First and foremost, thank you for the invitation to join you for the Tuesday seminar.
As Kate mentioned, I very recently submitted and to have an opportunity to re-engage with my material as I wait for my brother is sort of welcomed.
But I think an important point exercise, if nothing else. So it's really exciting to be able to share a piece of my thesis with you.
It's going into the quite sort of unexciting, but maybe to the point title here of responding sexual violence and conflict space computing DRC.
But I'm hoping that it will be sort of one of the first papers that comes out of the thesis that be looking at
delineations of perpetrator hood in responses to sexual violence and conflicts in policy and in practice in Congo.
So thanks for being here. I welcome your your feedback and thoughts.
Hopefully again will help prepare for some questions that might come up the impending buyback.
So for the next 45 minutes or so well for the first few minutes, I'll spend some time setting the scene in some way, sort of situating the material.
And then I'll say a few words about the water project and the methodology behind the thesis, and then this particular piece of it too.
Before turning to the events and reporting that led up to the adoption of the first U.N.
Security Council resolution to address sexual violence in conflict Resolution 1820,
with a particular eye on how sexual violence and conflict was defined for the institutional purposes of the Council at the time,
and thus the way that we shaped the fight against impunity at the international policy level.
Given that we have some time,
I'm also going to show a short video that was produced by the FCO in the run up to the global summit to end such financing conflict.
And some of you may have heard that that happened in a couple of a few months, a couple of years before, four years ago, now in June 2014.
And then from there, we'll go from this kind of international policy space into practice in eastern DRC,
looking first at a high profile trial that took place in the town of Minova in May 2014.
And then looking at the less high profile side of everyday justice in local courts,
that sort of on which I suppose this national spotlight is is less bright and then offers some sort of brief conclusions.
So as many of you or some of you may have seen responding to such events in conflicts, including in particular in DRC,
was back under the international spotlight earlier this month when Dr. Denis Mukwege and Nadia morad were jointly
awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and on conflict.
That stems from Quakers, a famous gynaecologist who is the founder and director of a hospital just outside of Bukavu in South Kivu,
and very well-known for his work as itself on the status of repairing women in the region.
Now,
this prestigious recognition of their work came in the 10th year since the adoption of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1820 was adopted in June 2008,
which was, as I mentioned, the first to establish sexual violence in conflict as a threat to international peace and security.
As part of its still evolving agenda on women, peace and security.
And let's talk a fair bit more about that in a little bit.
But as you'll see from the side, this is taken from its first operative paragraph.
The importance of it is that it recognises such violence as a possible tactic of war
that can impede the restoration of international peace and security and can thus,
under certain circumstances, trigger action from the Security Council.
So in the decades since, we've seen a remarkable surge in attention to sexual violence across scholarship policy and in practice.
And I won't go into as much detail as I'd love to now,
but it's important to note that the mounting evidence and numbers of testimonies that were emerging of sexual
violence experienced by women and girls experienced in DRC in the sort of late nineties to early to mid 2000,
were an important focus of and actually a really important impetus for the adoption of the resolution and the advocacy efforts that led to it.
As you'll note from, I suppose, the following slide that the focus on DRC has been sustained in the aftermath of the resolution.
So in 2008 the country was since labelled quite controversially a seen by some
as the rape capital of the world and the worst place on earth to be a woman. And as you'll see from this graph,
it was the highest level recipient of international donor funding on subsection GENDER-BASED violence projects significantly higher than the second,
which was the second country. Country recipient was Uganda.
So all that to show that this this focus on sexual violence has been sustained
and has had very clear implications and levels of funding and in practice.
Grant. So as as a result of that centrality, really, the documents, the documented experience, history,
which notably emphasised the large scale of the violence committed against women and girls in the conflicts,
as well as their extraordinary, brutal nature,
became somewhat defining of the perceived nature of the homosexual violence and conflict, its victims and perpetrators.
And I used to come here sort of that became quintessentially this sort of a carefully curated and sacred centralised definition.
Our understanding of such violence was encoded in the resolution and in broader operational structures,
notably delineating who international actors believe they are protecting from what kinds of harms,
and crucially, for our purposes now committed by who.
