Oral evidence - Sexual Violence in Conflict

Members present

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (Chairman)

Lord Black of Brentwood

Bishop of Derby

Baroness Goudie

Lord Hannay of Chiswick

Baroness Hilton of Eggardon

Baroness Hodgson of Abinger

Baroness Hussein-Ece

Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead

Lord Sterling of Plaistow

Lord Williams of Elvel

Baroness Young of Hornsey

_________________________

Examination of Witnesses

Dr Chris Dolan, Director, Refugee Law Project, Professor Doris Schopper, Director, Center for Education and Research in Humanitarian Action (via videolink), and Ms Josephine Wambui, Programme Officer Somalia, Oxfam Novib

Q101 The Chairman: Good afternoon Professor Schopper. Thank you very much for joining us.

Professor Doris Schopper: Good afternoon, thank you for inviting me.

The Chairman: Good afternoon also to Ms Wambui and to Dr Dolan. Thank you very much for being with us. We are very happy to have all three of you with us. As you see, we have an almost full complement of our Committee, and we are very much looking forward to some questions and answers. As a very brief introduction, this meeting is on the record, and we will send a transcript for you to make minor corrections. It is also being webcast and will go up on the web. It is therefore completely open, I am glad that we have members of the general public with us as well. You have our register of interests in front of you, so you know what our personal interests are. I hope that you enjoy the session. If you cannot fit all the answers in, or you want to add anything else, please send them in writing, and we will gladly receive it. I open by asking each of you to introduce yourselves. Shall I start with Professor Schopper? Would you like to spend a moment or two telling us about your work?

Professor Doris Schopper: Thank you very much. I am the director of an academic centre here in Geneva, which is dedicated to humanitarian action. Two years ago, we initiated a course for middle and senior managers working in the field on sexual violence in countries with emergency situations. The course was developed with: the International Committee of the Red Cross; Doctors Without Borders—Médecins Sans Frontières; the UNHCR—the High Commissioner for Refugees; Handicap International; and UNFPA. It is quite unique among courses of its kind, because it brings together professionals working in a variety of settings being confronted with sexual violence in a variety of ways, which means looking at all the systems for dealing with it. That means medical treatment and the psychological needs of people who want our protection. We are looking at trying to create the kind of multidisciplinary look at sexual violence that is often lacking. So we have quite a lot of experience with this. I should also perhaps add that I am a member of the International Committee of the Red Cross, so I have some insight into how the ICRC works on this issue. I also have a very long-standing history with Doctors Without Borders, who also have a long history of dealing with this issue. That is my background.

The Chairman: Thank you very much indeed. I now turn to Josephine Wambui. Good afternoon.

Ms Josephine Wambui: Good afternoon. My name is Josephine Wambui, as you have said. Until a couple of weeks ago, for the last four years, I worked with Oxfam Novib in Somalia. The work that I was involved in there was on governance issues, peacebuilding, and sexual and gender-based violence in south-central Somalia, northern Somalia, Somaliland and Puntland.

The Chairman: Thank you. Dr Dolan.

Dr Chris Dolan: Good afternoon. My name is Chris Dolan. I run an organisation called the Refugee Law Project in Uganda, which is an outreach project of the School of Law at Makerere University. I have spent the majority of my career—about 19 of the last 25 years—in sub-Saharan Africa working with conflict-affected populations. In the last 10 years or so I have been working increasingly on matters of sexual violence in conflict. I think we are one of the first organisations to address the issue of sexual violence against men in conflict. I hope I will get an opportunity to speak about that, as when I perused the submissions made thus far I saw that many of them are focused on women and girls, and very little of substance is said about men or boys as victims. I would like to address my remarks to that topic and to the work that we have done on it.

The Chairman: We would be delighted to hear that. It is within our remit, as you have noticed, so it is a topic that we are addressing most sincerely. We now have some questions. First, I will call the Bishop of Derby, then Baroness Hilton and then Lord Black.

Q102 Bishop of Derby: Thank you very much for being with us. As an opening question, can you say, from your experience in this area, what the most important needs of survivors are and what you have learnt are the best ways of trying to meet those needs? This is about a very basic laying out of the ground.

Ms Josephine Wambui: I will give just two examples and leave some for my colleagues. The one thing I have seen is that survivors want to be safe—to feel safe again. They still want to be part of the community, even after this atrocious act has affected them. I guess that is where the issue of stigma comes in; it breaks down that feeling of being part of the community. Safety is related to the fear of reprisals. If you report the incident, you have no idea who is going to come back at you: it could be your family, because of the stigma; it could be the perpetrator. There is that desire to be safe and to belong to the community.

