mechanisms, Priscilla Hayner determined that “Most truth commissions have not been active in seeking out, encouraging or facilitating testimony from women.”7 Additionally, the early commissions in Argentina and Chile assumed a gender-neutral approach to truth—an approach that has been criticized for overlooking the ways in which gender neutrality frequently defaults into a perspective that privileges men and their experiences.8
A concern for the lack of “women’s voices” prompted the commissions in Guatemala and South Africa—and subsequently Peru—to actively seek out testimony from women. These more recent commissions have argued that truth itself is gendered and thus have sought to incorporate a “gendered perspective.” In terms of sheer numbers, they were successful: in both South Africa and Peru women provided the majority of testimonies given to their respective commissions.9 In all three commissions women described in detail the harm done to their family members and to their communities, testifying to the ways in which armed conflict affects every aspect of daily life, frequently exacerbating the underlying structural injustices of their societies. However, they overwhelmingly did not talk in the first person about rape. Thus the lament that “women don’t talk” shifted to the concern that “women don’t talk about themselves.”
The concern that women do not talk about themselves but rather focus on the suffering and harm done to loved ones has prompted a variety of “gender-sensitive” strategies aiming to capture women’s experience of violence—generally defined as rape and other forms of sexual violence. That women do not talk about rape is thus posed as the problem that a gender-sensitive approach is designed to resolve. From this perspective, the incitement to speech is well intentioned. The problem may be the sort of speech that commissions “commonsensically” seek.
The Peruvian TRC was given a gender-neutral mandate, but feminists were successful in insisting the commission think about the importance of gender in their work.10 Drawing upon the earlier commissions in Guatemala and South Africa, they argued for proactive efforts to include women’s voices in the truth-seeking process.11 Thus the Peruvian TRC decided to include sexual crimes in its mandate because of the broad language used in the Supreme Decree, the importance of the topic, and “the need to recover the voices of women affected by such crimes.”12
Additionally, the TRC’s Linea de Género (Gender Program) persuaded the commission to adopt a broad definition of sexual violence that reflected changing international norms. Rather than strictly investigating rape, the commission used a broad definition of sexual violence in its work: “Sexual violence is a type of human rights violation, and includes forced prostitution, forced unions, sexual slavery, forced abortions, and forced nudity.”13
In light of concerns that “Perhaps the most commonly underreported abuses are those suffered by women, especially sexual abuse and rape,” there were efforts to encourage women to come forward.14 As the head of the Gender Program wrote, “To encourage victims of sexual violence to participate in the [Peruvian] TRC’s investigation, the PTRC developed a series of training documents that included communication strategies on how to conduct investigations in the country’s rural areas and provided guidelines for the interviewers. The PTRC also organized a public hearing on women’s human rights.”15 Thus “gender-sensitive” strategies were employed with the goal of soliciting women’s testimonies about rape and other forms of sexual violence. The results?
Of the people who gave testimonies to the TRC, at the national level 54 percent were women and 46 percent men; in the department of Ayacucho, women provided 64 percent of the testimonies.16 Women certainly did come forward: they spoke a great deal but not necessarily about sexual violence—at least not in the first person. The total number of reported cases of rape was 538, of which 527 were committed against women and eleven were crimes against men.17 Of these cases, 83 percent were attributable to armed agents of the state.18
If legal standards of proof are the measure of success, these numbers are grim. Women overwhelmingly refused to speak about rape in the first person. However, a potential strength of truth commissions is their blurring of genres. While legal standards of proof might disallow “hearsay” or “anecdotal evidence,” truth commissions can work with other evidentiary standards to establish “historical truths.” This is what the preponderance of “third-person” testimonies permitted the Peruvian TRC to do. As they state in their Final Report, although the numbers do not show the magnitude of the problem, the testimonies allowed the commission to infer that sexual violence was a common practice during the internal armed conflict. Thus if indeed they could not quantitatively demonstrate the extent of sexual violations, the qualitative and tangential information collected allowed the commission to assert that sexual violations against women were a generalized practice during the internal armed conflict.19 These findings are important, and the PTRC’s Final Report is a tool in the struggle for gender justice.
But let’s stay with those statistics. When discussing the underreporting of sexual violence, the primary factor cited is shame. As Julissa Mantilla has explained, “According to the PTRC, the number of cases of sexual violence against women was significantly less that the number of other human rights violations; however, the PTRC recognized the statistical under-representation of these cases. The same type of under-reporting occurred in Guatemala and South Africa due to the victim’s feelings of guilt and shame.”20 She also notes that in Peru the idea persists that rape is not a human rights violation but rather a collateral damage of war. Additionally, acts of sexual violence frequently occurred within the context of other human rights violations—massacres, tortures, arbitrary detentions—and such violations overshadowed the reporting of sexual violence. For example, in many massacres the women and girls were separated out and raped first; however, the incident may only have been reported as a massacre.21
However, there was the “historical truth.” I do not find it surprising that many women provided testimony about sexual violence in their capacity as witnesses rather than as victims. While shame is a factor that influenced this trend, it also reflects the gendered nature of memory specialization. Women narrate communal suffering and the quotidian impact of war: thus it is not so strange that they are the bearers of these collective memories as well. It is to women’s memory work and the gendered dimensions of war that we now turn.
In her research on the South African TRC, Fiona Ross argues that the commission essentialized suffering and gender, focusing on harm as the violation of bodily integrity. Thus the “rape victim” narrative was constructed, and prized. In the Public Hearings, narratives of rape were elicited—extracted from broader testimonies—and became emblematic of “women’s experience” of apartheid.22 Yet as Ross poignantly demonstrates, women had much more to say.
Yes, the PTRC adopted a broad definition of sexual violence, including forms of abuse extending beyond rape. However, even a broad definition of sexual violence may result in a narrow definition of the gendered dimensions of war. In the thick description women provided, they narrated a broader set of truths about systemic injustice, the gross violations of their socioeconomic rights, and the futility of seeking justice from the legal systems that operated nationally and locally. When women talk about the suffering of family members and of their communities; when they recall the long walks to the river for water and the hours spent scrounging for bits of kindling; when they tearfully recall their children’s gnawing hunger that they tried to calm with water and salt; when they remember with outrage how they were subjected to ethnic insults in the streets of the very cities in which they sought refuge—they are talking about themselves and the gendered dimensions of war. And, beyond the dangers that engulfed them, they have much to say about the actions they took in the face of those challenges. They also give us much to consider regarding commonsense notions of a gendered perspective on war.
Memory Projects