communities where they're coming from. They have been stigmatized. The women have been stigmatized. How can you come with these communities to do group discussion, how to accept these women? Because they are not looking at them as a victim. They are looking at them as a perpetrator. They are doing prostitution in Liberia. I'm not talking about Surrealism, but in Liberia, most of those guys on the streets are victims and they turn to perpetrators. So how can you encourage international angels that want to go and work with these people to do long-term training? And Luis, you talk about DDR. You say 40% of the DDR we are women. In Liberia, as I'm talking, I've worked in Liberia and I'm still working in Liberia. Most of these international angels don't want to listen to women in Liberia. So if you have worked in Liberia, what do you think we can do to encourage communities to work with these women? Virginia have already answered my question, the one I wanted to ask on community and education. That's the main issue that we need to talk about, education with the communities. Let's forget about the local angels. Like in September I worked in Liberia, I tried to map out local angels and international angels in the communities. The women don't know what the local angels are doing. You tell them, this is an angel working in your community. They don't even know an idea of them working for them. So how can we try to, like policy makers, to understand that it's not just talking about it, but implementing these issues? Those are my questions. Thank you for that very key question. And I think it puts us all right here, having to come up with some new ways of looking at our DDR models. I'm going to take one more question and then I'll ask our panelists to respond. Hello, I'm Jessica Sauer. I have a non-related job with the Senate, but I'm attending the UN commission on the status of women next week in New York. And so I'm really excited to hear this panel and I'm hoping that some of the ideas brought up today will be incorporated next week. However, I have a question for the panel kind of related to women combatants and war crimes. How are women combatants held accountable for their war crimes? And what accountability measures are appropriate given that women are often both victims and perpetrators, but also recognizing their agency to do good or bad? And then also, I was wondering if any one's research, if they found that the services provided to victims of female combatants were different from the services provided to victims of male combatants? So I was just kind of wondering if, I don't know, would love to hear some answers. Thank you. Thank you for bringing us to the accountability issue that women play multiple roles. A very key question. But to take one more, just looking at the time to make sure everybody's comments and questions. Go ahead. My name is Alucine Ture, I'm straight from the heart from Sierra Leone. Could you speak closer to the microphone? Alucine Ture from Sierra Leone. Welcome. My question here, well, or concern or comment, I think more Louise and Megan will be more interested in that. We're looking at this girl. Imagine a girl abducted at the age of 789, was with this rabies for about 15 years. By the time they are done with them, it's about they are in their late 20s, early 30s. Where I grew up from, or most of us grew up from, we have childhood memories, TV shows, went to primary schools. Things we sit down and think of that we think of who we love. We know it's a pleasure to us and everything. Now imagine these girls at the age of 5, 6, 7 years old. The war has lasted for about 10, 15 years. At the end of the war, what are their memories? What do they think of? What life are they going to live? Now if you are going to reintegrate these girls or these people or these boys, reintegration in my own definition put you back where you used to be, try to make life normal for you. They were 5 and 6, 7, 8 years old. Now they are like 25, going to 30 years old. Where do you start? Do we focus on the vocational stuff that the DDR are doing? Or do we focus, like Mr. Louis said, the psychotherapy? Intense clinical therapy to get... If we look at it in reality, it's impossible to get it off their mind. It's really, really, really impossible to get it off their mind. But we do the best that we can. The DDR does the best that they can. Try to adjust these people to the current situation, to the environment, so that they can adapt themselves. But then again, my other question is, the DDR programs have been centralized in the major cities. For example, in Sierra Leone, free time is where most of all these NGOs are. And if you look at it from my own observation when I was in Sierra Leone, 80 or 90% of these girls, of the little boys, we are taking from the up-country in the suburbs, in the villages, all these places. They have been here for about 10, 15, 20 years. Now that they are out, we bring them all back, all of them. Barely places in the cities. We choke them in the cities. Costa Flavia, you've been in Freetown. Freetown is Chocop. Liberia is Chocop. There's no place to sleep, no housing, no proper sanitation or anything of itself. We put these girls in there, five, six weeks, vocation, trade training for tellering or this and that. We're doing this with intention. They can go out there, find a job, try to get a better living. In six weeks, like Ms. Kamara said, it's impossible. An idea. If we take these programs, take them to the country part in the suburbs beyond far away from the cities, where the actual victims came from, opening up there in the villages, all these other small places, these people will come back to their villages where they originally came from, their houses there. You know, in Sierra Leone, in Liberia, there are some towns and villages