I was honoured to be selected and invited to the International Ministerial Conference on Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative 2022 held in London, the United Kingdom. The main theme of this conference was “For Survivors, With Survivors”. After two-day fruitful sessions, I gained a lot of knowledge about the struggles that grassroots-level organisations face while deal with sexual violence in conflict settings.
Many people from regions such as Congo, Libya, Afghanistan, and Ukraine, experience conflict-related sexual violence. In 2021, MONUSCO documented 1,016 such cases, affecting 544 women, 459 girls, 7 boys, and 6 men in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the same report, the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) confirmed 23 instances of rape and forced prostitution committed during the conflict against 9 Libyan women and 14 migrant women, including those from Cameroon, Somalia, and Sudan. More numbers from other countries could be found to demonstrate the importance and urgency of preventing sexual violence in conflict-related contexts.
In order to reduce and further prevent sexual violence in the aforementioned contexts, the survivor-centred approach should be employed on micro, meso, and macro levels. In many cases of sexual violence in conflict-related settings, survivors are usually silenced due to social norms that discriminate against victims of sexual violence. Therefore, the voices of survivors are missing in the solutions employed in order to prevent sexual violence. I would argue that survivors must have a say in decisions impacting their lives.
On the micro level, three points should be covered. The first one is to listen to survivors, trust them and amplify their voices — what is more important is to build a comfortable and safe space for survivors to speak up? Next is to educate the public about sexual violence in these contexts in order to de-stigmatise survivors. The public needs to know what sexual violence is, why sexual violence is used in conflicts as a way to control and gain power, and why it is not the survivors’ fault to experience sexual violence. After such an awareness awakening, how to help survivors to build their lives should be thought about because not only do they undergo sexual violence, but also suffer due to the other impacts of conflict. At the same time, the public should hold a belief in survivors and stop victim-shaming them. Thirdly, the language to describe survivors and sexual violence should be changed as it contains power. Thus, instead of saying a person is raped or sexually assaulted, the focus should be shifted on who raped or sexually assaulted this person.
On the mesoscopic level, four points exist. Firstly, survivors’ sexual and reproductive health and rights should be paid more attention to. Many pregnancy cases are caused by rape in conflict-related settings. Meanwhile, early marriages happen more often in conflict regions. Conflicts cause death and poverty in families. In order to financially support other family members, girls in conflict areas are forced into early marriages which can lead to teenage pregnancy. How women and girls could be protected from the perspective of sexual and reproductive should be emphasised by grassroots organisations and non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Secondly, the
gender-binary perspective should be tossed away. The LGBTQ+ community is also one of the groups that face high risks of sexual violence but might be less possible to speak up in an environment of homophobia and thus, need more support. Thirdly, while amplifying the voices of survivors through interviews, NGOs and journalists should seek consent from survivors about whether or not they intend to be interviewed, and how their stories could be used and a safe and comfortable interviewing environment should be created by them. Survivors should be informed of enough information about the benefits and risks of sharing their stories. And they should be provided opportunities to drop out when they do not want to share.
On the macro level, more actions could be done. First of all, sexual violence-related international law should be translated into domestic laws to better regulate sexual violence from a legal perspective. Secondly, military forces in every country in the whole world should be educated and trained about human rights, human rights law, international law, and gender equality, and how military personnel can contribute to sexual violence prevention in conflicts. According to speakers at the conference, about 70-80% of sexual violence is conducted by military or security personnel in conflicts. Hence, educating and training military forces will play a key role in preventing sexual violence in these settings. Thirdly, collaborations among survivors, lawyers, journalists, academia, NGOs, international organisations, and governments should be built up and strengthened. From the sharing of many speakers, a solid collaboration among multiple key players in preventing sexual violence in conflicts is missing. Last but not least, dedicated financial resources to international organisations and local NGOs, especially grassroots organisations should be allocated.