The last one, I would say, is justice. They want justice. There is a feeling that they want true justice, not halfway justice. They do not want to go through this and then decide that it was not what they wanted when they reported the incident. For me, those are the two key things that I have engaged with.

Dr Chris Dolan: When working with male survivors, there is a quite clear sequence of need. Generally, because the issue is so hidden, the first need is medical. Our entry point is nearly always addressing medical needs that have sometimes been left unaddressed for many years. People then say, “You have helped me with my body. What about my head?”. You then get more into a counselling mode, still with the individual. After some time, the most effective mechanism we have found is to encourage people to form or join support groups with peer survivors. We have managed to do that in three different spaces with three quite different groups of male survivors. Those groups allow people to re-establish a sense of social identity and a sense of being respected again. At the core of sexual violence against men tends to be an attempt to emasculate and to destroy social identity. Being in a group, even if is a new group and is parallel to existing structures, helps to give back a sense of being recognised as an adult and as a man. That becomes one of the most successful interventions at a more psychological level.

Professor Doris Schopper: May I add to that?

Bishop of Derby: Yes, please.

Professor Doris Schopper: Thank you. To add to what Dr Dolan has said, it is clear that medical care is absolutely central. We would go as far as saying that if medical care is not available for victims of sexual violence, you should not make interventions in a community. That is particularly important, of course, for people who have recently been exposed to sexual violence. As Dr Dolan was saying, there are long-term consequences of these incidents, which I will come to, that need to be addressed. Then there is the psychological care to encourage and enable them to talk about this and to address their psychological wounds et cetera. Medical and psychological care are absolutely essential.

Q103 Baroness Hilton of Eggardon: Dr Dolan has already touched to some extent on the needs of male survivors. Clearly, there are rather different symbolic and psychological aspects for a male victim of sexual abuse. However, it seems there are probably generalities and points in common between what happens to women, to children and to men, even if there are points that are different. Do you see the needs of women, children and men as being generally different, or are there just specific aspects that need to be addressed?

Dr Chris Dolan: The experience of children is quite different from the experience of adults, in so far as the child has a much less developed social identity and sexual identity, or sense of their own sexuality. That does not make it worse or better for children or adults; it just makes it a quite different experience. The needs of children who are not yet playing key social roles—are not yet in relationships with spouses or children—are quite different. There are specific needs. I am not judging them as worse, better, greater or less, but they are different and are not yet well understood.

On the medical side, which we started with, there are many different forms of sexual violence, but depending on the form that the sexual violence took, the recovery process itself may pose particular challenges. I am thinking here of things such as nutrition. We have many refugees trying to survive on food rations that just do not correspond to what you need for a recovery process. There are other needs, such as those of men who have been abandoned by their families because they are now viewed as less than men or as homosexuals. Quite often they are absolutely alone and unable to do any physical labour because they are not in a fit physical state and are really at the mercy of all sorts of issues.

There are differences, and the whole logic of the violence is different when it is done to children as opposed to adults. That needs to be further disentangled. We tend to say “women and girls”, and now that we are talking more about men we tend to say “men and boys”, as if they are homogenous, but they are actually very different. The cut-off point between boy and man, or between girl and woman, is different in different places. None the less, we need to find what that cut-off point is in different environments and to look at the specific needs that relate to those different identities and different stages of development.

Ms Josephine Wambui: I will just pick up on the point that Dr Dolan made about the cut-off point between men and boys, or between women and girls. In the context of violence in Somalia, which I am familiar with, there is early marriage. A girl quickly transitions to becoming a woman: she is married and has children, and then violence is meted out on her. There are issues that need to be unpacked as we provide the medical services and the psychosocial support. There needs to be discussion around how you treat a woman who is essentially still a girl. Those discussions are important.

Baroness Hilton of Eggardon: Do you use support groups in the same way that Dr Dolan has mentioned to help them get over the psychological trauma?

Ms Josephine Wambui: Yes, one of the partners that I worked with in south-central Somalia has support groups, which is how they bring the women and the girls together. It is one of the ways in which they are able to talk about what is affecting them and keep in touch with each other and form bonds. So yes, it works.

Baroness Hilton of Eggardon: Dr Dolan, did you want to add to that?

Dr Chris Dolan: Just briefly, if I may. We are in the preliminary stages of an analysis of the costs of medical treatment. When we compare the costs of treating 200 women and 100 men, we find that the men are more expensive. The courses of antibiotics and the surgery overall tend to end up being more costly than for women.

Baroness Hilton of Eggardon: Because the physical trauma is worse?

Dr Chris Dolan: Yes.

Baroness Hilton of Eggardon: Professor Schopper, did you want to add to that?

Professor Doris Schopper: No, that is fine, thank you.