which are abandoned. No one lives there because during the rebel war, these houses have been burned, everything has been taken away from there. Everything with these NGOs, the DDR, everything is just concentrated in the big cities. And it's more difficult. They are out of here in six weeks. What do they resolve to? Stealing, prostitution, and so forth. Like Louis said, these guys with these motorcycles, there are more motorcycles in the city now than cars. You can work an inch without a motorcycle going through. The police are harassing them. They are harassing. It's just like there's no infrastructure in the entire thing. If we talk about these problems, problems, they just keep accumulating. DDR is, I mean, the intention is good. But what is going to perpetuate the sustenance of this DDR? Is it going to continue? How long is it going to be there? And how effective is it going to be? Is it going to reach out to everyone in the entire country? Are the real victims going to get benefit from this DDR? Thank you for the time. Thank you very much. And thank you for really shining a light on the fact that these are individuals who have lost a childhood. And I think you eloquently laid that out and also the regional issue. I'm going to turn briefly to the discussants because there are two more questions, but I'm going to ask you if you could respond to these three relevant questions. Yes, thank you for your questions. I'll just be very brief. I think, Ms. Kamara, I think in many ways you answered the question that you posed very eloquently. And I think that you both in some ways answered that question of how do we actually have long-term reintegration. I think what's troubling for me is that the DDR and Sierra Leone in hindsight is seen as a success story, primarily because it was implemented fully. So because it happened, it was a success. And if you remember the image that was up of a male on top of a pile of guns, that is the image that people see as a success. The disarmament phase, getting guns away from individuals. And in that sense, the DDR in Sierra Leone was very successful. But because there's this emphasis on security, again, that scene is a success. And by the time we get to the reintegration, there's a loss of interest, there's a loss of concern about security, people don't link reintegration with security. And so I completely empathize with your concerns and I have the same kinds of questions in terms of long-term. I do think what you mentioned in terms of speaking with local actors and asking what skills are relevant? How can we capitalize on the skills that women already have, which aren't soap making, aren't tie-dying after 11 years of civil conflict? So what skills are necessary? So the midwifery program, for example, is a perfect example of something that helps the community, doesn't require a lot of training, it is so useful, but it just requires that extra step of dialogue, right? And so I think, I'll just leave it at that, but thank you very much for both your questions. Alex, do you have a comment? Yeah, just two quick comments. Yeah, on the first question and the last point as well, I think your two questions were very much linked. And I think part of the answer lies in the last comment or question, in terms of how do you get communities to deal with women and to reintegrate them? And I think part of the response is thinking about it more long-term and thinking about these programs more in the community instead of dealing with individuals. And there are actually some examples that have been tried where instead of doing a DDR program that focuses on individual combatants and giving them training and skills and whatnot, your program actually focuses in the community in which they're gonna be reintegrated. And part of the reason is, if you give all your resources to combatants, what about all the victims, all the other people who are not combatants who don't get the resources? So they feel left out. So part of what you do is try to say, you work in the community and say, okay, we're gonna provide some resources for the community to deal with this problem you have collectively, that you have ex-combatants to reintegrate, that you have women who are disadvantaged, that you have all these issues and work through the whole process with them. Now that takes a lot more time. It takes NGOs getting out of free town and working in different parts of the country. But I think ultimately, and there've been some attempts to do that, but I think that's where things would go. Make two other, just on the transitional justice point, I think you could make the same argument that Megan made with respect to transitional justice that it reinforces some of the same stereotypes for the very same reason. And I'll leave it at that for now. Just first a comment to Alex's comment regarding the recipient communities. I think in Columbia, what we've seen is a shift, somewhat of a shift, it's not a full shift yet, but a shift in the thinking that there's a need to provide benefits to the communities that are accepting ex-combatants to be reintegrated. Right now there's just tremendous conflict that exists in these communities where the victims of the people who are being demobilized who are getting benefits are expected to live side by side with their perpetrators. And I think one of the ways, there's some creative approaches that are emerging and one of them is, for example, to provide a school and teachers to a community that has a certain number of ex-combatants being reintegrated into the community. I think these kinds of initiatives are actually very, very, very promising. To go back to the other questions, I think Agnes raised a question about education. I would underscore again the importance of education, but I would underscore the importance of appropriate