 because I want to make sure that you have every one of these 90 minutes with these fabulous young scholars you are soon to meet. My name is Kathleen Kienas. I direct the Gender and Peace Building Center here at the U.S. Institute of Peace and for those of you who haven't been at the U.S. Institute of Peace before, let me just say that we are celebrating our 30th year. No, some people think we're only three years old because we've been in this building for three years, but 30th year we are mandated and funded by the U.S. Congress to be independent, nonpartisan, and to work to prevent, mitigate, and resolve international conflict through nonviolent means. So that brings us to the story today. The question of how do we prevent sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict settings. This is a very complex field and it is very diverse and in many ways disparate in terms of the many, many different disciplines, both academic and then also in terms of the development field and conflict resolution field in how to tackle such a difficult issue to study and much less to identify sometimes. So we have brought together through what is called the Missing Peace Initiative, that is P-E-A-C-E, the Missing Peace and we believe quite firmly that even though conflicts in sometimes this form of violence, this extreme form of violence does not end and we're trying to look at it from many, many different dimensions. So we feel very fortunate not only today but over the past 18 months to be working with 30 international young scholars who are looking at quantitative and qualitative approaches to understanding this phenomenon in war and in post-conflict settings. Today we have 10 representatives of this group. Hello. If you don't mind. And where they come from many different universities across the world and will share with you their latest research, what you should know right from the top that these are young, courageous and very in the forefront of these issues and that's why we're so excited to have this time with them today. I want to also before you meet them acknowledge our partners. USIP works closely with civil society organizations and this could not have happened without the strong partnership of women in international security, otherwise known as WISE, PRIO in Oslo and the Human Rights Center at the UC Berkeley School of Law. And I would just like to take a moment to ask Chantal Deunga Udrat and where is Kim? Kim, Tui, Silinger. You can stand up. And these are our partners and they will also be our moderators today and you'll learn more about them as they come forward. So how to set the context? Because some of you may be researchers yourselves. Some of you may be practitioners or policy makers. And so about 15 months ago we had an international symposium here, really a community of practice called the Missing Peace Symposium. And what we did from that was try to set a baseline of what we know and where the gaps are. And in doing so, we wrote several of our young scholars here today, a piece called Wartime Sexual Violence to dispel some of the myths around it. And you'll hear from Amelia Hoover Green, one of the authors in the first panel. But we also put together a very small video and I'm going to share that with you now as a way to kick it off. And so we're all on the same page and then we'll begin with the panel. So the lights are going to come down and we're going to show the short video and thank you. It's without a doubt now that sexual violence is part of genocide, crimes and humanity. And it's without a doubt now that sexual violence is part of genocide, crimes and humanity and war crimes. Missing Peace Symposium is about sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict settings. And that is really about peace and security. Why do we care about sexual violence in conflict? There's so many different angles to it. And so we were hoping to bring together folks from different walks of life, different disciplinary practice, who had different research methodologies, different roles in response. That was really the challenge we had as organizers to bring over 250 people together from various conflicts with various stakeholders and policymakers, practitioners, academics and find a way that we could communicate with each other that was respectful, that allowed debate, controversy and allowed us to listen to one another. Sexual violence in war goes to the core of people's identities. The right to kill someone means you're breaking your most basic social norms. And there's a risk that while doing that you also transgress into sexual violence or other forms of violence against civilians in war. The condition of women tells us ultimately about the condition of a society. There's a strong culture of silence and denial. I don't know if we need to define sexual gender-based violence. I think those who are survivors and have been subjected to it define it. We have to listen to the survivors to tell us what sexual violence is for them. Each country is different, is unique, but the pain that these women feel and they go through is the same. It has dehumanized them. It has humiliated them, degraded them so much that they lose confidence in themselves. Conflict has many faces. We wanted people to start thinking about the continuum of violence, that it's not just something that happens to the other over there. The biggest challenge is of thinking about, you know, kind of what the general public thinks about in terms of sexual violence and conflict is women as victims of rape. And certainly that happens far too often. That's also partly a tactic of war against men to have to see or to know that your partner was a victim of that. He is partly an attack on men themselves and then it also happens specifically to men. The numbers are much, much greater than even I had expected. People who say this is not an issue, it's not happening. If it were happening, you know, why are the figures so low? People find it very hard to disclose because the wrong questions are being asked. There's no guarantee that if you tell your story it will be listened to. The core task of every military organization is to fight and win the nation's wars. There's an idea that every military organization also needs a certain military culture, a warrior culture that makes them effective at doing that, performing that core task. There is a sense that when one is perpetrating a rape you kind of express being a real fighter, a real rebel. We have child soldiers who were abducted by force and themselves experienced a lot of sexual violence. But then of course we also have other men who voluntarily joined the armed group and they have high level of appetitive aggression for example. The groups that recruit by abduction I think are more likely to be groups that don't invest in political education, that don't invest in training. These groups consist of people who are strangers to each other, often who have no reason to trust each other, who have been abused in the case of men, often in the case of women have been raped even as part of their abduction process. And so again committing rape, especially gang rape, I think can increase social bonds between fighters and help make the armed group more coherent. This is exactly what we've seen. We've seen people who were previously victimized by sexual violence becoming aggressors and participating in terrorist actions because they have nowhere else to go. Sexual and gender-based violence also has a huge economic cost. Survivors often cannot pick up their life again. They can't function normally in society. Looking at health issues but also looking at institutions, the judicial system and the political participation and engagement of men and boys. People don't talk about it. People are not in a hurry even when it is introduced on the peace table and yet when you leave it and you say we'll discuss it when we strike a deal or made an agreement then it will be completely forgotten. If you are not able to sleep in your house without fear then there is no peace. But the uniqueness of sexual violence at least when it's a male perpetrator and a female victim is that it produces children and we know very very little about these children and we know very very little about the how they're taking care of in their families. We have to break the silence if we want to break later on the cycle of violence. What we're seeing is if you create the right space people will really do want to talk and they want to narrate what happened to them. You can talk about it that you can talk to ex-combatants in detail about what they did. It has to be men standing up and saying we're not like that. We don't want to be perceived that way and we're with you in changing the conversation. I think the most important challenge is that we face is to be able to ensure that governments take national ownership responsibility for this crime. There needs to be a continuous international pressure reminding the leaders of the various war infections that they will be held accountable. Irrespective of where you are, who you are, as long as you commit this crime you will be held accountable. We find voices of peace in the same very communities where the conflict has happened creating ways to sort of turn up their voices helping them design youth led campaigns creating again safe spaces whether that's in schools or community groups where they can talk about what they saw and how they want to construct different futures. Both in research and design programs based on that is to understand men's experiences in terms of sexual violence. I think one of the issues we need to look into more is to try to avoid perpetrators of sexual and gender-based violence reintegrate them back into positions where they're supposed to protect the population. One of the things that's incredibly remarkable that we've often seen in our work is that women simply want the opportunity on a foundation of peace to rebuild their lives in a vision that they think reflects what they would want for themselves and for their families. It is difficult for women to stay inside shelter for many years so this is what we are trying to make a mediation between girl and family. We need to have some mechanism either to adjust the way the society looks at the rape victim but also to have different kinds of opportunities for women who are raped. When individuals talk about their experiences of having been violated sexually or physically or psychologically and they confront their violators, the person feels free, they feel peace of mind. Other things that you can do is to make sure that