Q104 Lord Black of Brentwood: I wanted just to follow up on a point that Ms Wambui started on in her first answer, which was about stigma. We have heard a lot about how stigma plays a role in preventing victims from reporting crime in the first place but also then from seeking help. It would be interesting to hear your views on how such stigma could most effectively be countered. Supplementary to that, I would be interested to hear how that impacts on LGBT communities in particular, where a double dose of stigma probably occurs.

Ms Josephine Wambui: Where I worked, I did not come across many LGBT issues. Somalia is very silent about them, so I would not be able to offer much on that. However, for dealing with stigma, support groups are really helpful, not only at the national level or in urban centres but especially in targeting the rural areas, where stigma is much greater. Supporting the very small community organisations that run these support groups is very important, because it is one of the ways to share the message and to raise awareness in the community about the impact of sexual violence, and about the fact that it could happen to anyone and is not confined to only a few people. Raising awareness in rural areas is especially important. It is important in the urban areas, but we should also consider the rural areas.

Working with the media is also useful and important, as is protecting them. In south-central Somalia, journalists were arrested for reporting cases of rape. We need to work with the media and support them in reporting cases correctly but also protect them from being jailed for reporting these cases. Stigma also comes from the police. If you report the case to the police and the policeman does not believe you and reacts negatively, you will never report a case again. A lot of women or girls have not reported cases because they say there is no justice: “If I report, my next-door neighbour will know”. The policeman belongs to the community, so there is no feeling of safety. Raising awareness in some of the structures that the survivor will interact with is important.

Dr Chris Dolan: One of the ways in which we have tried to do this, which I think has helped, has been to introduce systematic screening for all refugees who come to our offices. In that screening we ask standard questions about sexual violence experiences, mental health challenges and access to justice problems. We ask everybody, whether they are male, female or other, which creates a microclimate in which everyone knows that when they come to our office they will be asked these questions. It has been quite surprising, but also very useful, to find that when you normalise those kinds of questions, people generally answer much more openly than I anticipated before we did this. That is very important on many levels.

Linked to that, we have created materials—posters and the like—which indicate that sexual violence in particular can happen to anybody: LGBTI, male, female, the elderly, the disabled, the young. Helpline numbers are attached to such information to make it possible for people to access support without having to go through any kind of gateway, if you like, where they may get identified or have a finger pointed at them.

The support groups are incredibly important, but it is important to have support groups not just for survivors of sexual violence but for a whole range of different issues, so that again you create a microclimate in which a larger number of people become aware of issues of discrimination, marginalisation and so on. We run training workshops for leaders of different support groups where we juxtapose leaders of LGBTI support groups with survivor support groups, with the parents of children born of rape, with people living with HIV—a whole gamut of issues together. Because of the nature of the meetings, they know that this person has this issue, that person has that issue, and bit by bit you start creating a change. Male survivors, for example, would initially try to meet in darkness: they did not want to be seen. These days they go on national television.

That brings me to my last point. With the groups we are able to create platforms for them to speak for themselves. That, too, is incredibly mobilising for all sorts of people. If you see a parent talking about bringing up her child born of rape, or his child born of rape, and that is on TV, it changes the discussion completely. It is no longer an issue that is pushed under the carpet. We see a lot happening with that.

We have also found that screening short documentaries by survivors themselves enables so many people to come out and talk about their own experiences related to what they have just watched. There are many different modalities. The whole question of training is massively important. You cannot break down stigma when everybody is still hidden away. People will remain hidden away if there is no value in disclosure. If you are to disclose, you need police officers who understand that this can happen to anybody. In Uganda we had to re-work the police form on which such violence is reported, because the body depicted on which you were supposed to mark where things happen was female. Medical service providers who have never had any training on working with men and LGBTI bring the same stigmatising assumptions into their encounters with such clients unless you have done the training work with them. We need quite a complex range of responses.

I will just add one more and then I will be quiet. Our own staff need to become very adept at reading the signs so that they can help somebody to talk about what happened to them. That might involve a lot of non-verbals, a lot of body language, a lot of attitudes that you might misinterpret, but if the person is well trained they can cut through that and help the client they are talking with to start to talk about what actually happened to them. Until that happens you are really not going to go anywhere very far. I do not believe that you cannot address stigma as an abstract; you have to address it through people turning themselves into activists.

Lord Black of Brentwood: Before asking Professor Schopper, you both talked about the importance of support groups. Do you have enough of them?

Ms Josephine Wambui: If we are talking about having support groups that are not just about survivors, I do not think you can ever have quite enough.

Dr Chris Dolan: I would say that we have more than we can handle in the sense that these groups take on their own dynamics. Things happen in these groups as people become more empowered and more vocal. We have more than enough, but we do not have enough support for the support groups. It is incredibly difficult to get money for them, despite the fact that the amounts are trivial. You can keep a support group moving along for $20 a month, which is less than $500 a year. If you have a $1,000 a year for a support group, they can do something really useful, so it is an incredibly cost-effective intervention, but getting that $1,000, if you do not have that in your budget, is a challenge.