education and meaningful education. In many cases, these are people who have gone, who have picked up arms because they're trying to promote change and expecting them to be vessels who are absolutely blank slates, who are just there to receive knowledge. I think it's not an appropriate kind of education. So I think we need to think about education not just as a panacea, but the kind of education, the kind of pedagogy that might actually reach these individuals and help them to be reintegrated into a society that's not a perfect society and that they may have desires to change and to give them the ways to change. And I think in Columbia, you are seeing many ex-combatants finding roles for themselves as peace proponents, looking to play a role in future peace processes, for example, trying to train themselves and educate themselves in order to have a more constructive role toward peace. I would also underscore the need for prior consultation with communities and with the ex-combatants themselves. I think it's really easy in the international community to say, oh, DDR, we have all these experiences in Nepal, in Sierra Leone, in South Africa, in different places, let's see what lessons we can learn from them and see what fits in our situation. I think one of the lessons that we have to emerge with at some point is that you can do all that, but if you haven't consulted with the people who are going to be the supposed beneficiaries of your programs and projects, you're not gonna have an effective program. You have to have buy-in at the local level. And if you don't go through the process of creating dialogues to figure out what it is that would be useful, that would be seen as an effective transition to a reintegration, you're doomed to fail. And I think in that regard, I would just note there is a real stovepiping of academics, policy makers, and beneficiaries. And I think we need to begin to or continue to, if we're already doing it, find ways to put those different communities in conversation with each other so that the policy makers can actually know why it is that ex-combatants picked up guns and can design their programs in a way that addresses those kinds of questions and some of the answers of which are being found by academics who are doing research. Thank you for that excellent point. And I'm going to, I've promised that each of you have a comment. I don't think we'll have time for a discussion afterwards, but I would really like to hear from each of you. If you could move close to the mic, though. Thank you. Your name is Saji. I'm with Search for Common Ground. Thank you for the comments and also the questions. The DDRR process seems to, to me personally, is something that really addresses combatants. But what about the young people? Because we know that disaggregating by age is a good thing. What about those young people who did not commit acts of violence? Are we celebrating those who did commit violence and stigmatizing those who didn't as an incentive to commit violent acts and be part of the DDRR process? So something I wanted to brace and bring to this DDRR panel. Thank you very much. Here, here. My name is Kelly McBride. Could you go closer? Thank you to the, yes, to the mic. My name is Kelly McBride. I've been working in Columbia for 10 years with IDPs, DDRR, and ex-combatant children. So I'm a practitioner. One of the things I wanted to comment about is what drives people to get involved in conflict. And one of the things that worries me about Columbia and also other countries is the pervasiveness of drugs and the culture of illegality and how that affects women and how it attracts women, right? So it attracts young girls to join the gorillas because they think it's really sexy to have a cell phone or the paramilitaries. Or they get a salary or young girls who decide to change their bodies so they can be the girlfriend of a paramilitary. So I'm very interested sort of in how to change, sort of how do you work on that? You know, the image and the role of women and sort of how it's affected by the culture of illegality. And I'm curious about that in other countries. And the other thing I would just talk about Columbia because Jenny works on it. It's wonderful to work on Columbia because the Columbians are so creative and so resourceful and that women are actors in changing their situations. So there's a famous court case in Columbia from women IDPs who brought a case against the Colombian government saying you have to provide us with certain benefits and it's the only case in the world. So there's a lot to be, I think, be learned from Columbia. Thank you very much. And finally our last comment question. Hi, my name's Shayna Tabak. I'm at GW Law School. I'm sorry we won't have time to get into this more but hopefully afterwards we could talk about it. But Megan, I was really, I really appreciate the point you made about sexual violence as a currency of war and not specifically the symptom of war. And maybe this is sort of food for thought going forward but it really sort of raises a question for me about ways in which we can think about the need to sort of infuse a gender-oriented perspective not only in the ways that we look at post-conflict mechanisms but also what it really teaches us about the nature of and perhaps the origin even of conflict. Thank you. Well, I'm sorry that I'm not gonna be able to give you all your final say but we've really gone over a few moments but I think in summary if we can say that our DDR models are old and broken, they need to be based beyond stereotypes of both men and women and children and age, class, regionality and we need to start thinking much broader long-term and I think this was an excellent beginning conversation. I thank all of you and I hope you'll join me in thanking our catalyst today. Thank you.