you have a very clear chain of command in war so that you can find the guilty once the crimes are being committed and that you can also prosecute the entire chain of command if there are multi-level transgressions. We are working on different activities to help women in gender-based violence, one of them on legal side, to raise awareness about women right and also to assist them with legal consultation and legal representation. And also we are working with religious leaders on ending or reducing violence against women. I interviewed a woman in Bosnia many years ago who had experienced rape and she told me that she had been approached by someone who had told her that what you experience is not a private experience, it's an international crime. Shift the perspective away from, you know, stigmatizing the woman who is raped to actually focusing on the perpetrator. Taking people to court alone isn't sufficient. The perpetrator may get convicted and be sentenced to jail but the victim has to live on. Where do we need to go? We need to keep pursuing the development of the law, the inclusion of the international community in all aspects. And it's really not enough to say it's terrible, that's important, that recognition is clearly important. But it's important to recognize that we all have a role in this and that what happens in other places also does affect us. If you sit with women in so many places who are afflicted, they are truly victimized by their circumstances. But as one said to me not too long ago in Afghanistan, stop looking at us as victims and look at us as the leaders that we are. They are the agents of change and we need to support them in every way that we can to create the kind of world that we all want to see. Again, that was from 15 months ago and as I watch it, I will say I think we've made some progress and I think we are learning more and more. And thanks to the young scholars we have with us today and many others who are around the world, we hope to learn more as we move forward. The film indicated that the United Kingdom, the British government has taken a lead role on this and one of the outcomes of this two-day workshop we've had with the young scholars will be a letter to the key organizers of the three-day summit in London, which will be in three weeks. And so some of the comments you hear this morning will be going into that letter. You'll hear more about it later in the program. So I have asked Amelia Hoover Green, who I've already indicated was one of the key authors of the wartime sexual violence, which if you haven't read it and you're interested in this topic, I strongly recommend to you because it really dispels 10 myths about the issue of sexual violence and conflict. This panel in particular is going to kind of set the scene and talk about what we know and where the gaps are. And Amelia Hoover Green, who is assistant professor at Drexel University in Pennsylvania, is going to begin with looking at some of these common patterns. Amelia, the floor is yours. Okay, so I'm going to take five minutes and tell you everything I know about patterns of sexual violence. Just kidding. So I'd like to start by talking about some things that we know about patterns at the case level. So if you're a legal scholar, which I'm not, maybe you would use the phrase modus operandi. But let me just name a few of these. Some patterns that we think we see pretty frequently in several cases, not all cases. One is rape and sexual torture in the context of detention, often of political enemies. Another is either organized or unorganized opportunistic gang rape in the context of a massacre. We frequently see public gang rapes in the context of ethnic cleansing or simply as sort of an episode that is concurrent with battle. Also very frequently though, in data that I've looked at at least, we see opportunistic rape, which is to say rape that is not ordered by superiors and that occurs by individuals or small groups under cover of night to individual victims, etc. It is also really important to mention that one of the most common patterns, we think, of sexual violence during armed conflict is actually sexual violence by intimate partners. And that's a thing that frequently we sort of forget those of us who are more particularly looking at military organizations. Lastly, a pattern that we definitely forget much too often is restraint. There are groups and subgroups in which we see or by whom we see very little sexual violence in the context of armed conflict. And that is, I think, kind of the main message when we're talking about patterns of sexual violence, certainly when we're talking about patterns of sexual violence in a policy community, we need to be clear about the fact that there is huge variation, not just in the sort of pattern and scenario of sexual violence, but in the incidence of sexual violence, both across and within cases. I'll say one more piece about that, which is that some of these patterns, if you think back to that long list I just gave, some of these patterns are associated with discipline, which is to say they are strategic, they may be ordered from the top down. This is what we traditionally think of as a weapon of war, using sexual violence as a weapon of war. Others, however, are associated within discipline, that is to say against orders. I think possibly most commonly, though again, we don't know the sort of relative incidents of these different types of patterns, most commonly, I think, we see not discipline, not indiscipline, but indifference, that is to say sexual violence that occurs, not on orders, not against orders, but in the absence of orders from above. And to me, I study internal institutions in armed groups. So my particular research focus is on how armed groups who wish to prevent rape can do that, rape and other sexual violence, I should say. How can they do that? What sorts of institutions must they build? And this I think is sort of an emerging focus in conflict related sexual violence research. All of those, all of those patterns are sort of visible at the cross-national level to some extent. And that is what the report from last year spoke about predominantly. So some of those patterns, just to set the stage on kind of a broader, much broader cross-national level, it's not just fighters. As I said, intimate partner violence is a huge source of sexual violence during conflict. Thank you. It's not just Africa. That should go without saying. It's a terrible thing that we have this idea that this is somehow an African problem. But guess what? Now we have data that confirms that it is in fact not just an African problem. It's not just a problem of ethnic conflict or ethnic cleansing. And from my perspective, one of the most important things that we can know is that, again, it's not just strategic. I just want to close with a very brief mention that, again, we don't know the relative patterns or the relative frequency of the patterns I've mentioned. We can't know it or rather we can't know it now because we don't know a lot about the dynamics of reporting of sexual violence. We don't know who is willing to talk about their experiences. We don't know whether some types of sexual violence are much more or much less likely to be reported than others, et cetera, et cetera, right? So if we're going to really know about patterns of sexual violence during conflict, we need to know about patterns of reporting. Thank you. Thank you very much, Amelia. And thank you for a very cogent beginning of playing out what it is, what it isn't. And moving from your point that not all of sexual violence happens on the continent of Africa, we have a scholar, Dr. Michelle Leiby, who is a assistant professor of the College of Wooster in Ohio. She is doing her work on sexual violence in Latin America, and we'll talk about the use of sexual violence by state-armed forces during the Civil Wars in El Salvador and Peru. Michelle, the floor is yours. Thank you, Kathleen. So I'm going to jump off of what some of what Amelia talked about, but with specific focus, as Kathleen mentioned, on particular conflicts in Latin America, most of my research has been in Guatemala, Peru, and El Salvador. So bear in mind that that's sort of the geographic context within which I'm speaking. I'm also going to limit my comments to state-armed forces, although I should note that this is a big umbrella concept that includes the regular army. It includes irregular paramilitary forces. It includes the National Police Force, Navy. So we're talking about multi-sectors here. So I'm going to talk a little bit about patterns that I've observed in these conflicts and how they butt up against what we thought the patterns were before additional research was done. So for example, in Peru, actually in all of the conflicts that I've looked at, sexual violence was not perceived to be as frequent as additional documentation has shown that it is, with the exception of maybe El Salvador. So a lot of additional research has demonstrated that sexual violence as a proportion of other non-sexual violence human rights violations that occur in conflict is actually more frequent than we had previously thought, although as Amelia mentioned the relative proportions are really difficult to pinpoint when you're talking about phenomenon that are inherently under-reported. Another pattern and myth that I think is important to dispel is that sexual violence is not just rape and gang rape. And I think it's really important that we as practitioners, policymakers, academics, when we're talking about patterns or data, whether that's quantitative or qualitative, that we're actually very specific about what it is that we're talking about. And I'll give you an example of why that's so important. If we limit our understanding of sexual violence to rape and gang rape in the context of Peru, for example, that excludes more than 50% of all the reported acts of sexual violence that have been documented now, 50% of the picture would be lost if we define sexual violence as just rape and gang rape. Some of the most frequent other forms of sexual violence that have been observed in these conflicts, sexual humiliation, which is currently not recognized as a war crime by the International Criminal Court, sexual torture, sexual mutilation, forced impregnation, forced abortion. So I think it's really important to again recognize this variation in the type or the form of sexual violence. Another myth or misconception that has been held about sexual violence and patterns of sexual violence in the Latin American context and in other contexts as well is