Lord Black of Brentwood: Professor Schopper, did you want to add anything?

Professor Doris Schopper: Yes, very much so. There were two different parts to your question. One was about how stigma prevents victims reporting sexual violence, the other was about seeking help. In my opinion we should separate these two issues, because what is emerging here is that victims of sexual violence do not seek help as much as they report it. There are certainly a whole host of other issues to consider over reporting, such as police training and access to justice for victims. We can come back to that later. When stigma is attached, that does not allow them to seek help, but for many psychological support is extremely important. At the moment, as Dr Dolan said, the screening is done for those who come, such as women and refugees; sometimes everybody goes if you have a screening. That is not what happens in the non-refugee situation and when there is violence. What happens in those situations is that screening is done for people who come to the health facilities. The problem is: what about those who do not have health facilities? Those who come to the health facilities are those who have taken the pledge to seek help. That means that we need to look at what we need to do to increase access to health facilities to allow people to come forward to those facilities.

One issue that is extremely important here is safety, which has been mentioned. It is also about surety, which is of course about the attitude of the workers dealing with patients: so empathy, maybe prejudice towards people and judgmental attitudes, which goes back to the training issue. There is also concern about people not just being protected from sexual violence but being able to say, “I want to go to this place”, to get protection from sexual violence. That can become counterproductive when it becomes known that password actually means the need for protection from sexual violence. So they have tried to increase access to services. One point I would make about stigma is to draw attention to who it is coming from. We talk about the wider community, but stigma starts with the family, with partners and husbands. When a woman is a victim of sexual violence, she may be rejected by her husband. The other question then is how you work on that before working in the wider community.

One thing that we have not mentioned—I am not sure if it will come up later, but I just want to mention it here—is that health studies have shown that during and after conflict the increase in domestic violence, intimate violence, is more significant than the sexual violence perpetrated by armed actors. We need to think not only about armed actors but about what happens in intimate relationships among partners, neighbours and family members, because that is where most of the sexual violence may happen. Studies in Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire and now also from Lebanon and Algeria have shown that of course there was violence by armed forces, but the much greater incidence of violence was within intimate relationships. So we need to think about stigma in that context as well, which is a bit different from always talking about the community as a whole.

As for support groups, we have tried to find evidence of what works when it comes to support. It is very context-related and depends on the culture and the type of community. It can just be peer support, but it could also be things like livelihood strategies, which they are helped to carry out together. This has been done successfully in the DRC with some of the victims of sexual violence. There is also the question of what we mean by “support group”. It is a generic term that can mean many different things.

Lord Sterling of Plaistow: I have a supplementary. It is very obvious that all three of you do marvellous work out there, but your enclaves, in a way, handle the problems once they have happened. We had a professor here a week or so ago who spent a lot of his life in central Africa, in particular in southern Uganda—where, as a matter of interest, I lived for a while many years ago. This is really for Dr Dolan—the work that you are doing, from listening to you, is absolutely splendid. There have been so many conventions, and resolutions by the United Nations, but the professor who was here last time said that, sadly, whenever he goes back—a bit like you were saying before, Baroness—he sees very little progress: nothing is being implemented and nothing is really improving. You are dealing with the results of that. I am trying to see to what extent the authorities locally are helping. In the part of Uganda that you know, in Kampala, do you see any improvement in the attitude of the government authorities—those who really can make things happen?

Dr Chris Dolan: This is one of those critical questions. Often, we do not see the changes that we would like to see, but that is no reason not to try to push for those changes. We have realised that on certain issues it is more effective to work through the technocrats within ministries than to try to get change at the public or political level.

On sexual violence, we have invested a lot of effort in the training that is given to police: shifting the curriculum at the national police training school has been one mechanism for doing that. In other respects, the challenge comes not just from the local authorities but from the international organisations. Particularly on the issue that I am focusing on this afternoon, that of male survivors, the international organisations—or at any rate their staff on the ground—are as ignorant as their governmental counterparts. We face the same problems of confusion around homosexuality. With sexual violence against men, all the stigma is lumped together in one easy bundle. It operates at multiple levels, and we have to work at both a national and an international level, and through ongoing day-to-day training. When we do that training with the local stakeholders or duty-bearers, we find that it very quickly shifts the conversation, and we start to get police officers calling us up when they encounter a transgender individual, for example, and do not know how to respond. We find that is a more effective method in a sense than changing legislation. Changing legislation takes many years, and, as you say, it does not get implemented very quickly even when it is there.