In effect, given the myriad sexual harm that are committed in context of conflicts as in any context,
and by a myriad of myriad actors who the perpetrators of sexual violence in DRC are is in fact, far from inevitable.
But I imagine that thinking about and maybe even coming to this presentation to think about fighting impunity for such mines in DRC,
you possibly have a fairly clear image and mind of who it is we'd be talking about
when we're talking about perpetrators of sexual violence in conflict in Congo.
And I imagine that this image may be of a sort of an African black armed man in uniform.
So through this presentation,
we're going to talk about constructions of perpetrator hoods that are defined in discourses and responses to such violence and conflict,
so specifically relative to eastern DRC.
So really what I hope that we'll do through this is to unpack who we have in mind when we talk about sexual violence in DRC.
And I want to show that the dominant constructions embedded in policy and advocacy are not accidental.
And I do this with a particular eye to Security Council Resolution 1820 and the deliberations leading up to it.
Having established this international policy landscape, as I mentioned,
I seek to show that these this dominant construction is more challenging to pin down in response efforts in practice,
and specifically in efforts to fight impunity. So as a quick clarifying note, sorry, I focus on 1820 for the reasons that I mentioned.
It represented a significant juncture in international responses to such events and conflict.
And so really establishing the issue is an issue of international importance on policy agendas.
And then why the focus on the fight against impunity?
Efforts to promote judicial accountability continues to be a very central pillar
of internationally driven multisectoral responses to sexual violence in DRC,
and that driven it's driven by three core and interrelated aims.
The first is to deliver a sense of justice to survivors of sexual violence.
The second is to restore a sense of faith in the rule of law as parts of peacebuilding and state building initiatives.
And the third is to sort of signal to send a message that sexual violence will not go unpunished.
So to deter would be perpetrators from committing some of the crimes by demonstrating, as I mentioned, that sexual violence would go unpunished.
So what I hope to show, though,
is that the fight against impunity in practice may actually be functioning in distinct ways than those intended in international policy.
And induced in doing so is foreground the interplay of institutional mandates and imperatives,
along with sort of operational and contextual constraints in legal practice, to account for this discordance.
By way of broader context. As I mentioned, this is situated in my PhD thesis, which, as you may have guessed,
examines the relationship between theory, policy and practice in responses to sexual violence in eastern DRC.
And in particular, I'm interested in understanding the gendered assumptions that underpin and are reinforced by response mechanisms,
and then how these bear upon our wider understandings of the way that gender operates in context of armed conflict.
So a number of feminist scholars have noted that sexual violence responses are underpinned by the
assumption that women are inevitably the victims and that men are inevitably the perpetrators.
And while my research ultimately shows that this underlying binary is reinforced and reified,
it is so in more complex ways than I certainly initially envisioned.
So to be clear, I am not challenging the notion that men are the primary perpetrators of sexual violence.
That would be untenable. I think quite an unhelpful argument to make.
But what I'm more interested in doing here is to trace which men internationally
driven policies target and efforts to fight impunity for such crimes in DRC.
And then, in turn, to consider which men internationally driven efforts to fight impunity for sexual violence in DRC interact with in practice,
or in other words, which men the policymakers intend to hold to account they believe are holding to account.
And then which men are being held to account in practice?
So as a brief note, I suppose, on the methods behind this research and on the in the school approach.
So I conducted extensive research at the UN headquarters in New York and specifically with the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security.
I spent 13 months there between 2013 and 2014 and conducted interviews with key policymakers and shapers,
I suppose behind the resolutions in the broader gender protection platform, peace and security architecture.
And then I've been working in Congo sort of on and off since 2014 under different institutional guises.
So importantly, this multifaceted and multi-institutional approach is what's enabled me to sort of to discern and to see the
different ways in which this idea of sexual violence and conflict is seen under different sets of institutional art,
notably in relation to the victims and the perpetrators that are engaged with on a sort of everyday, daily basis.
And doing so, I really sought to better understand the roles and constraints within which differently positioned actors or responders are operating.