that sexual violence is limited to or targeted exclusively towards women and girls. Again, relative proportions are difficult to pinpoint, but in my research in Peru, as another example, it was previously reported that less than 1% of all victims of sexual violence were men. This is sort of the official state perception and documentation by the Truth Commission in Peru and a reevaluation or digging deeper into the data actually show that close to 30% of victims of sexual violence were men and boys. And again, part of this is because Truth Commissions or other reporting agencies may limit their analyses to just rape and gang rape and that could exclude particular types of victims of sexual violence. The last sort of pattern that I'm going to talk about is who commits sexual violence in the three Latin American civil wars that I mentioned. And I think it's often perceived, again, I'm only talking about state armed forces, but I think it's often perceived that the regular army because it's a much larger force because maybe command control and oversight are more limited. I think often the perception is that the regular army has more capacity to commit sexual violence and so therefore is the most frequent perpetrator of sexual violence. And actually one of the things that I've observed is one of the most frequent perpetrators of sexual violence is the national police and special forces in particular within the police umbrella. So counterterrorism or counterinsurgency special ops forces disproportionately commit sexual violence in Latin America. And again, the types of victims that they target and the types of acts of sexual violence that they commit are different. So the regular army and military more often engage in rape and gang rape, but the national police and counterterror special ops forces are much more likely to engage in sexual humiliation, sexual torture, and sexual mutilation in the context of detention centers, as Amelia mentioned. So I think it's really important to dig deeper into the variation and understanding that can actually dispel a number of the myths or misconceptions that we have about sexual violence and conflict. Thank you very much, Michelle. And before I turn to our last panelist, I failed to mention that we do have a hashtag for this event, hashtag missing peace, one word. And again, that's P-E-A-C-E. Our last panelist for this particular panel is Jocelyn Kelly. And I met Jocelyn Kelly about five years ago before she became a PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins University when she was the director and instilled the director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative's Women in War program. Jocelyn was working with perpetrators of sexual violence and trying to understand their motives in the DRC and another one of our special reports. And really one of the first we ever wrote on this topic was Jocelyn's. And I really encourage you also to read this because she opened dimensions of what are these armed actors thinking about? What are their motivations? And we look forward to hearing in the next five minutes the answer. Great. So I'll just jump right in. And I couldn't think of a better framing for this conversation. We've heard about patterns and we've heard about variations. So now let's talk about what helps drive some of this violence. And as we've heard, it's not only non-state armed groups that perpetrate violence, but it's an important piece of the puzzle. There's been a lot of new and interesting scholarship unpacking the motivations and the repertoires of violence of non-state and state armed groups. I began working on the issue of sexual violence and conflict in Eastern DRC in 2007. And I had the honor of working with many women who were survivors of sexual violence. Survivors of sexual violence can tell us a lot of incredibly important and foundational things about what's going on. But what they can't tell us is why this is happening to them. And we should never be expecting survivors of sexual violence to explain why they are victims of this. So instead I began working with a local NGO to talk to rebels in Eastern DRC about their experiences and their motivations and the internal structures of their groups. This is helpful to understand how behavior evolves, how it changes, how it's codified, and then how it's maybe calcified throughout the course of a conflict. We began a project to look at one armed group in Eastern DRC called the Mai Mai Militia, which is a homegrown rebel protection group. But I've since looked at other groups throughout Eastern and Central Africa, including the Lord's Resistance Army. So what I'm about to say is perhaps a bit of a synopsis of a number of different studies. What did we find? Soldiers are actively deconstructed and mentally reconstructed during often highly violent and systematized initiation rites. They're usually taken out of a home context where they have those checks and balances, the people that know them, the morals and codes that they've grown up with, and they're taken to places where those morals and codes and lines of what is appropriate and inappropriate are redrawn for them. There was a soldier that I spoke with in Congo and he told me this just incredibly beautiful metaphor and very sad metaphor of saying after other initiation rites they were taken to a river and they were beaten until they were unconscious and they fell down in the mud on this river bank and when they kind of regained consciousness and emerged they were remolded as a different person from the mud. We've talked about how they've redrawn lines of what's moral and immoral. So a lot of the soldiers said yes rape is bad and yes we do participate in that kind of violence but we don't do the worst kinds and that's how you know we're the good guys. And so something as simple as saying where you've drawn that line of morality is actually not right and let's bring this all the way back and reground our conversation can be surprisingly powerful. Soldiers have complex and sometimes very contradictory relationships with civilians but this relationship is malleable and can be leveraged to change their behavior. So some groups but not all actually want to be seen as protectors but they don't always have the tools or capacity to fulfill that vision. Why should we care about working with state and state and non-state armed groups? One, because we can find concrete leverage points for changing their behavior during the course of a conflict we can understand risk factors saying we've seen groups that are a lot like yours evolve into this kind of violence. Let's start now and prevent that kind of evolution. Two, helping combatants demobilize and turn into civilians means that they can become agents for peace and reconstruction and this is where lasting post-conflict change and reconstruction occurs. I was talking to another gentleman in Eastern DRC who's a former rebel he looked me straight in the eye and he said I've been demobilized five different times. Conflict can be cyclical and it recurs if you don't do a good job of constructing peace with the men who have been part of the violence. So one thing we know is that sexual violence exists before, during and after conflict and it's not only combatants of state or armed state armed groups that perpetrate it but these combatants do become fathers and husbands and partners and leaders and so we must be sure that we are including them and the processes of our research. Thank you. Thank you. That was a lot in five minutes. You know I'm going to forego my question on policy implications in hopes that we can hear from the audience because I only have five minutes left in this panel so do we have any questions and if you do if you would just very briefly state it I'm going to take a couple and if you would introduce yourself thank you. Good morning. My name is Rosemary Segero. I'm the president of Hope for Tomorrow. We focus on conflicts, violence and conflict resolution. I'm from Kenya but I'm past here in Washington DC. Thank you for your presentation. My comment is just one. Yesterday evening we had a wonderful event at the World Bank where World Bank has included violence against women at the World Bank and you are speaking the same words here. How do we come together? The World Bank is speaking the same story. You are speaking the same story and the victims are there in Africa. How do we make this as a curriculum? How do we make this to get to the victims for protection and prevent? How do we make it a prevention out of what you are talking? The World Bank, the UN, everybody's talking but the victims don't get the message apart from us organizations who get to them without resources to advocate. How do we work together and how do this message get to the through the media that's video conferencing or any curriculum that can make this a prevention of violence to the victims and those who are not victims? How do we work together as civil society, as organizations locally and internationally? Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to take the two more questions. Thank you. Manuel Contreras, GW. Just a question. In your stories have you found a pattern related to socioeconomic and demographic and cultural characteristics of perpetrators and there's some differences and especially related to the gender roles and their attitudes. One more question right over here, please. Good morning. My name is Diana Cutlow. I'm with the Joan Crock Institute for Peace and Justice at the University of San Diego. And my question is whether or not you have examples of armed forces that are doing good jobs of preventing rape and how they're doing that. I'm going to turn to my Amelia. To your Amelia. That's nice. Fellow Minnesotans. So I'm trying to think about what is the right answer to these questions. I think on the prevention question, that is obviously the question, right? How do we translate these sorts of nebulous research findings? From my perspective and I imagine from Jocelyn's, though she can speak for herself, a key thing, a key mode of prevention is actually saying to armed groups, here's what you can do. And in that context, I guess this is also maybe an answer to the other two, because armed groups are not by and large top-down ordered rape, not that common. It happens, but very frequently it's a thing that goes on kind of in spite of rather than because of. Yes, I really do. I'm not saying that the armed group leaders are not aware of it. I'm saying they allow it rather than order it. And I think that difference is important. I sure hope not. No, one of the, I want to sort