The Chairman: Thank you very much Lord Sterling and Lord Black. We have five more Members to ask questions: the first are Lord Hannay, Baroness Young and Baroness Goudie. Lord Hannay.

Q105 Lord Hannay of Chiswick: Could we turn to the question of impunity, which Lord Sterling has just touched on? I suppose it would be common ground to all of us to feel that it would be a wonderful thing if you could bring an end to impunity. Equally, I am well aware that this has not been achieved—nothing like it has been achieved—and that if it had been achieved, there would not be as much sexual violence as there is. What could all three of you say about what more could be done to, as it were, chip away at the culture of impunity and to reduce it, whether by international or national judicial means or by cultural means?

Professor Doris Schopper: I would be happy to answer that, if I may.

The Chairman: Please do Professor Schopper. Go ahead.

Professor Doris Schopper: Thank you. Just last year we had a conference looking at this issue of impunity. There is a wonderful paper by a professor from California University called Kim Seelinger; I do not know whether you know of her. She has researched what happens on the legal side with regard to sexual violence. When you read her paper or listen to her talk, or listen to people who work on this at the Office of the High Commissioner for Human rights here in Geneva or to other people, you see the different steps the victim has to go through, starting from the medico-legal certificate, the forensic evidence that needs to be collected, the report to the police, filing the papers with prosecutors, going to court—often for a public hearing—and then maybe getting a judgment that does not correspond to the expectations of the victim. Then there may be an appeal by the person accused. Then the person who you want to jail may evade jail, which happens frequently and is terrible for the victim. When you look at all these steps, the evidence now is that only about 6% of victims ever report their case and start to go through this process. The proportion of those who get to the end is even smaller. Why is that? The legal system in most countries where this happens is very dysfunctional, so getting justice in a national court is extremely difficult. People encounter several problems at different steps. You may know that in the DRC a mobile court was set up, supported by the American Bar Association, to go to the villages and to have everything done on the spot much more rapidly. The experience of that was that it was extremely expensive and is certainly not sustainable.

Another thing that people have looked into is how much customary law could be used. After the genocide in Rwanda, the Gacaca court had a very mixed track record on justice for the victims of sexual violence. It has not always worked very well. We do not have very good evidence about how we can make the courts better. The first thing would really be to see what could be done to give support for the national legal system to make it safer for victims of sexual violence to come forward and have due process that in the end gives justice for what happened. The issue is getting not only justice but reparation, which may be even more important. We should watch and see who is getting justice in the formal sense of giving reparation to the victim, which can happen in another way. Part of what victims want is to be acknowledged—for it to be acknowledged that this happened to them and that it was a wrongdoing—more perhaps than the prosecution of the perpetrators, which may be a burden to bear and a difficult situation for them. When we look at medical care and psychological care, we have learnt partly what to do. We have learnt a bit about what to do to give victims support in the community. When it comes to justice for victims, we are very much at the start.

Dr Chris Dolan: On this question I think there are four different points. One is that a lot of domestic legislation needs reforming. Despite what we just discussed, where laws exist, even if they are not implemented fully, they have an impact on how people handle certain situations, and that is particularly the case with sexual violence-related legislation. There is a need to reform domestic legislation, for example to recognise male victims and female perpetrators; about 70 countries do not recognise male victims, and about 30 countries do not recognise female perpetrators. The Rome Statute is currently the best model for what sexual violence laws need to grapple with. It currently has the best definition of rape and recognises other forms of sexual violence. It also understands the whole concept of something that looks like perpetration but is actually somebody being forced into conducting acts of sexual violence totally against their will, which is very much a feature of a lot of the conflict-related sexual violence that we see. So I would hold up the Rome Statute as a model.

I know that my colleague Niamh is going to speak about investigation skills, which need a lot more work. As I said earlier, if you do not know how to ask the right questions at the right time in the right way, you will never get disclosure.

On a much broader level, the whole question of impunity rests on silence, and we need to look at where we are playing into the silencing of particular forms and patterns of sexual violence. Certainly in the way in which sexual violence in conflict has been documented today, we have seen a lot of silence in the one-third of cases that I believe are male cases, because people are not asking the questions. There is no box to tick for the male survivor. We have contributed a lot to a culture of impunity through a lack of adequate research and documentation. There are many different places where we need to tackle impunity.

Lord Hannay of Chiswick: Can I just follow that up with you? You spoke very highly of the Rome Statute for the International Criminal Court, which I agree with you is an admirable innovation, but are you not a bit disappointed that virtually none of the prosecutions that have taken place and the cases that are being prepared relate to sexual violence in conflict? Have you any idea why that should be?