So for this particular piece I'm doing first on the research I conducted in New York and then subsequently
on data that I sort of generated and gathered in working with the judicial system in North and South Kivu,
which included interviewing notably sort of clerks and secretaries working in while working in police stations,
as well as police officers themselves, prosecutors, judges, you name it.
And one of the most I could talk about that is quite a bit now, one of the most fun, I suppose,
aspects of sitting the clerks and secretaries going through the the records that they keep to sort of get a sense of,
as I say, the types of cases that the numbers and types of cases that are being recorded in the institutions in which they were analytically.
My approaches, I suppose, very much inspired by the works of postcolonial critical feminists,
of international relations and international law who have long been attentive.
And I quote Munro here to see the ways in which women have been excluded, marginalised,
silenced, misrepresented, patronised or victimised by international institutions.
And they've often used this idea of gendered subjects or figures as a key analytical
vehicle through which to sort of draw out and communicate politics of representation,
and that often the centralising effects as a whole.
However, I find that this body of literature, while I'm very much inspired by it,
tends to overlook the role of institutional imperatives and the micro politics behind micro macro policies on the one hand,
and overlooks the role of operational and contextual constraints in practice on the other.
So foregrounding these last two elements,
I played a sort of critical feminist approach to think about institutional representations of and interactions with conflict affected men in DRC.
So that takes us to the. Oh, sorry, I forgot. We fight on methods.
So this is now into the substance. And reporting on sexual violence.
Notably, PTSD predominantly centres on acts of sexual violence committed by armed men in uniform, all parties to the conflict.
And from the onset, this emphasis was made explicit in 2002, as we see the report here,
Human Rights Watch published a report entitled It's the War Within the War Sexual Violence against Women and Girls in Eastern Congo,
which effectively sounded the alarm to the issue.
And in fact, it was the first report to shine a spotlight on sexual violence perpetrated in these conflicts, bringing to bear its scale and brutality,
which I quote was frequently and sometimes systematically perpetrated by armed men in uniform against civilian women and girls during the war.
In its introductory summary, the report states that most forces involved in the conflict use sexual violence as a weapon of war,
at times raping women as part of a more general attack to terrorise communities and
accepting their control or to punish them for real or supposed aid to opposing forces.
But the authors also note that sexual violence is increasingly committed by a variety of perpetrators,
but that nevertheless the focus of the report is on crimes of sexual violence
committed by soldiers and other combatants against parties to the conflict.
Now the focus was sustained by feminist and women's rights activists.
Advocates are here working with and within the UN in the pursuit of a key advocacy goal,
which was to establish sexual violence and conflict as a self-standing issue on the UN Security Council agenda.
So if anybody wants to ask about this later, I think it's quite fun story.
But this is a picture of a documentary that actually played a really key role in generating and effects a lot of the momentum in the party,
the political will to get Resolution 1820 off the ground.
It's on. I haven't been able to find the full the full film online,
but it was once available on Amazon and it mentions that it's credited, in effect, for the resolution.
So if anybody wants impacts in the policy world, it seems as though documentaries are all the way to go.
So achieving this goal of establishing sexual violence and conflict as a self-standing issue on the council's agenda requires some
strategic manoeuvring largely to persuade a resistant council of the importance and even the relevance of sexual violence to its mandate.
So personally, to this discussion, this meant sort of delimiting when and what types of sexual violence fall within
the remit of the Council and is quite crudely stated by one of my respondents.
I don't think Russia's ever going to believe that, you know,
a husband raping his wife unless he's being held at gunpoint by a military officer should count on the sexual violence and conflict agenda.
And as we can start to glean from this quote, the profile of the perpetrator was quite an important distinguishing factor and effect.
Clarifying this point, the respondent explained that some member states don't want to understand the coercive atmosphere that's created.
That's not to say that every act of sexual violence that happens in countries in conflict is that chance in conflict.
But I think that lots of member states don't want to understand that beyond the sort of very clear he's in a military uniform.
So from this perspective, the presence of a military uniform sort of automatically comes to represent the symbol,
quoting from another interview, the symbol of being a sexual predator.
And it's clear that just viewing it in this way, it glosses over a host of sexual harms that are committed in conflict contexts,
including intimate partner violence committed by civilians,
as well as violence against sexual gender minorities, for example, against women in civilian spaces.
