Understanding women's struggles for justice, healing and redress:
A study of gender and reparation in postwar Guatemala
A participatory action research project funded by: Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC)
Principal Investigator: Dr. Alison Crosby, Assistant Professor of Women's Studies, York University, Toronto, Canada
Research partners: Dr. M. Brinton Lykes, Professor of Community-Cultural Psychology, Lynch School of Education, Boston College National Union of Guatemalan Women (UNAMG) Centre for Research on Latin America and the Caribbean (CERLAC) York University, Toronto, Canada Centre for Human Rights and International Justice (CHRIJ) Boston College, Boston.
This project examines the nature and forms of reparation for women survivors of sexual violence during the 36-year long armed conflict in Guatemala, within a context of ongoing structural impunity, militarism and gender-based violence. We start with the understanding that in situations of systematic and systemic violations of human rights such as the genocidal war in Guatemala, it is not possible or even desirable to erase the consequences of violence, nor is it possible to adequately compensate for what has been lost. We cannot “repair the irreparable” (Hamber 2006, 567). Thus in terms of impact, reparation for massive human rights violations during violent conflict must be viewed as largely symbolic, even when material compensation is provided (Hamber, 2006; Lykes and Mersky, 2006).
The project addresses the existing gaps in the study of reparation as a part of the field of transitional justice. These gaps are both empirical and theoretical. As such, the project aims to bring new understandings of gender and reparations in the aftermath of truth-telling processes through an examination of the implementation of the National Reparations Program in Guatemala from the standpoint of women survivors of sexual violence during the armed conflict. We are working with 62 women survivors who have been engaged in a process of mutual support and organizing for the past five years (ECAP and UNAMG, in the framework of Consorcio Actoras de Cambio, 2009), and who have provided their own oral histories of their experiences of the armed conflict. This research is centered on these women survivors’ conception of reparation and their broader struggles for justice.
The project seeks to avoid a hyper-reductionist focus on sexual harm. We do this by making visible women’s multifaceted agency and subjectivity as victims, survivors, and resisters within armed conflict and its aftermath, their search for voice as well as their preservation of certain silences, and their complex and conflictive struggles as political actors to create new social relations within the families, communities and society in which they live. This project draws on the work of Kleinman (1988), Martín-Baró (1996) and others who emphasize the nature of suffering as deeply social, collective, and historical, rather than only or exclusively individual. Given this analysis of social suffering and the structural nature of oppression and violence, the project situates reparations strategies within broader struggles for justice. Such an approach depathologizes survivors of trauma and deconstructs the tendency to reduce them to the status of victim-object. This research project does not seek to “give voice” to women survivors, but rather to create the spaces and opportunities for listening to the voices women have within the contexts in which they live and act.
For more information, visit the project website.