Breaking Colombia's silence over its war rape victims
Breaking Colombia's silence over its war rape victims
Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation - Fri, 6 Sep 2013 07:00 AM
Author: Anastasia Moloney
BOGOTA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Preyed on by armed men at beauty pageants and at school gates and then raped. Forced into sex slavery. Gang-raped as a punishment.
Colombian academic Maria Emma Wills has spent years collecting such testimonies from women and girls across the country in an effort to document the impact of sexual violence and other war crimes on civilians carried out by warring factions during the country’s 50-year-old war.
Her work, along with a team of other researchers at the National Centre for Historical Memory, a government-funded research group, is helping to break the taboo about sexual violence.
As Colombia struggles to emerge from its shadowy past, sexual violence against women and girls, which was mainly carried out by paramilitary groups during the 1990s and early 2000s, has so far gone largely unpunished. And the trauma it has left behind is only just being recognised.
Sexual violence is a common feature of most wars. But in Colombia it took on a different form, says Wills, because it was part of a “social order” imposed by right-wing paramilitaries in some regions of the country where they held power.
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