Qualitative methods in psychology: A research guide

Much of the current scholarship on wartime violence, including studies of the combatants themselves, assumes that women are victims and men are perpetrators. However, there is an increasing awareness that women in armed groups may be active fighters who function as more than just cooks, cleaners, and sexual slaves. In this article, the author focuses on the involvement of female fighters in a form of violence that is commonly thought to be perpetrated only by men: the wartime rape of noncombatants. Using original interviews with ex-combatants and newly available survey data, she finds that in the Sierra Leone civil war, female combatants were participants in the widespread conflict-related violence, including gang rape. A growing body of evidence from other conflicts suggests that Sierra Leone is not an anomaly and that women likely engage in conflict-related violence, including sexual violence, more often than is currently believed. Many standard interpretations of wartime rape are undermined by the participation of female perpetrators. To explain the involvement of women in wartime rape, the author argues that women in armed group units face similar pressure to that faced by their male counterparts to participate in gang rape. The study has broad implications for future avenues of research on wartime violence, as well as for policy.

Female Combatants and the Perpetration of Violence: Wartime Rape in the Sierra

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Female Combatants and the Perpetration of Violence: Wartime Rape in the Sierra Leone Civil War

https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/32303175/nihms243198.pdf?sequence=3

Sierra Leone’s Child Soldiers: War Exposures and Mental Health Problems by Gender

Introduction: child soldiers, iconography and the (il)logic of extremes 1. Children's involvement in war: the quandary of structure and agency 2. Recipe for rebellion: civil war in Sierra Leone 3. Negotiating power: research on and by child soldiers 4. 'Becoming RUF': the making of a child soldier 5. 'Being RUF': victimization, participation and resistance 6. 'Put dey gon don': the unmaking of a child soldier 7. New battlefields.

/pdf/child-soldiers-sierra-leone-s-revolutionary-united-front-gb3kls2sub.pdf

Child Soldiers: Sierra Leone's Revolutionary United Front

Girls—both willingly and unwillingly—participate in terrorist acts within the context of contemporary wars. These acts range from targeting civilians for torture and killing to destroying community infrastructures so that people's physical and psychological health and survival are affected. Girls witness or participate in acts such as mutilation, human sacrifice, forced cannibalism, drug use, and physical and psychological deprivation. This article focuses upon girls in two fighting forces: the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in Northern Uganda and the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone and their roles as combatants whose primary strategy is perpetrating terrorist acts against civilians. In analyses of gender and terrorism, girls are typically subsumed under the larger category of female, which marginalizes their experiences and fails to recognize that they possess agency and power.

/pdf/girls-as-weapons-of-terror-in-northern-uganda-and-sierra-59yd6j6iye.pdf

Girls as "Weapons of Terror" in Northern Uganda and Sierra Leonean Rebel Fighting Forces

Peacebuilding is frequently viewed in terms of post-conflict societal reconstruction without consideration of cultural context and gender. Using a feminist participatory methodology, this study investigated South African women's understandings of peacebuilding and how these are mediated by gender and context. Sixteen women engaged in dialogue over 2 days. Thematic analysis of the recorded dialogue provided insight into how the 16 South African women leaders understand their efforts to build a more peaceful society. The findings pointed to gender- and context-specific aspects of peacebuilding. Most of participants' peacebuilding activities occurred outside of the aegis of national governmental institutions and their peacebuilding priorities focused less upon structural rebuilding and more on processes, people, and relationships. One of the important priorities was the prevention of violence toward women. Whether these findings are gender-specific and contextually unique are topics for future research.

Sandra McKay

Papers

Girls as "Weapons of Terror" in Northern Uganda and Sierra Leonean Rebel Fighting Forces

Peacebuilding as a Gendered Process