But what also became clear over the course of my research was that not all military
uniforms are treated equally under the Security Council's institutional eyes.
Not all acts of sexual violence committed by an individual in a military uniform constitute sexual violence in conflict under the women,
peace and security agenda. Nor do they therefore trigger the same institutional response mechanisms.
Notably, while it's widespread across peacekeeping missions,
sexual violence perpetrated by U.N. peacekeepers falls under the separate policy category of sexual exploitation and abuse,
or SGA, and is addressed under the remit of conduct and discipline,
which is just a completely different part of the House, again, as it was described by a respondent.
So this policy and in effect, operational distinction is no coincidence.
According to a UN women's rights advocate who again was quite prominent in getting 1820 off the ground,
the conflation between conflict relates to sexual violence and sexual exploitation, and abuse creates a number of closed doors.
This is particularly challenging in relation to troop contributing countries or ticks on the council who were concerned that, she recounted.
We were just there to point the finger at them for incidents.
As she explained in our interview, she and her colleagues thus pushed to formalise the distinction between conflict related sexual
violence perpetrated by our two parties to the conflict and perpetrated by peacekeepers,
another intervening actors to keep these political jaws ajar.
So when I asked if this was the reason why there exist is clear delineation in no uncertain terms, she responded.
Yeah, yeah. That's the reason why it's a tactical and strategic decision that we made very deliberately.
And I can tell you honestly that had we not done that, we'd be nowhere to compete with sexual violence.
So as a result, perpetrators of conflict related sexual violence became defined as armed men in uniform,
crucially, who do not sport a blue U.N. peacekeeping helmet.
So sexual violence committed by this category of perpetrators that response efforts intend to target,
including in efforts to promote accountability and fight impunity.
Yet, as Judy stated by the authors of the Independent Review of SCA in the Central African Republic for victims of sexual violence,
it's immaterial whether the perpetrator was wearing a blue helmet or not.
So I want to turn to a video. But this focus as I try to find it.
So see from the quote, this focus was on armed men in uniform and not peacekeepers.
It's very clear. And so that statement context there from the former excuse me,
when I play around with technology for the representative of the Secretary-General to sexual violence and conflict to very clearly how do I.
Yeah, I was. I removed. So very clear references to two military uniforms and badges.
And in this video, as I mentioned, was produced by the FCO in the run up to the global summit.
To find such a complex, the same kind of the same emphasis is, is quite evident.
And I thought I'd give you a break from my voice and let you know we disagree with you or there's a weapon that doesn't just in physical.
Any violation over. A lot of power buyers.
I'll catch up.
A weapon that is just as scary as bombs and bullets, but invisible when rape and sexual violence is used against women, girls, men and boys.
Victims are sometimes abandoned by their families and the armed have communities of colour like wars massacre,
especially when the monsters who did it are allowed to get away with even the murder victims.
But it doesn't have to be this way. Rape and sexual violence are the worst crimes we can imagine, but they are not an inevitable part of war.
It's time to act. And sexual violence. Time to act, to bring those responsible to justice.
Time to act to let governments know that enough is enough.
Time to act so that those who live in fear of sexual violence have a chance to fill some time.
To act. To make your voice heard. Okay.
Back to the presentation. Yeah.
Is it, Gene? Yeah. As movies become more and more reliant on computer effects.
This is not what we want. Okay, let's just get. Sorry, everyone.
Technology rally on my side. So as we can see from the video, there is a clear idea.
I mean, I think if the nature of the harm of sexual conflict and notably of who the
perpetrators of such violence and conflict are and the redress that's thus warranted,
which is fighting impunity for judicial accountability.
So with this in mind, who is the fight against impunity reaching in practice in DRC?
So to explore this question, I'll first barely walk through the outcomes of the high profile trial,
which took place, as I mentioned, the town of Minova in May 2014.
And then I'll walk through cases that we see making it to and through courts on a more sort of quotidian,
everyday basis in these less exceptional trials.
So to explain why, I suppose to explain this picture,
it's it was one of the most iconic pictures that came out of the of the trial that was spread around media.
