Gender considerations: a case for women's participation in peace processes/Considerations due genre: un argument en faveur de la participation des femmes aux processus de paix.

• Author: Nzisa, Agnes
• Position: Essay

The eruption of armed conflict has devastating effects on the citizens. Unfortunately, the signals of the onset of trouble more often than not go unnoticed or ignored in a country. As soon as the leaders close their eyes to the brewing trouble, so does the rest of the world. Only to wake up and find the land scattered with skulls and drenched in innocent blood.

Conflict can subtly start as wrong imprisonment of a public figure, state instigated violence, inter-ethnic violence, election violence or ot-her forms of violence. Conflicts may be attributed to the diversity in culture, history and politics of different people and nations. Conflicts also arise from boundary disputes and sharing of power and natural resources.

More often than not women's role in conflict is viewed as being a passive one. A research on Peace, Security and Women by the UN Security Council showed that women (just like men) are both actors and victims in armed conflicts. Women participate in armed forces as combatants and through playing supporting roles. They may assume these roles willingly or be forced to play them. Women and girls have been known to infiltrate opposition groups for the purposes of passing information, hiding or smuggling weapons, supporting or caring for fighters. For example, in Sierra Leone, women supporting the rebel forces smuggled weapons through checkpoints in baskets of fish, under their clothing and via their children.

Civilian women and girls face different risks and dangers in armed conflict compared to those faced by civilian men and boys. Notably, the fact that women are left unprotected in times of conflict makes them vulnerable. A factor that contributes to this is the disintegration of traditional forms of moral, community and institutional safeguard in the light of proliferation of weapons. Social attitudes also expose women and girls to vulnerable situations. For example, families have wrongly assumed that an elderly woman, an expectant mother or a woman with children will be safe from harm and have left them to safeguard property while the rest of the family flees.

Evidently, those who suffer most in any conflict are usually the aged, women and children. While women and girls endure the same trauma as the rest of the population, i.e. bombings, famines, epidemics, mass executions, torture, imprisonment, forced migration, ethnic cleansing, threats and intimidation; they are also targets of specific forms of violence and abuse, especially sexual violence and exploitation. There is an increase in the incidences where rape is used as a strategy of war. A Ugandan woman who took up arms to fight for peace during the civil war years in Luweero District was gang raped by Obote soldiers 21 times then she stopped counting. One time they were dosed up in a certain room and she was raped day and night. This young girt tore so that there was no separation between the vagina and the anus. She...