Elsevier

Social Science & Medicine

Volume 70, Issue 1, January 2010, Pages 152-159
Social Science & Medicine

The risk of return: Intimate partner violence in Northern Uganda's armed conflict

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2009.09.027Get rights and content

Abstract

The physical and psychological consequences of armed conflict and intimate partner violence are well documented. Less research focuses on their intersection and the linkages between domestic violence, gender-based discrimination, and the structural violence of poverty in armed conflict. This paper describes emerging themes from qualitative interviews with young women who have returned from abduction into the Lord's Resistance Army in northern Uganda, many of whom were forcibly given as “wives” to commanders. Their interviews reveal multiple levels of violence that some women experience in war, including physical and sexual violence in an armed group, verbal and physical abuse from extended family members, and intimate partner violence. Striking is the violence they describe after escaping from the rebels, when they are back with their families. The interviews point to how abduction into the armed group may exacerbate problems but highlight the structural factors that permit and sustain intimate partner violence, including gender inequalities, corruption in the police system, and devastating poverty. Findings suggest that decreasing household violence will depend on the strength of interventions to address all levels, including increasing educational and economic opportunities, increasing accountability of the criminal justice system, minimizing substance abuse, and improving the coping mechanisms of families and individuals exposed to extreme violence.

Section snippets

Background

In 1988, a spiritual leader named Joseph Kony assembled the remnants of several failed insurgent groups into a new guerrilla force, the LRA. From its inception, the LRA commanded little public support in their ethnically-Acholi home region. With little popularity and virtually no material resources, the LRA immediately took to looting homes for supplies and abducting youth to serve as fighters, servants and “wives”. Following increased support from the Sudanese government, abduction increased

Lack of financial help

Faced with the overwhelming challenge of being a single mother and pressured by conflicts stemming from scarce resources, some women left their families in hopes that husbands would help them financially. Seven women described, however, that their husbands worsened their daily financial struggles. For example, Adong mentioned,

The way my husband treats me. He drinks a lot. He argues. He says he wants to take food from the harvest and sell it because it is his land. He came and took four sacks of

Discussion

The women in this study describe multiple levels of violence that they experience in war, including physical and sexual violence by an armed group, verbal and physical abuse from extended families, and intimate partner violence. Most violence described is not exclusive to abducted women. Fig. 1 displays the multiple levels of violence described in this war-affected region and portrays how different experiences with war violence may interact with factors at individual, family, social and

Limitations

There are a number of limitations to this study. First, qualitative interviews offer perspectives and insights from particular individuals within families, communities and systems in the region. These interviews explore potential relationships between constructs, but do not seek to draw causal conclusions. Second, purposive sampling means that one cannot generalize from the themes in the narratives (although information from the full representative sample shed light on issues in the larger

Conclusion

Women's narratives reveal the multiple levels of violence that some women experience in war, including physical and sexual violence in an armed group, verbal and physical abuse from extended family members, and intimate partner violence. War experiences may exacerbate problems but they also interact with factors that permit and sustain domestic violence, including gender inequalities, competition for resources within a patriarchal family network, corruption in the police system, and poverty.

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    The authors wish to thank Christopher Blattman, Dyan Mazurana, Khristopher Carlson, Alice Acan, AVSI-Uganda, the SWAY survey team, Okot Godfrey, Kristen DeRemer, Nathan Hansen, and the CIRA seminar members for invaluable contributions to the research and manuscript. For financial support, we thank UNICEF, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the United States Institute of Peace, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation.

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