It's also the cover of a militia group. I don't know if you've come across her work.
I highly recommend it. Interested in this in this area and more generally.
But these were the protective clothing that were given to victims who testified
at the trials and the microphone sort of concealed their voices and signature,
but sort of backtracking. So a handful of incidents of mass rape have become particularly notorious in eastern DRC.
And one such event took place in November 2012 when following the defeat of the M23 armed group, hundreds of soldiers from the national army,
the FARC, retreated to Minova, which is a town on the shores of beautiful Lake Kivu, bordering between the north and South Kivu provinces.
What ensued was a ten day frenzy of destruction, as it was sort of described by Human Rights Watch,
which included widespread looting and sexual violence,
with some reports estimating that more than a thousand women, children and men were raped in this town alone.
Most reports estimated the numbers of instance to be around 230, but some such descriptions of the attack, importantly,
seem to align quite closely with the policy definitions or the ideas that we just talked about above,
including in terms of the perpetrators of the harm as the national army, as well as the nature of the harms to.
Now, because of the scale of the attack and the outcry that followed,
Congolese authorities came under quite significant pressure to hold those responsible to account,
which led to this sort of high profile, highly media time trial. Some six charges were brought were brought against 39 defendants.
33 of the charges were for rape as a war crime, and one was for a rape of a minor under domestic legislation,
76 civil parties or victims testified at the trial,
which included 50 testimonies for rape and 26 testimonies for crimes of pillage,
although most of the parties testifying for rape also victims of pillaging.
However, only two convictions were secured for sexual violence and only one of which was for rape as a war crime.
The other was for the rape of a minor under ordinary as an ordinary crime that I just mentioned.
So all defendants accused of rape as a war crime, but one were acquitted, although some were charged with lesser crime.
This verdict was widely viewed as a disappointment, as a failure to deliver justice and as a new insult to the victims of sexual violence in DRC.
And it was seems to confirm this idea of a dysfunctional state, the dysfunctional state of the Congolese justice system.
Now I don't have the time and probably wouldn't want to bore you with going through
the legal reasoning behind the acquittals because you don't really have the time.
But I do have a more extensive discussion that I'd be happy to share with anybody if you're interested.
But ultimately, a combination of sort of political military dynamics,
evidentiary constraints and resource limitations contributed to the acquittals, as far as I can see.
It seemed to be I mean, it was legally reasoned. What is more relevant for our purposes, though,
is to think about that one soldier who was convicted for sexual violence and for rape specifically as a war crime.
And, you know. So this indictment as if this was not a command responsibility indictment, but one of individual criminal responsibility,
which meant that it required both evidence of this individual criminal responsibility and contextual elements linking to the crime of the conflict.
Our focus on the form as it's most relevant to our conversation now.
So proving individual criminal responsibility and beyond reasonable doubt can be especially challenging in conflict contexts,
as explained by the verdict at the court.
Generally, with respect to sexual violence, perpetrators take measures to not be identified by their victims.
They favour acting when it's dark, blinding their victims with the light of their torches,
intimidating them with threats to stop them from staring at them,
warding off potential witnesses so the victim becomes the only witness to the aggression.
Herein lies the importance of a statement so the judge can appreciate her credibility.
So the officer who was convicted on the charge of rape as a war crime was recognisable by virtue of an exceptional physical feature.
You can see on the picture a missing thumb.
According to the verdict, the victim recognised the suspect, whom she previously seen fetching water from the fountain,
who had a missing finger on his on his hand, a feature she easily remembered.
I'm quoting from the verdict again. So central was this feature to the proceedings.
The suspect's defence argued that the victim had only noticed the missing thumb during preliminary investigations,
a claim that was later proven unfounded because, in effect,
in the aftermath of the attack, she had gone to a local cleric and in her seeking support from him,
had given some had mentioned this distinctive sign on his body of his thumb.
So what does this mean? It suggests that even when or maybe especially when circumstances of such violence
and conflict align closely with those associated with the sort of consensus,
this narrative, and therefore what is quintessentially the perpetrator.
The outcome of Minova indicates the necessity of an exceptional physical feature to prove individual criminal responsibility.
So every day justice coming to the end, I promise.