Dr Chris Dolan: I cannot answer that fully. It is important to distinguish between the Rome Statute as a set of principles and the International Criminal Court as an institution. I talked about the Rome Statute. I could talk about what I think is wrong with the Court and how it functions, or does not function, but it would take quite a while. I do not feel I am the best person to address the question of the balance of cases, but I think Niamh will come to that in the next session.

Ms Josephine Wambui: If I may, I will pick up on the point that was raised about formal and informal justice systems. In the case of south-central Somalia there is the traditional system, there is the formal system, and there is sharia. When we worked there we supported the formal system. There was support for the sexual violence Bill, there was working with the police, but then we realised that no one was reporting to the police. The majority of those who do report to the police go through the traditional system or the sharia, the religious, system. So one of the things that we started doing just as I was leaving was trying to understand the relationship between the formal, the religious and the informal justice systems, because in some way all of them work together and deliver some sort of justice. Understanding that and seeing how to tackle impunity in an imperfect, unempathic mix of systems is interesting. One of the things that Oxfam and Saferworld were doing was research into formal and informal justice systems not only in Somalia but in Pakistan: where people report, why they report there, what their appeal mechanisms are if they feel that the formal system does not give them justice. That process is going on, and it will be interesting to inform that.

The Chairman: Thank you. Next we have four more sets of questions: from Baroness Young, Baroness Goudie, Baroness Hodgson and Baroness Kinnock.

Q106 Baroness Young of Hornsey: We have touched on this question already. It is about different justice mechanisms and what role they can play in accountability. There are the formal justice mechanisms, and you, Ms Wambui, have very helpfully outlined three different modes of addressing this problem. Perhaps you specifically would like to say something about the extent to which the victims who have been through the informal systems, the sharia system or the traditional system felt that justice had been done and that there had been accountability for these dreadful crimes. Perhaps, Dr Dolan and Professor Schopper, you could also give us some examples of where you think there has been some effective use of informal, or different, justice mechanisms.

Ms Josephine Wambui: We received mixed reactions. As I said, just before I left the organisation we were doing a field study, and we realised that among those who went through the formal system there was a feeling that they were not received well right from the time they reported the case at the police station. There were those who shared stories of having reported the crime, the perpetrator was arrested and held, but there was an extra requirement for them and their family to provide food for the perpetrator because the police station did not have enough resources to sustain anyone they hold. So you have that. Then you go through the court process, and sometimes the traditional elders come in, talk to the judges and say, “We can sort this out at our level, the traditional level”, and the case is dropped. There is the feeling that the formal system is not strong enough yet to offer them the justice that they seek. The traditional system is very collective, in a sense, in that if the survivor makes a report, a meeting is held with the perpetrator and his family, they discuss it and a fine is given, if I may use that word, and it is his clan who come together and pay. It is a collective responsibility. When that payment is made, it does not necessarily go to the survivor—it will probably go to the male members of her clan—so she may not feel that there is justice. At least there is some sort of payment, but it is still “half/half”. When we talked about sharia, one of the things we found was that it is very strict: if you do this, this is going to happen. It is also very punitive. So the survivor will have to look at all three systems and decide which one they go to.

Another reason for making a particular choice is what is accessible. If I am in a village, where can I go? Is my religious leader the closest person to me, is it my elder, or is it the police and the court system? Appeal processes are also different. If I feel that I do not receive justice at the traditional level, what other mechanisms are there for me to appeal through? Those are not clear. I know it has happened, and there is some anecdotal evidence to show that, but I do not think that enough information is collected to show how one case can move from one system to the next, how they interact, and how there can be accountability so that people do not play the system—because there is always that issue.

Dr Chris Dolan: Where Ms Wambui just stopped is where I wanted to start. People play these systems off against each other a lot, and often it is not the victim herself who makes that decision but the parents. The parents will use the threat of a sentence for defilement, for example, to squeeze the money out of the accused, and as soon as that has happened they drop the whole case. The way in which the traditional and the formal are played off against one another is an important part of our understanding of what is going on. In IDP situations, for example, as was said, traditional justice is done in a very collective way. It is also very patriarchal. Those mechanisms hold out absolutely no hope of redress for male victims or LGBTI victims. They hold out some hope for some women and girls, but not very much. So I am not particularly optimistic about traditional mechanisms providing justice in the way we understand it under a formal justice system. They are good for other dimensions, such as acknowledgement and recognition. They can be much better than the formal process, and they are generally much quicker.

I would just like to reference one example of male survivors who never got justice for what happened 25 years ago. For them the decision to disclose, and to go public with their disclosure, has been the best that they could get, in the sense that it shifted them from the position of being a victim who had to hide what had happened even though it was an open secret—everybody knew it but you were not allowed to talk about it—to deciding, “Okay, I’m going to talk about it. You will have to acknowledge it, and in the process I will get recognised again as an elder”. We have seen some interesting dynamics around that, but, as I say, do you need to wait 25 years before you can talk about it? There are lots of limitations on all these different mechanisms.