of, I want to back up to say that I think that legally in terms of accountability, one thing that we can do is sort of begin to rely more seriously on the new or should have known piece of international law that is frequently ignored. Jocelyn? Yeah, I was just going to say in no way is it excusing, just as Amelia said, but there are different ways that sexual violence occurs within armed groups. I think it can be allowed or condoned or encouraged or ordered. And those, while all of those are equally terrible in terms of their outcomes, it's actually valuable to know what kinds of systems exist within armed groups because I do really think that many armed groups are somewhat malleable. And just to get to Emmanuel's point about kind of characteristics of perpetrators and I think what we often see is that, you know, perpetration can happen in many different ways within armed groups. And an important point is that often people are victimized within the groups themselves. We've seen that a lot, especially with very young recruits and that boys and girls and men and women are highly associated with groups. And so we shouldn't think of them only kind of as adult men or this homogeneous group. We actually see, we saw in Congo actually that many young girls were very vulnerable to being pulled into armed forces and that there were actually characteristics that made them more vulnerable. And those were different for young boys versus young girls. So young girls were very vulnerable to being pulled into armed groups if they'd been orphaned, if they'd experienced or witnessed violence within their family, and if they didn't have the protection kind of an adult figure to help them avoid the worst of the conflict. Michelle, do you want to comment on this? Yeah, I would just, I think as a good, maybe concluding statement, I think a lot of us here, a lot of our conversations over the last 16 months now have been geared towards prevention. That's absolutely what motivates I think everyone's work in the room. I think the difficulty though is that we're really committed to evidence based policy prescriptions. And that requires unfortunately time and resources. So I would just make a plug for responsible policy prescriptions and interventions that are based on rigorous, valid research on patterns, on variation, on motives. And I think a quick final point is just that USIP has done an enormous amount to bring people together. And so I don't think the UN or the World Bank or USIP or the governments are working in silos. I think there's been an enormous amount of convergence around this issue. And we'll hear about an effort this summit happening later that has over 1500 participants from, I think, 150 countries, which is just breathtaking. That's going to try to come up with concrete actions related to this problem. And though the World Bank is not represented here today, they were a key part of the Missing Peace Symposium. You saw many of the leaders in the video. And we really see this as a community of practice. It's going to take practitioners on the ground, all disciplines, from public health to political science to anthropologists, to policymakers to get the right issues in front of us to help prevent it. I want to say one last thing before we close this session. Two important points. When we use the word gender, we do not mean it's another word for women. We mean both men and women. And one of the key findings out of the Missing Peace Symposium is the number of male victims in conflict of sexual violence. And it is the truly the most taboo issue to talk about. And secondly, that really this has very little to do about sex. This is about power dynamics. And in the end of the Missing Peace Symposium, that is really one of the takeaways. This is all about power. And we know in situations in Sierra Leone, based on field research that 50% of the armed actors who were abducted were girls. And they were a part of the sexual violence. So we have to broaden our understanding so we get our policy and prescriptions for prevention right. So I want to thank our group here. And I hope you'll join me in a round of applause. I'm going to invite our next panel and you will see this is very rapid. They have five minutes each. And then we open it up again for discussion. So Kim. Okay. So in order to keep time, we're going to move right into panel number two. And I'm Kim Tweed-Sealander from the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley Law School. And on our panel, we're going to discuss and explore how we can even know what forms of sexual and gender-based violence are happening to whom and where. This is the baseline problem we have if we're hoping to respond appropriately. And so the panel is able to discuss that and also some of the implications, both practical and ethical, in terms of when we're asking people to come forward and disclose that this has happened to them. So we're going to start with Tia Palermo, assistant professor at Stony Brook University in New York. And she's in the Department, in the Program of Public Health and Department of Preventive Medicine. And we'll speak to the issue of underreporting of gender-based violence generally and why it's important. Thank you. One of the things we've been hearing about this morning is how sexualized violence and conflict has often either been completely ignored or just not made a priority. One of the things, one of the aspects that we need better data on in order to prevent and best respond to gender-based violence is an understanding of the magnitude of the problem. One of the issues we have is that oftentimes in emergency settings, our information is informed by service delivery statistics. And this is problematic because we know that there is a lot of underreporting of gender-based violence, but also that a lot of women don't formally report or seek services related to gender-based violence. And another problem is that if we're basing our information on how we target and respond to this issue on the women that do come forward to seek services, those women might systematically differ from women who don't come forward to report or seek services. So with my colleagues, Amber Peterman and Jennifer Black, we conducted a large multi-country study to examine the question of women who experience gender-based violence. And by that, in our study, we were talking about physical and sexual violence experienced by women. What percent of those women experiencing violence came forward to report or to seek services, either medical services or other related social services. And what we found in this study, we had data on over 280,000 women from 24 countries who'd experienced some form of physical or sexual violence. And these 24 countries included not only countries in post-conflict settings, but also in peace settings. So we were looking at a wide range of contexts. And what we found is that among these women who'd experienced some form of gender-based violence, only 7% came forward to either report it to the police or seek medical or other social services. And what was particularly striking is that not only were they coming forward to formally report or seek services, but they weren't telling anyone at all. Less than half of the women even told a friend, a neighbor, or a family member. And so what this means is that a majority of the women are experiencing this violence in silence. We did notice some variation in these rates across regions. We saw that the highest rates of formal reporting were in Latin America and the Caribbean at 14% of all women experiencing some form of violence. The lowest rates were in India and East Asia at 2%. And then Eastern Europe and Central Asia were in the middle at 10%. And then in Africa, we saw that about 8% of the women experiencing physical or sexualized violence came forward. We noticed some systematic differences of all the women who did experience some form of violence. We noticed some differences between women who were more likely to come forward and those who were not. So women who were currently in relationships or had never been married were less likely to report than women who were formally married. We also found that younger women were less likely than older women to formally report. And finally, not surprisingly, perhaps we found that women in rural regions were less likely to report than women in urban regions. So really what we need to take away from this is that if we're just basing our targeting and our resources that we're mobilizing based on the women who are coming forward in these emergency situations, we're going to have a gross underestimate of not only the magnitude of the problem, but also the demand for services. So what we really need is improved methodologies to estimate the prevalence of this problem in order to best respond and prevent gender-based violence. And we can do that through more types of population-based surveys. There have been some innovative methods implemented in conflict settings such as the neighborhood method. And my colleague here on the panel has conducted a systematic review of prevalence in conflict settings. I think another issue that we need to be reminded in that was particularly in our study, we were not just looking at sexualized violence for by strangers or combatants, but we were looking at all forms of physical and sexualized violence. And that includes violence from intimate partners. And in fact, we know that gender-based violence, the most pervasive form of gender-based violence, is intimate partner violence. And that's true not only in peace settings, but it's also true in conflict settings. And we need to keep that in mind as we tailor interventions and programs to address this issue. Thank you. Thank you, Tia. So next we'll hear from Alexander Vu, who is an assistant professor and emergency room physician at Johns Hopkins University. And he's going to speak to us about recent developments and innovations in terms of detection of sexual and gender-based violence among refugees and other displaced persons. Thank you. My focus today is to talk about screening. When we talk about screening, what do we mean? Case in point, most of my work is as a clinician we focus on interventions and identifications and then obviously from identification to leading to treatment. So from the screening standpoint, in the clinical setting, for example, if we were to say what's the purpose of a detection for breast cancer, if we were, now we know that mammograms are very good as a screening tool to identify a potential concern. And from that, if there is a concern, we refer them for