This is probably the most dense part, though, so bear with me. You come to the end.
So, as I mentioned, Minova was exceptional in several regards,
not least the resources that were invested in that one particular trial, as well as the high level media attention.
But on an everyday basis that, you know, similar important insights to be going to and doing my research, including with the Human Rights Centre,
the sexual violence program at the Bexley School of Law, and certainly in the early phases of it with local judicial actors.
We saw me and my colleague Suzanne Oldham were surprised to find that judicial systems were, in effect, functioning.
Almost everything I had read or knew about in the Times pointed to their deplorable or dysfunctional states,
both of the civilian and military justice systems.
We were all the more surprised to find that the justice system was, in fact functioning, to investigate and prosecute sexual violence crimes.
So we're talking about it's different to the Minova space, which was an operational military court,
but these were functioning to investigate and prosecute sexual violence crimes.
And in fact, this would be prioritised conviction rates once cases reach the courts.
So to the point of judgement, conviction rates are actually high, in some cases up to 80%, which is much higher than you see in the UK.
I think in London this year it was about 7% conviction rate conviction rates for sexual violence.
However, it also became clear the more we sort of dug into the cases that the types of such ones
cases that local judicial actors were prosecuting were not of the kinds that we imagined.
In other words, they were a far cry from those depicted in the sort of quintessentially narrative.
So my thesis, I show that this has implications for both female victims as well as for the male perpetrator or
men and boys who have been suspected or accused of having committed an act of sexual violence.
But in line with a sort of general focus on perpetrators, I won't talk about it to say about happy to sort of merit the analysis of mirrors.
They marry each of them. So it's important to give a little bit of legislative context with domestic legislative context.
In 2006 and new sexual violence law was passed in DRC,
which has been widely heralded nationally and internationally for its expansive and progressive nature, as well as its strong punitive measures.
What is less frequently noted, though, is that it increased the age of legal marriage and sexual consent from 15 as it was in the Family Code to 18,
which effectively created a whole new category of legal, statutory,
statutory victims under the law for whom the notion of consent is, in effect, legally void.
You don't need to prove consent if you can prove that the young girl is under 18 while the devil really is in the detail here,
I'm going to try and not get too lost in the numbers, but we'll try and pull out some of the some of the key trends on this.
In the next slide, I include a couple of tables with cases recorded by the peer, this,
which is the specialised sexual violence unit set up specifically to receive and investigate cases of sexual violence.
And the officers in that have received extensive training,
extensive and specialised training by including some of the European and European police as well as as well as others.
So they don't represent the whole justice system by any means, but they're intended to be the first stop or point of entry to the judicial system for
survivors to report to their also needs specific to the military or civilian justice systems,
meaning that we can expect to see or we could expect to see cases perpetrated by the civilians or parties to the conflict,
a uniformed personnel, members of armed groups. So they offer a good starting point for this discussion.
So as you'll see from the numbers here, this is in Goma, the provincial capital of North Kivu.
There were 477 total cases reported to the unit between 2013 and 14.
But of these, only three of the suspected perpetrators were identified as being from the ongoing armed group in Bukavu.
We see that nine of the 236 this was just for 2014 were identified as being uniformed personnel.
So in effect, 96% were identified as being civilians.
Now, what I'm not depicted in the table data from Bukavu, which is the provincial capital of South Kivu sorry.
They're also in the records that give insights into the suspects ages, their professions,
sort of allowing me to have a more nuanced analysis and more nuanced and textured analysis of the profiles of perpetrators.
The age of the suspected perpetrators was specified in 107 of the cases 3040 and is varied between from 12 and one case as the youngest to 67,
which was the highest. The average age of the suspected perpetrators of this hundred and seven was 25, with 82% being between 15 and 30.
And this actually equates exactly with numbers found in previous years by UNDP.
And it's also worth noting here that the average age of victims recorded for 2014 was was 16 years.
So with regards to professions, when recorded or known on the civilian side,
there was some variation ranging from sort of students and pupils to unemployed cultivators, motorbike drivers, construction workers, among others.
But the most highly represented were students and those unemployed.
