The risk of return: Intimate partner violence in Northern Uganda's armed conflict☆
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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2022, Child Abuse and NeglectCitation Excerpt :This is consistent with international research which shows that trauma exposure is a risk factor for further trauma (Mitchell & Finkelhor, 2001), and that multiple trauma or ‘poly-victimisation’ predicts worse mental health outcomes (Finkelhor et al., 2007). International evidence also supports the hypothesis that public and private violence are interlinked, with several studies demonstrating increased occurrence and severity of IPV in conflict-affected regions including Liberia (Kelly et al., 2018), South Sudan (Murphy et al., 2019), Lebanon (Usta et al., 2008), Uganda (Annan & Brier, 2010) and Sri Lanka (Guruge et al., 2017). The proportion of case files in the present sample recording probable mental health problems was high (63.5%).
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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.