Professor Doris Schopper: I very much agree with Dr Dolan that customary law is usually linked to very patriarchal societies, which means that it will not benefit women, and male or LGBTI victims of sexual violence probably even less so. One example came up several times involving participants from the Middle East. Under customary law a woman who has been raped has to be married to the perpetrator following that rape. That is the kind of customary mechanism that we are dealing with. One needs to be extremely careful about making judgments as to where courts see a benefit, because perhaps it is better than nothing.

I referred to the Gacaca court, but it is not really a customary mechanism. It is more aligned, I think, to a traditional justice mechanism, where after conflict you have a kind of reconciliation phase where people in the community can come out and say certain things and people can ask for forgiveness. It is a traditional justice mechanism based on the possibility of dealing with the perpetration of sexual violence. That, of course, can be very positive and sometimes very striking. A very good film was made in the DRC on perpetrators of sexual violence in the recent conflict. It is astonishing to see that many of these persons have absolutely no sense of guilt over what happened, so the victims do not even get the chance to say that something terrible happened to them or even an excuse for what was done. So in that sense a lot of caution has to be taken over the customary mechanisms, which may not be as bad as thought.

The Chairman: Thank you so much, Baroness Young. We have three more questioners. At the risk of appearing ungrateful, could I ask our witnesses to be relatively brief, as I am very keen for Baroness Goudie, Baroness Hodgson and Baroness Kinnock to ask their questions?

Q107 Baroness Goudie: Thank you, Lord Chairman. I would be very pleased if you wanted to take the questions together and for the witnesses to answer all three in one comment if you felt that would be helpful because of the time. I would like to ask a question about an issue that I feel very strongly about, as I know Members of the Committee do. At the peace table and in negotiations, the problem of livelihood support has also come up. Representative Banguri felt that this was a missing link in aiding women who experience conflict-related sexual violence to get further employment and training, to move forward in employment, to help with their families and, in some cases of course, paying for school fees. In some areas there is no free schooling, and we want people to be able to move on.

Ms Josephine Wambui: I totally agree that livelihood support is important. We find that once you equip a survivor with skills, they can provide for their family and take back some of the power that they feel they have lost. That is very important. It is not the only thing, but it is part of the healing process.

Dr Chris Dolan: I totally agree. I would also point out that the same holds true for male survivors, in the sense that very often they have been stripped of their traditional roles as heads of households, providers, protectors. That becomes a source of distress not just to them but to their families and spouses, and one of the reasons why families end up splitting up, so there is a need for that kind of support across the board. I do not think that one should rush to livelihood in the absence of any attempt to understand why, if it is for women, a woman is alone. Is that because of stigmatisation? Has she been abandoned by her husband, by her family? Those questions also need to be asked.

Professor Doris Schopper: I would just add that there is quite a lot of evidence now that it does not benefit victims of sexual violence to have support just targeted at them. It can be counterproductive because it can lead to further stigmatisation. In conflict situations, many people have issues with their livelihood. It is not only sexual violence that can happen: many other terrible things can happen, and paying particular attention to survivors of sexual violence can actually backfire. So now there is much more of an attempt to ask who the people in the community are who need livelihood support and then to provide that support but in a broader sense. Of course you may have a specific setting, where the clinic or whatever in the community has created livelihood support for survivors of sexual violence because they are in the clinic, and that has made a difference. But in the community, I would very much caution against having a livelihood support programme specifically directed at survivors of sexual violence. I would integrate them into these programmes, but without finger pointing.

Q108 Baroness Hodgson of Abinger: How effective do you think that the UK’s Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative has been in responding to the needs of survivors, which has been one of the focuses of the initiative?

Ms Josephine Wambui: I feel that the focus has mostly been at the national level and mostly around policy. I was reading a speech about UK expertise to help national governments to prevent and prosecute sexual violence in conflict settings. However, work at the national level might not translate to results on the ground. I am very passionate about work on the ground at the local level, where the issues are. Yes, it is important to support national governments and to have policy, but the weakness has been in supporting the bottom to be able to demand that transparency and accountability and to demand justice. You need to build the capacity of local organisations that are working day in, day out on these issues and to support them to protect themselves, because there are reprisals against them when they are working on these issues. Staff at one of Oxfam’s partners were put at risk, so we need to support them to have security mechanisms for themselves and their staff to be able to work, especially in violent contexts. For me, the top and the bottom have to be complemented. PSVI has done the top, but the bottom is lacking.

