by Rita Manchanda and Antonia Potter Prentice
It’s hard to write a rebuttal when one gets the strong sense that even those, like Chuck Sudetic, who claims to be so disappointed by the ideas we shared (or the way we shared them?), actually subscribe very much to the main points we were making.
Elisabeth Rehn has dedicated her professional life to this work, and a key lesson her response to our piece, and her work in general, teaches conflict mediators, and peace process support actors is to listen, listen, and then listen some more to a broad representation of people on the ground, including of course women. Listening, and acting on what is heard, and reporting back on those actions are highly validating for the person being heard, especially when their experience is normally one of disempowerment and marginalization.
Unwittingly but helpfully answering Chuck’s vociferous call for ‘more practicality’ she describes the effective and pragmatic mechanism of the Senegal Women’s Situation Room. She trenchantly reminds statisticians, policy analysts and the writers of glib op eds that each individual experience of conflict related sexual violence is a shock to the world’s conscience, and a wound to its victim’s very soul that can never be forgotten. So whether there are in reality handfuls, hundreds or thousands of such cases, each individual one stands as a horror on its own. She reminds us that for victims of these kinds of crimes of conflict, peace and justice aren’t a ‘choice’ or a ‘tension’; they are quite simply the same thing. Impunity means for them that the conflict is not over. There’s no rebutting that from our side, and we’re pretty sure that Sarah Cliffe and Chuck Sudetic feel the same way.
What she does not perhaps spell out is an insight that comes out more in Sarah Cliffe’s piece and is an important finding of the 2011 World Bank Development Report on Conflict, Security and Development to which she referred: that investing in citizen security, justice, and jobs is essential to reducing violence in societies, especially post-conflict ones, a finding which relates quite as much to women as to men. The effects of sexual violence in conflict, especially when not dealt with, lead to extreme social distortions and specific, negative socio-economic consequences for the survivor and her or his family. It’s not hard to agree that sexual violence is bad for people, bad for communities, bad for societies; but recognizing that preventing it by empowering women across the board, alongside changing attitudes, seems to be a tougher sell. We would maintain that socio-economic empowerment as is as important for women as political empowerment: with resources, comes status and choices; with status and choices come voice and power.
Chuck Sudetic is right: violence is everywhere, the cultures that make this ok have got to change, and clumsy international attempts to support local efforts to do this have got to get more nuanced. Chuck wants us to fix this now; Sarah reminds us that cultural change, attitudinal change take years to take root. We agree with him: we wish it had been fixed yesterday; but Sarah’s right, mind-set changes are incremental, and if each society is to find its way from the ‘inside out’, as it were, it must set its own pace for change – taking into account women’s views alongside men’s about the pace that fits.
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