further treatment biopsy. Similarly, in this context in terms of gender-based violence, if we were to talk about that, then what's the purpose of screening in this context? In the work that I've done in many places for focusing on refugees and internally displaced populations, screening is a very interested but also controversial. But for example, I just want to give you context. One of the work that I've done in Uganda, there is a male refugee from Congo, 25, and he comes to the service organization for the past two years. And the providers are saying, we're not quite sure why he's here. He comes in with occasional pain here, difficulty with sleeping, difficulty with getting about his daily work, but they never really pinpoint to the issue of why he's here. And once we develop our screening tool, the organization adopted this tool as a standard operation. And it was rolled out to all the participants. And this opened up a conversation for him, and we found out that this gentleman was raped. And he was also forced to perpetrate rape in front of his family and to rape his own daughter. So it gives you a context. And then from there, it allowed us to really narrow in on the issue. So to carry on this further, we also did a reason for the screening is also that we fact is that there are many barriers to reporting. And much like Tia has mentioned, what the issue of underreporting is that there is huge institutional distrust. And many significant other barriers that we won't have time to talk about today. But these are examples of why our group believed that screening and actually taking a proactive approach to this would open up the conversation for survivors to come forward. And so our study really focuses on is that can a screening tool that is quick and confidential and easy to implement in five minutes or so? Can it help to identify a survivor? And can the identification of a survivor help us to refer the participant into a treatment program or consultation? So we did our work and we conducted the work in three different places and using a very rigorous mixed method approach from the qualitative standpoint to understand the context and to develop the screening tool itself, which is a six item type of screening tool for women, for example. It focuses on gender based violence. And it, for example, is the one is the threat of violence, two is physical violence, three is rape, four is sexual coercion, five is forced pregnancy, six is forced abortion, and seven is forced marriage. And once we do that say, if you have any of these, then who and where? And this allows us to be able to identify and refer these participants. And the results, some of the results are actually quite, I just wanted to share with you the results in Columbia for among the IDPs, among the 506 participants of the screen, 63% screen positive. 63% screen positive for being a survivor, at least one type of violence. In Ethiopia among refugees of the 482 that we screened, 51% screen positive. This is in Boko Maio during the Somali famine crisis in 2012. And the most striking here is among the males in Uganda, mostly from Congo, of the 520 that we screened. 23 screen positive in the past 12 months. 80% had screen positive in the lifetime experience of gender-based violence. So this basically just speaks to the point where screening has a significant role. And what we would refer to as the 3S is, for example, screening will help us to get to refer to services. And it also helps to address the issue of stigma to combat the social norms about gender-based violence. Thank you so much, Alex. Our final panelist is Hen Rice, who comes to us from the University of Denver, where she focuses on access to healthcare services, particularly in humanitarian settings. So and that is what she'll speak about today, actually. Yes, so as Kim said, I'm going to be speaking about services, and in particular health services, although those are not the only services that survivors of violence need and want. So before I joined a university, I worked for quite a number of years with the World Health Organization. And although we heard a lot about variation in the earlier panel, one constant in every setting that I've ever worked in or on has been a lack of access to health services for people in general, and especially for those who experience sexual violence and need some sort of care. So why are health services important? So there's a number of reasons that they're important. The first one is that it's an immediate form of justice and assistance for people who have concerns, who have negative health effects from what they experience, negative psychological effects from what they experience. It's also what people say they want in studies that I've been part of when we asked women who report sexual violence, what do you want? What do you need? One of the first things that they say they want after they talk about what they want for their children is they talk about wanting health services to help address some of their concerns and some of their problems. It's also a really important entry point. Women, and unfortunately less so men because of the way we set up services, but women, if there's a service that they trust that's available to them 24 hours a day, seven days a week, that's confidential, will come in and report sexual violence because they can get something that will help them and they know that they can do it in a trusting and a confidential and a safe environment. The role of the health provider is also to refer them to additional services and to help them link into other processes, whether that's socioeconomic reintegration, psychosocial support, or legal processes. So a lot of what the Missing Peace initiative is about is about helping to end impunity and achieve justice. In order to do that you need the support and the inclusion of the women who experience the violence. And the health services can also document and provide documentation for women of what they've been through so that if they choose to pursue justice at some later point, they have contemporaneous evidence that they have reported it and that it's been documented by a health provider. So why are these services that are so critical, so rarely available? And that's one of the issues that I'm looking at in my research and what I'm finding is that it's twofold. At that very surface level it's very much about resources. Humanitarian assistance is expensive, there are a lot of competing priorities and needs and you're usually starting from a place where you have a very disrupted health system. Health providers have had to flee or stop working, facilities are destroyed, supply chains for medicines are disrupted and so you walk into a clinic and they literally have some expired aspirin on the shelf. They don't even have basic things that you expect like gloves or sheets for the beds and so we're talking about a very very low resource level. And the humanitarian community can only really provide a very inadequate band aid for that. A deeper level that I'm discovering is that it has to do about what was available in the first place. In almost no place in the world that I have been aware of and I'm happy to hear about places that are different, is there integrated into the training of nurses, midwives and doctors as a standard practice how to address and treat survivors of sexual violence. Now in most of these places there isn't this continuing medical education. You have one opportunity to train people and then they go out to their health post or to their clinic and so if you miss that chance you miss your really your only chance to train them. In most of these places even when humanitarian assistance is there it's not the MSF doctors from Europe who are doing most of the care it is local service providers who have been activated and supported to provide that care. If they're not trained they can't provide the care. So what we really need to do is to invest not only in rebuilding health systems but in looking at the health systems that we have right now and really working to integrate some of this training into the current medical nursing and midwifery education systems that's what I truly believe will make the difference especially for settings that are conflict prone and go through these cycles of violence that Jofson had mentioned earlier. Thank you so much Ken. I have so many questions about so the practical and ethical and policy implications of the work but I don't have the time to ask them so I'm hoping that you will ask some of those questions. We have a few minutes before we have to move on so does anyone have any questions for the panelists? Let's take two right here. Thank you Daniel. Hi my name is Jocelyn. I'm from the International Center for Research on Women. I have a lot of questions but I'll just ask one. I'm in thinking about in helping people in a given geographic context develop a screening. I'm thinking about this right now and I'm learning as I'm doing. What would you think of as the minimal infrastructure scenario that should be in place before implementing screening so that people who are identified as survivors can have access to the kinds of support services that they'll be needing? So what's the background structure at a minimum that should be in place before screening is implemented? Thank you that's an excellent question. Right in front of you here. Hi my name is Diane. I'm with the Global Women's Institute at George Washington University. I wanted to ask Tia two things. One thing is if you could share a little bit more about the methodology of your multi-country study and how you had you collected the data. Another thing I would want to ask you about is the neighborhood methodology that I've heard has increased violence from the women that were asked the questions and if you have any opinion on that or if you've heard of the negative repercussions of the neighborhood methodology and then the third question I have for Alexander about the 63% that you reported in Columbia. Does that include that's not just conflict related violence it's just women that tested positive for some type of violence and through the screening and I think that's like an important. I'm wondering and it would be important to state that. All right that's a bundle of questions. Let's take one more very short one if you don't mind. Thank you. My name is Angelina. I'm from Albania. I go for WHO, by an American Health Organization and we are working on a recently on a project now that linked the violence intimate partner violence with mental health and especially focusing on children. I have