And when asked about the trends in perpetrator profiles reported,
the officer from the commanding officer from the unit in Goma emphasised their young age and low socioeconomic status.
Perpetrators are usually young, usually between 1745. They usually have an education level that's not surpassed the average and they are unemployed.
Similar patterns were identified across magistrates courts and tribunals further along the judicial chain.
Echoing this, the police officer above, the general prosecutor, also in Goma, stated that very often,
very often the idle young men, they're generally people of the same generation.
The girl is 14, the perpetrator is 21 when they're both minors.
What about in the justice, the military justice system?
So here several trends were notable to the numbers of reported cases were significantly lower than in the civilian justice system.
For example, the magistrate's office in Goma.
On the civilian side, we saw 857 cases reported between 2013 2014, but there were only 122 on the equivalent military side in the same period.
And the higher up the military judicial chain and therefore the higher the jurisdiction of the higher ranking officers,
the numbers just got lower and lower, like in the civilian justice system.
Military officers, often reported, tended to to be known or identifiable to the victim,
which is quite in contrast to what we heard in terms of being over and concealing identity.
And I only am one of the 122 cases reported in Goma that I mentioned.
Was the suspect not identified or known to the victim?
They also tended to be lower military grades, and that is of lower socioeconomic class military stature,
which also aligns with the findings of the civilian justice system. And echoing the civilian prosecutor that I mentioned,
the secretary of the military magistrate office in Goma stated that the 2006 law came in with a lot of vigour.
We arrest boys who are 19 or 20 here in the garrison who rape young girls and who are minors.
So what was made clear across the military in civilian jurisdictions is that the vast majority
of cases of sexual violence reported to and addressed by formal judicial systems in the region,
including in the specialised units, the magistrate's offices, the courts and tribunals for statutory rape that is involving and goes under 18.
So this doesn't tell us much about the dynamics behind the cases in each of the cases,
but there was a to the terms are used colloquially to refer to these cases of statutory rape that involved
a female minor who in most cases is engaging for an intensive purposes in consensual sexual relationships.
And that time is, of course, finished. So these cases are often reported by a family member who either doesn't approve of their
daughter's relationship or to pressure their daughter's boyfriend in delivering a bride price.
Now, I do want to be clear in saying that I'm not stating that every case of sexual violence
reported to the justice system in eastern DRC constitutes coming out in this way.
But during our research, we heard story upon story of young girls visiting either their legally prescribed perpetrator in jail,
bringing their children to visits in jail, and even threatening to kill themselves if their boyfriend was convicted or imprisoned.
So such cases, as we heard them, don't seem to be delivering justice for sexual violence in the way that it's intended,
nor is it reaching those it seems to be intending to.
Rather, it seems to signal the often overlooked and disproportionate effect of socio economic class and indeed of age in the operation of the law.
The law in this way seems to be operating more as a means of sexual regulation rather than one of delivering justice or redress to the survivors.
So to conclude, I want to highlight three points. And before doing so I want to emphasise that responding to sexual violence in
conflict as in any context is important and should be appropriately resourced.
But in doing so, we need to keep in mind how response structures are operating,
how they perceive you operating in policy, and how to operate in your practice.
So I've showed through this presentation notions of perpetrator heard of such violence and conflict and
injustice specifically were carefully and strategically delineated for international peace and security policy.
As armed men in uniform,
all parties to the conflict producing this sort of centralising narrative of sexual violence and in turn producing potentials perpetrator.
And this highlighted the importance, though,
of accounting for institutional imperatives and political dynamics in defining a policy issue in any given political moment.
But through the second and third parts of the presentation,
it was clear that this quintessentially spoke is less easily discernable in domestic legal practice.
And so it's important to account for contextual realities and the often overlooked influence of class and age and the operation of the law.
And with that,
if we return to the fact that the fight against impunity is deemed to be important for its effects and signalling certain messages to the population,
notably the crimes of sexual violence and conflict will not go unpunished. And the current functioning,
it seems as though efforts to fight impunity seem to say as much about who is punished and
punishable under the law as it does about what is punished and punishable under the law.
So with that, I'll leave it there and open two questions and thank you for bearing with the presentation.
Thank you.