COLOMBIA: Sexual Violence as Weapon of War

Sexual violence is used as a weapon of war in Colombia by all parties in the country's longstanding armed conflict, and its main victims are women and girls, states a report recently released by Intermón Oxfam, backing up claims made repeatedly by national and international human rights groups.

At the launch of the report, released simultaneously in Bogota and Madrid, Paula San Pedro of Intermón Oxfam – the Spanish branch of the relief and development organisation Oxfam International - stressed that all of the armed groups in Colombia, including government security forces, far-right paramilitary forces and leftist guerrilla rebels, use sexual violence as a weapon of war, "to the extent that it has become an integral part of the conflict."

The report, "Sexual Violence in Colombia: A Weapon of War", has served to shine light on an issue that has been repeatedly raised over the past two decades by women's, human rights, Afro-Colombian and peasant farmers' organisations, as well as some female legislators, yet has been largely ignored by both the government and the general public.

In Colombia, the report's launch coincided with a World Peace Summit held in Bogota in early October, where personal testimonials and audiovisual presentations highlighted the powerlessness felt by women and other particularly vulnerable sectors of the civilian population throughout more than four decades of civil war.

Over four million people have been forcibly displaced by the ongoing conflict since 1995, according to figures from a number of non-governmental organisations, including the Consultancy on Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES). This figure represents roughly 10 percent of the country's total population of 42 million.

The majority of the displaced are peasant farmers and black or indigenous Colombians forced off their land, often after witnessing the killing of family members or rape of women from their communities.

This South American country has been in the grip of civil war since 1964, when the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the much smaller National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrillas rose up in arms. The paramilitary groups that emerged in the 1980s to combat the leftist insurgents alongside the government forces remain active despite the reported demobilisation of tens of thousands of their numbers between 2002 and 2006.

Permanent scars

Intermón Oxfam and other humanitarian groups maintain that 60 percent of the total number of displaced Colombians are women, and that two of every 10 of them have fled their homes to escape sexual violence.

Unfortunately, there are no official figures to reflect this situation, because in many cases, women do not report being raped "out of fear or shame," explained Alexandra Quintero, the research coordinator at Sisma-Mujer, an NGO which produces annual reports on violence against women in different spheres.

Some victims of sexual violence suffer from temporary or permanent mental illness, as reported by participants at the World Peace Summit. "Permanent scars" was the term used by a 53-year-old Afro-Colombian woman from the northwestern province of Chocó, who called herself María (not her real name).

María told IPS that before the armed conflict spread into Chocó, "we lived peacefully on the banks of the Atrato River. That was up until 1988, more or less, when the cruelest part of the war began. Every time we heard a boat motor we would freeze."

The population of the province of Chocó, on the Pacific coast, is mainly black. The province also has the highest poverty rates in the country, and almost all transportation is by boat over the many rivers and streams that run through it.

"They dragged people out of their beds in the middle of the night. They killed the men and raped the women," recalled María, with a mix of anger and resignation.

María knows a woman who was gang-raped by a group of guerrilla fighters, but she was also a witness to the cruelty of the paramilitary forces and the atrocities committed by government soldiers against women in the region.

"It's a trauma that you never recover from, no matter how much they talk about reparations, because it's something a woman feels in the flesh," she said. Whether the victim is a young girl or a grown woman, "when she doesn't want something done to her body, it shouldn't happen," she stressed.

This is what led María to join a group of women from Chocó that organises protests, sit-ins and other actions to raise awareness about the problem. "We need to participate more actively and make ourselves visible, because we have been badly beaten down," she said.

Machista culture trumps modern laws

The persistent struggle waged by women eventually had an impact in the judicial and legislative arenas, leading to reforms of existing laws and the adoption of new ones. Their achievements include the recognition of women as victims of sexual violence and of their right to compensation.

Nevertheless, "these legislative advances do not appear to have had any effect in actual practice," Quintero told IPS.

This is because the modernisation of the country's laws has done nothing to change the underlying culture or to curb acts of aggression against women "in a particularly machista and patriarchal society," said San Pedro, the coordinator of the Intermón Oxfam report, at its launch in Madrid.

The report estimates that "between 60 and 70 percent of Colombian women have suffered some form of sexual, physical, emotional or political violence" - statistics that show that violence against women is a phenomenon that goes beyond the problem of the armed conflict.

Moreover, it is a phenomenon that has actually worsened instead of diminishing in recent years. Sources consulted by IPS concurred that the "democratic security policy" implemented by the right-wing government of President Álvaro Uribe has resulted in a rise in violence against women.

"This policy has signified greater insecurity for women, because the so-called demobilisation of the paramilitary groups, who continue to control many regions of the country, has particularly affected women and girls," María Eugenia Ramírez of the Bogota-based Latin American Institute for Alternative Rights told IPS.

This insecurity is reflected in "sexual violence, genital mutilation, harassment and forced recruitment. Conclusion: the armed conflict has exacerbated the violence that women have historically faced," said Ramírez.

Quintero said this conclusion is backed up by the findings of a report coordinated by her organisation, Sisma-Mujer, which will be released in November by the National Network of Women.

The upcoming report reveals that the number of human rights violations in general, and those committed by members of government security forces in particular, has tripled since 2006.

The sources consulted for the report include the non-governmental Colombian Commission of Jurists (CCJ) and the forensic Legal Medicine Institute, noted Quintero, who stressed that the report addresses the violation of human rights of the population in general.

The report confirms that there has been no improvement in terms of the vulnerability of the population in general or of women and girls specifically as compared to previous studies.

The 2007 edition of the report quoted an alarming figure provided by the CCJ: "Between January 2002 and June 2006, an average of one woman a day died a violent death in Colombia."

The National Trade Union School contributed some detailed statistics in 2005: "Women trade unionists suffered 15 acts of femicide, 102 death threats, 10 arbitrary detentions, 15 acts of harassment and persecution for their union activity, two attempted murders, seven forced displacements and one kidnapping."

Meanwhile, the Constitutional Court reported early this year, based on figures supplied by women's organisations, that of the 518 victims of constitutional violations registered since 1993, 183 were victims of sexual assault.

Of the total number of cases, 58 percent were attributed to paramilitary forces, 23 percent to government security forces, eight percent to insurgent groups, and the remainder to unknown perpetrators.

While there may be variations among the different reports compiled, they all concur in highlighting an aggravating factor with regard to violence against women: impunity. The report to be released by Sisma-Mujer in November maintains that the perpetrators of this violence go unpunished in an astounding 97 percent of cases, according to Quintero.

"There is not a single region in the country where women can feel safe," said San Pedro, before going on to stress that "Afro-Colombian and indigenous women are the most vulnerable to sexual violence, given the triple discrimination they suffer because of their gender, ethnicity and poverty."