a question about screening in that case. What types of interventions we should take in order to help children that are related to this violence? So thank you. Thank you for mentioning children. We often don't know how to to respond to that population. Okay so we have a bundle of questions. Please feel free to respond to any part of the questions that were posed to you. Sure I'll just answer quickly about so the data were from population based household surveys that were collected so they were demographic and health surveys for those of you who are familiar these are implemented by the country governments with technical assistance from ICF macro so they're nationally representative they're population based household surveys and we looked at women who had experienced violence in those surveys and then as far as the negative repercussions of the neighborhood method I haven't personally been involved in the collection of these types of data. I know colleagues at Columbia such as Lindsay Stark and other people have done this methodology. I think that and so I don't want to talk about the negative repercussions because I haven't personally implemented these studies but I do think that possibly one limitation is from our own research we see that women don't tell their friends and neighbors and family members about their own experiences of violence so that could perhaps be one limitation. And Allison if we could be super brief please thank you. So to answer the question about what are the minimum services that's necessary we have developed a manual with the basically what we call a toolkit in order to say what services needs to be considered. I think the perhaps the most important thing one of the first things to think about is the organization able to and understand the depth of what the gender-based violence is and to address the issue meaning the personnel are they able to have good understanding to address the issues and to understand the issues of confidentiality and to address the issues of a safe space to ask such questions. Second one is to focus on the services that's available meaning referral services that's pathways obviously one of which is the psychosocial support that's absolutely necessary many of the women and men and boys that we've come across are desperate to have psychosocial support above many other things and then obviously the medical services that's needed not only to treat the STIs but also to address the issues of physical repercussions of physical violence. Thanks Alex I have to ask you to rip up thanks. Just one other quick thing about minimum services screening as the whole purpose of screening is really to be able to link people to services earlier and in a more consistent way so screening should only be done when services are available there are minimum standards for very low resource conflict affected settings that have been developed for health services by WHO UNHCR and UNFPA those are available on the WHO website and there's also trainings associated with those that that provided but you absolutely should not be doing screening or actually research in settings where you cannot refer people to the needed services there are also ethical and safety recommendations guidelines developed by WHO on this as well. Thank you apologies for being so rushed and still still not having enough time but thank you very much. This last panel of this impressive array of young scholars is going to respond more to the questions of our Akinian friend and you know what are the policy implications and what can we actually do about it we have three terrific young scholars here Renata Avalar Giannini who is from Brazil the Igarape Institute Sabrina Karim Karim who is a PhD candidate at Emory University and Paul Kirby who is a lecturer at the University of Sussex in the UK. Now a lot of these issues about sexual violence came to the fore particularly at the political level in the 1990s when we realized that a lot of the peacekeepers were actually not doing the job they were supposed to do that is protecting their populations there was actually we figured out that we realized that there was a lot of sexual abuse within the peacekeeping troops as well as abused by peacekeepers towards the population they were to protect and I think Renata you have actually a very personal experience about this and I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about that sure thank you Chantal so this story is also the story of how I started working with this particular issue how I got completely hooked up on it what happened was that about four years ago I was just starting to my studies on gender and peacekeeping and I was sent to Haiti with the aim to interview military troops from all contingents that were there they're mostly from Latin America and to sort of identify how well they were protecting local women against sexual violence and gender-based violence in general and right in the beginning we went to one of the contingents and right after the interview the women the military men from that contingent they pulled us apart the female researchers and said okay we need to talk to you because you're talking about these issues and this is happening with us as well it's we're being abused they told us those horrible stories and that's when I realized that we were all vulnerable to this kind of violence and there was there was definitely something that needed to be done and so that leads me to one of the things that I would like to share with you in this brief five minutes what I've been doing the past nine months now that I came back to Brazil after living here in the US for four years is I'm focusing on what responses can the global south and specifically Brazil do I mean what kind of things that these countries can do to help in the international efforts to to prevent and eliminate sexual violence in conflict settings and this is basically through two ways one is through the UN peacekeeping missions which is the main form of intervention that these countries participate so that is well trained the troops not only troops the police and civilians as well and also for the technical cooperation projects that I would talk about later but coming back to our story what I've realized from my research and I also been in the Democratic Republic of Congo I also interviewed troops there from other regions not only from Latin America is that the national context it really influences the way that peacekeepers behave and how well they can protect women in these settings so giving a simple example from Brazil which is what I'm focusing currently if we think about gender balance in Brazil it's only seven percent of militaries women and moreover they are medical I mean they are part they're apart from the the medical staff or administrative positions so that that means that in the field they're they're not going to be many women sent to the field in the case of Brazil most of our troops are in Haiti and throughout the 10 years that men of style the UN mission in Haiti will complete 10 years now June 1st it was 40 000 the Brazilian troops that were sent from those how many women 140 that means that it's less than one percent and they are also sent in positions that do not lead them to have any contact with the population at all which is some one of the things that could facilitate perhaps to contact with you know victims and and so on at the same time however where you observed and I've been studying the Brazilian case for a while now that there has been some improvements especially because some whole of government approach has been starting to to to show up and and more policies towards gender equality and so okay they don't have women in the field but they do have some very interesting policies so they promote several military projects that are designed to empower and benefit local Haitian women it's um it's very interesting what they've they've been doing this regard they have specific clinics within their base that attend women that were victims of sexual violence they try to have local translators that are women so that this facilitates also the communication of gender-based crimes and and and there are other very very interesting things that specifically the military are doing but now moving to the other side of the story usually Brazil has this approach which is trying to to put together development and security as a way to have a sustainability in in its efforts so one of the things in regarding sexual violence that is being done is promoting technical cooperation projects in some of these fragile settings that tries to enhance a local capacity to deal with these problems and that's obviously very important so for example in the democratic republic of Congo Brazil has has been doing some has promoting some efforts to facilitate the access to to justice to victims and also providing remedies in Guinea-Bissau for example they've been promoting the exchange of health professionals that in Brazil are well trained in attending victims of sexual violence and so they've been promoting this exchange of experiences in Haiti this this was happening it stopped it now but they were providing training in how to investigate crimes of sexual violence through Brazilian police so these are relatively cheap projects that can really contribute to national efforts to prevent and to eliminate sexual violence so there are many other things that I would like to share with you and I will have to do that after the panel thank you very much thank you very much Renata and I think it's very important that you emphasize the south to south cooperation that we often forget about Sabrina you have studied UN peacekeepers what is going on in in the UN in terms of peacekeeping troops thank you Chantal so most of my work has been in Liberia with the UN peacekeeping mission there as well as with the Liberian national police I've spent the last two years developing a relationship with them and studying the reforms they've implemented related to sexual violence and this is all resulted in what will be a book project on gender equality and peacekeeping and so we've heard a lot today about patterns and reporting and so this this panel is a bit more about responses and solutions and so I want to talk a little bit about what peacekeeping missions can do to prevent sexualized violence and the first thing that they can do is to stop being perpetrators right so in one study that I have conducted in Monrovia Liberia with some others is we found that in a representative survey of Monrovia 30 percent of females aged 18 to 30 have engaged in transactional