Speaking up: social interaction, disclosure, and meaning-making by youth born of conflict-related sexual violence in Rwanda

Children born of wartime rape have long been invisible, ostracised, and silenced. This predicament explains blind spots in transitional justice discussions and practice that have neglected, until recently, both their victimhood and agency.

Our Professor in Global Politics Denisa Kostovicova has co-authored a new paper in the Journal of Human Rights Practice with Professor Myriam Denov, which analyses how children born of war time rape in Rwanda disclose harms in social interaction to find agency in the self through novel analysis of discourse in transitional justice pioneered by the Justice Interactions and Peacebuilding (JUSTINT) project.

Abstract

"Children born of wartime rape have long been invisible, ostracized, and silenced. This predicament explains blind spots in transitional justice discussions and practice that have neglected, until recently, both their victimhood and agency. Explanations range from (the lack of) international protective norms, persistent stigma in their local societies and communities, and children’s de-agentification owing to them being perceived through their mothers rather than as actors in their own right. Arguably, the inability of these children to articulate their many familial and community challenges has contributed to their exclusion from mainstream discourses and civic participation. Drawing on focus group data with a sample of youth born of conflict-related sexual violence during Rwanda’s genocide against the Tutsi, we analyse how their concerns are made visible in an interactional environment of a peer-led focus group. We highlight the role of fellow youth as moderators and treat focus group data as interactional data where meaning is co-created through social interaction. Applying conversation analysis, which focuses on how speakers interact with each other, and thematic analysis, which examines the content thus produced, we reveal how the youth ‘speak up’ disclosing intimate harms, navigate a sense of groupness and individuality, and find agency in the self."