Dr Chris Dolan: I would say the same thing. It has been better at drawing attention to the needs than at addressing them itself. It has done a very good job at shifting the discussion and moving it forward, but in terms of practical needs at a grass-roots level, there is some way to go.

Professor Doris Schopper: I feel totally the same way. We can sense now at an international level that the discourse at the political level has changed very much, but we still hear about how difficult it is for organisations on the ground to secure funding and how difficult it is to set up and to fund small projects. The big gap for me is mechanisms to support and fund small organisations at the local level in countries where this takes places. That is the gap right now.

The Chairman: Thank you. Our final question, Baroness Kinnock.

Q109 Baroness Kinnock of Holyhead: Thank you to the three of you for your very coherent and helpful remarks. What steps should be taken, in your view, to ensure that sexual violence does not continue in post-conflict societies and situations? Even if we think we have made some progress, we need to be aware that hostilities can resume at any time and to be prepared for that. How can we ensure that we are?

Ms Josephine Wambui: One of the things that we were trying to do in the context that I was involved in when I left Somalia was understanding the justice systems. Contexts are different, and understanding the different justice systems and how they work, and the power that is played out in all those systems, is important. I would not say that one should support one over the other, but the formal justice system could be promoted. If it does not work, there is disillusionment. We need to understand and try as much as possible not to support one over the other. As we have said, the gap is in the support for the local organisations that are on the ground and do the work. That, for me, is very important, because in the event that hostilities arise, those are the ones that will be left: the international organisations will be out and the government will probably not be in a position to provide justice or services, but the local organisations will be the ones dealing with whatever is coming out. For me, those are the three things.

In terms of ensuring that hostilities do not resume, I guess there is conflict analysis. Whoever is working in those contexts, it is important to have a gendered conflict analysis and a gendered power analysis to understand what the issues are. Those are my points.

Dr Chris Dolan: It is an interesting question, because it raises all sorts of questions about the idea of rape as a weapon of war. It also raises lots of questions about whether peace processes actually end wars or just change the framing of the hostilities. I did a piece of research in 2010 in eastern Congo on community perceptions of sexual violence. The conclusion was that the war was not yet over, even though at that particular point there was a lull in all the main hostilities. People felt that the war was not over essentially because the economic conditions were making it possible to recruit people into various different armed groups and the political tensions between different ethnic groups had not been resolved. Much as there had been negotiations, peace deals and so on, the actual underlying causes had not been addressed. That is the big picture.

At a more micro level, we have seen a lot that among the refugees who we work with there is tremendous clarity about the fact that sexual violence in conflict, if it is not addressed, leads to domestic violence in peace. They make a very clear connection between what happened to them during the conflict and the ongoing problems that they have at the domestic level, even in a country of asylum. It means that we need to be thinking very hard about the response itself as a form of prevention. If we respond and intervene, we are able to contribute to breaking some of those cycles of violence.

Professor Doris Schopper: To tag on to what Dr Dolan just said, the question is rather how we deal with sexual violence post-conflict or in a protracted crisis. There are two different things that we need to think about here. One is post-conflict where we have a fractured society where violence has become the common rule or just a bigger trend, so violent behaviours are much more prevalent than they were before the conflict. People need to be able to re-engage in a normal social life. If that does not happen, there will be a high prevalence of sexual violence after the conflict. That can often lead to domestic violence or violence within relationships.

The other thing is that, in the long term, if we want anything to change with respect to this, in some ways you have to change society. You have to change gender roles, perceptions around violence and sexual violence et cetera. That is a very long-term endeavour, which is not what humanitarian actors engage in.

But if you do not have these profound societal changes, it will be very difficult to change that. We need to acknowledge that sexual violence will be very prevalent post-conflict and that we need to provide services to survivors of sexual violence. As Chris Dolan said, having such services is perhaps the best entry point to prevention activity. We also know nowadays that we know very little about how to prevent sexual violence: there is very little evidence about what means are effective in preventing sexual violence. So we have to be very humble. One thing would be to invest more, not necessarily in research but in putting in place very stringent monitoring and evaluation of the problems. That way, we can better learn from what we are doing about how to tackle this in the future.

The Chairman: Professor, thank you very much. In a sense, you have wrapped up the discussion with your last comments, which were very helpful, as all your evidence was. Thank you very much, Ms Wambui. We are looking forward to seeing what you do next. You have given us a great deal of information and hugely useful perceptions from your enormous amount of work on the ground. Thank you very much to Dr Dolan for your very full reports and for tackling an issue that we have been underobserving. Since we have not had the evidence on it before, you filled in a very large gap for us, and we are deeply grateful. Thank you all.

We could spend all day with you and still be learning, but alas we have to move on. Undoubtedly we will have a few more questions by email, and we would be grateful for your replies to those as well. On behalf of all the Committee, thank you for all your help.