sex with the UN peacekeeper 30 percent that's a that's a staggering number and so this is the problem while you know sexual exploitation and abuse is not the same thing as transactional sex it gives you an idea of what the the actual you know problem might be but what do we know about how to prevent something like this so we know that when militaries and police contribute country contributing countries are from more general equal societies so for example countries that have adopted a national action plan for UN Security Council Resolution 1325 those countries that have adopted a resolution if they're the ones sending peacekeepers they're much less likely to we're much less likely to see sexual abuse and exploitation happen and actually if 60 percent of a mission is composed of those kinds of countries we get a prediction of zero sexual exploitation and abuse so the solution here then is to promote gender respect and equality within every single military and police contributing country within the UN mission with that contribute to UN missions what else can peacekeeping missions do to promote to help prevent sexualized violence well they play a major role in promoting gender equality in the host society so what we know is that peacekeeping can peacekeeping missions contribute to those countries the mission countries adopting national action plans on 1325 and actually also implementing them there's statistical evidence that suggests that if you have a peacekeeping mission that they're more likely that country is more likely to adopt a national action plan and in Renata gave a very good synopsis of some of the activities that can go into implementing these things so in Liberia for example female peacekeepers played major roles in implementing a 30% quota for the Liberia national police they were instrumental in developing the women and children's protection unit and the gender unit within the Liberia national police so here the key takeaway and the solution is that if we can get female peacekeepers into missions and give them the opportunity that's the key part is to give them the opportunity to be able to make a difference then they can do so we also know that increasing the female ratios of domestic institution and peacekeeping missions enhances trust in those institutions especially among females within local communities so in a in a survey that I've also done in Monrovia I find that contact with female officers whether peacekeepers or police officers leads to about between a 10 to 20 percent increase in people's wanting to wanting those institutions to respond and especially females within those institutions to respond to rape and domestic violence and so here again the solution is going to be to increase female recruitment but also to give them the opportunities within the institutions to be able to go out into the communities and to be able to talk to women that includes things like promotion of women into higher ranking positions it includes revisiting standards it means dismantling kind of protectionist policies that prevent women from doing the same kinds of activities that men do as well I mean the last thing that I want to touch on in terms of what we know about these types of what these institutions can do is that they're increasing the number of qualified officers whether it's female or males is actually also very important we know that competency plays a major role in people's likelihood to detect gender based sexualized crimes so for example in a study that I did with the library national police where we actually randomly selected 612 officers and basically gave them a crime scene to look at and analyze whether or not they saw what crime they saw 44% in general saw a gender based crime sexualized which is a pretty high amount I'm given that you know the seven years of reforms in Liberia has they've had a lot of attention on the issue but what we found was the competent men and women were 70% likely to see a crime be gendered and less competent officers both men and women were about 20% likely to see so that's a big difference that we see that training can make in terms of people's likelihood to to be sensitive to the issue in the first place right so the key takeaway here that I want to mention is that peacekeepers can promote gender equality however if they're intentional about recruitment training standards and giving women opportunities and also obviously not being perpetrators thank you very much Sabrina this panel discussion is called ending sexual violence in conflict the missing peace young scholar contribution to the UK global summit and Paul I want to ask you maybe you can tell us a little bit about the UK global summit to end sexual violence and then also tie in a little bit to the whole issue of to what extent having more women in peace operations and more generally in peace and security issues will help thanks thank you so I'm going to talk about perhaps the most high-profile contemporary policy initiative on ending sexual violence or mitigating sexual violence in conflict which is the UK government's preventing sexual violence initiative which was set up by William Hague the foreign secretary back in May 2012 and is more or less co-chaired by the special envoy of the UN High Commissioner of Refugees Angelina Jo Lee so the initiative has already been quite successful in continuing a kind of global high-level political dialogue around conflict related sexual violence it achieved the UN Security Council resolution last year 2106 which is the sixth UN Security Council resolution to discuss in whole or in part sexual violence in conflict there's been a g8 communicate there are diplomatic pressures being applied to certain countries which are perceived as having a particular problem in this area there are negotiations and work ongoing on an international protocol on the investigation and documentation of sexual violence crimes and similar kinds of declarations at the high political level and that's going to culminate next month in a global summit in London which we've heard is intended to bring together ministers from around 150 countries to translate some of that declaration into commitments and I think it's very clearly the time for those commitments to manifest themselves so the big challenge is going to be whether or not ministers donors country-level organizations are going to be able to meet that that demand and that requirement I want to highlight two areas where I think there is something to be thought about around the preventing sexual violence initiative the first is the question of proof or perhaps better put the relationship between evidence and resources like all initiatives and all policies and preventing sexual violence initiative rests on some and some assumptions around what works in mitigating sexual violence we've already heard about certain myths that are quite prevalent in the policy community in the public at large I think the initiative has by and large avoided those myths but it does have some assumptions around issues like the role of impunity and how ending impunity may tackle sexual violence I think in terms of research we don't know quite enough to be clear about what kind of impacts that would have and there are some real resource pressures that arise there in the last panel we talked about resources for psychosocial and medical services and to the extent that there's a trade-off there I think there is a challenge for the initiative to think about whether trials at the international criminal court or at a national level are necessarily the best use of resources second area where there are some assumptions that may need revisiting is in the weapon of war framing which again is quite prevalent for the initiative and as we've heard risks at the very least neglecting intimate partner violence and what we would call the continuum of gender violence so the way that sexual violence and gender violence in wartime is connected to issues like domestic violence and peacetime gender violence and the third area is men and boys now in a lot of ways the initiative has been very proactive and very successful in putting men and boys on the agenda as survivors of sexual violence and it's clear that more needs to be done and this needs to be taken seriously as an element of the overall package but there is still a lot that we don't know about the mechanisms and the processes by which men and boys become victims and survivors and in all three of these cases there is a real question of the connection between research and evidence and how resources are going to be distributed in the coming in the coming years alongside those questions of proof I want to foreground some questions of politics in the political context behind this because I think it's important to remember that the initiative isn't just a technical process of adjusting certain terminology or perhaps certain services but occurs against the political background now that's both because of course the UK government is having to negotiate politically with other nation states and so it's going to be constrained in terms of what it can do in that context in ways that might be familiar to many of us but also because the initiative and all initiatives of this kind are influenced by the political context in terms of social movements and in terms of the work of civil society and perhaps the main tension there is the one that has become more and more evident between a focus on conflict related sexual violence which very much foregrounds the war situation which very much foregrounds military actors and what is called the women peace and security agenda which is the wider approach to issues of gender equality participation whether it's in peacekeeping or in political settings domestically which for some is at risk of being marginalised and neglected when the sole focus is conflict extreme situations the role of armed groups or rebel groups never mind state forces in the perpetration of sexual violence so that I think is something that is going to be a challenge for the initiative but is also a challenge for the people in this room in the people in policy and advocacy positions which is how to think politically about the continuum of violence how to think politically about how we maintain that connection and that relationship whilst remaining grounded in the research and evidence space that we have and the research and evidence space that we still need thank you very much we're going to take another five six seven minutes for some questions and discussion so please raise your hand here on this side good morning i'm going to stand up because this is very important to me and excuse me if i get emotional when i speak because my name is Marie Claire Gundam i'm from Congo and i'm going to repeat i'm from Congo DRC it's been 20 years that we see the violence that's been going on in the eastern Congo the rape which are very despicable and I think this lady mentioned that kids have been raped and nothing has been really done to address this properly and I'm I'm going to speak a little bit about leadership and involvement and I want to have your perspective on that that we know that Ronda has been supporting rebels M23 if you you have a chance read it and it's been reported they've been supporting malicious who's been raping and attacking people in the eastern Congo and it's not being addressed properly and I I talk about it because I saw again President Kagame come in the US he goes to the UK he speaks and he gives talk but people don't want to talk about the role that Ronda has been playing in the Congo and again if you want to end those violence and really talk about those problems we have to be truthful and talk about the whole all the people who are involved and who are supporting this kind of action because if we neglect the accountability we will not solve this problem and for the case of Congo I always get very emotional because when I speak with people they always tell me oh this is so complicated and again I said when they rape 10 year old and they rape women in front of their children their family and we the world said this is too difficult and nobody wants to talk about it I look at the news I read the news and I see what happened in Nigeria I'm sorry I'll take just a little bit long because nothing is being said about Congo and it's been 20 years and I see women not talking about it or not addressing it so I want to know what as a Congolese woman and what the world can do to help us raise this issue at a level where we can really find a solution and I really want to have a take on the role of Ronda in Congo okay thank you we're going to this side the gentleman there speak up a bit please thank you very much my question is very simple I heard about the the policy implications with regards to Liberia as well and that led me to a question is there any relationship or has any study been done to see what what relationships exist between female leaders in some of those countries and the relationship that that may have with the issue of sexual violence in some of those countries so are there any relationship between female leadership in those countries and the deal how they deal with sexual violence issues thank you okay thank you anybody else in this side of the room okay here my name is Julie McCrae I I've listened to all three panels and I am very thankful that this is being discussed but what I don't understand is how we can compartmentalize violence and say rape is an act of violence but we call it an act of sexual violence rape violence in itself is all promulgated by society that permits violent activity against women and children anyway we're talking about countries that the respectful women and children in human life does not exist at all and we cannot address rape until we address in humanity and in this humanity that exists is allowing us to perpetuate we have to stop that here in our own country here in the United States my niece is a judge advocate she prosecutes rape she prosecutes rape within families in the United States military and the stories that she tells me are horrific done here violence violence in inhumanity exist in a society that permits violence to be committed against everyone rape is just a byproduct of a violent society and we must address our violence that's within each and every one of us men women and children and then we will be able to stop rape we will stop rape when we stop harming one another and begin to understand each other there is a commonality amongst every single living human being and that is that we are human beings anybody else then let's do some final comments from the panel here Renata do you want to start yes I'm going to start with the with the last comment I completely agree with you this is actually what I was talking about that's what came out from this very experience this very first experience that I had is that so how can these troops really protect the local women if they treat their women in in in such a horrible way and so I think it's also it's important to expand this research in my case I'm dealing with specifically the military and the police but what we are doing right now is to to to sort of expand this research to how is the incorporation of women in these institutions that are that have always been seen as extremely masculinized and as violent and separated from society so one of the things that we are trying to promote is okay these institutions they are not separated from the society they are part of the same Brazilian society in this case and we should see it as a as a as one thing and so you know I've been working with promoting gender equality inside these institutions and helping out with the training of the troops and and things like that so thank you very much for for your comment Sabrina any comment on female leadership and better behavior yes and thank you for that comment and I think it's an excellent point Liberia as you may know had the first female president elected in Africa and you know while that's a symbolic gesture it's also you know been very helpful in terms of a lot of legislation that's happened in Liberia where it has a lot of very progressive legislation when it comes to sexual violence and rape and and so I think it's I think it's been very helpful in terms of legislation and policymaking I think it doesn't necessarily translate on to the grassroots level because what I think is more important is the individual women's groups on the ground that have also actually played a very important role in that in those legislation process but more importantly in organizing women on this issue right and and so I think it's not just about leadership but it's about connecting all of the dots together leadership to people on the ground to the security sector everyone needs to be doing something about it and I just want to address this last point also really quickly um I absolutely agree with you as well that um violence against women is a much broader issue than just rape or sexual violence and I want to point to the fact that it's even broader than just the individual or societal effects there's a lot of evidence in the scholarship literature and in research and policymakers say this often that there's a link between violent societies um and war right so um there's a direct link there's an excellent book called Sex and World Peace that demonstrates that gender equality countries that are more gender unequal and you know have a lot of problems with violence against women also tend to be more more prone as well so yeah I would um agree with that and just emphasize in relation to that last question as far as I understand it there's nobody here today we disagree with what you're saying so when we talk about intimate partner violence as being important and not just a war focus when we talk about the continuum of gender violence when we talk about the characteristics of national gender context and how they're related to peacekeeping when we talk about provision of services all of that is about making those connections and about not saying that only certain actors in certain places do these acts right it's about talking about society as a whole and it's talking about gender orders and society as a whole but that doesn't mean that sexual violence is the same everywhere or has the same characteristics everywhere and it doesn't mean that violence of all sorts goes together everywhere right there are situations in which there were very very high levels of some kind of violence and a very very low levels of other kinds of violence and that's a puzzle and we have to try and think as best as we can about what explains that and what we can therefore do about that because the kind of approach to services which just ignores those complexities is going to be ineffective ultimately for victims and for survivors so I think that's the kind of and pays the people are on I do want to address the reminder question I would like to be able to give a simple straightforward recommendation to solving that I think what it indicates very clearly is the limits of certain technical nation state solutions which is why I tried to emphasize that we can't lose sight of the political dimension of that and that is a question of accountability but ultimately it's a question of accountability of the government's concern right whether that's the United States government or the UK government or the Rwandan government and that accountability is delivered by the pressure of the people who have the most influence over those governments which would normally mean the citizens and civil society and social movements of those countries on their governments right so I don't think that's um predominantly a question of scholarship speaking only for the UK context the people who work on Rwanda and the Great Lakes are very aware of this they write about this um you know people disagree and there might be nuances that we that we don't want to overlook particularly in the idea that all sexual violence in Congo is a result of Rwandan support um for other movements when we know that the FA IDC is responsible for very very high levels of sexual violence itself and so on believing those details aside I don't think it's a question of there being a lack of information right and a lack of knowledge it's a question of the political pressure and the political accountability that is brought to bear on on governments and that's something that's the responsibility of everybody thank you Paul uh what I would like to say is what really makes me optimistic is the breadth and depths of the knowledge that was displayed by the young scholars here uh and also they're savvy I think they're doing extremely important research extremely policy relevant research and they're all very much aware of that and so that makes me optimistic for the future I hope you will join me in thanking them but before we do so I also would like to thank Daniel Robertson who has been instrumental in making this meeting happen for all the logistics so Danielle thank you very much she was assisted by Nicoletta Barbera and Megan Looney by Charlie Charlie Christian and Lauren McNally and then finally thanks to our young scholars