Trauma Transmission and Sexual Violence

Reconciliation and Peacebuilding in Post Conflict Settings

Nena Močnik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367222147
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000164848
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

This book grapples with the potential impacts of collective trauma in war-rape survivors' families. Drawing on inter-ethnic and inter-generational participatory action research on reconciliation processes in post-conflict Bosnia-Herzegovina, the author examines the risk that female survivors of war-related sexual crimes, now-mothers, will breed hatred and further division in the post-conflict context. Showing how the historical trauma of sexual abuse among survivors affects the ideas, perceptions, behavioural patterns and understandings of the ethnic and religious 'Other' or perpetrator, the book also considers the influence of such trauma on other attitudes rarely addressed in peacebuilding programmes, such as notions of naturalised gender-based violence, cultural scripts of sexuality and support for dangerous or violent aspects of the patriarchal social order. It thus seeks to sketch proposals for a curriculum of peacebuilding that takes account of the legacy of war rape in survivors' families and the impact of trauma transmission. As such, Trauma Transmission and Sexual Violence will appeal to scholars of politics, sociology and gender studies with interests in peace and reconciliation processes and war-related sexual violence.

1 I will not raise my child to kill your child

Introduction

The beginnings of this book go back to 2015, to a village in central Bosnia-Herzegovina when I was leaving the country after finalizing my previous research. I was visiting women with whom I had worked for half a year to thank them for a fruitful collaboration and the mutual trust, exchanges, and conversations. I traveled with one of them, whom I will call Alma, to a village where another woman that I had worked with, here called Senka, lived with her husband and two daughters. When we arrived, she had just come from the hen house after finishing her morning routine and was changing from her plastic boots to comfortable slippers in front of the house. She warmly invited us to enter, and as is very common in the region, we gathered on a couch, sipping coffee and snacking on wafers. Her husband brought an orangeade from the cellar and then, after briefly shaking our hands, left the house. It was late morning, and the two daughters, aged 13 and 9, were in school. Glancing at the framed pictures of the two girls, Alma expressed how lucky Senka was to have two daughters, while she – although still thankful for her children – had two boys. “They get to help you with your chores, and you have nothing to worry about when you get old as the girls will take care of you,” said Alma. “I have worries, more every year,” responded Senka. “Every time they are about to return after dawn, I fear they will get attacked. You know how men are here and what they want.” This conversation continued back and forth between them, but they never directly addressed their own experiences with men. Yet the shadows of their memories were somehow present in the room.

Signaling that she wanted to get away from the topic, Alma lit another cigarette and, while exhaling, turned to Senka. “I don’t know what kind of mother raises her son to go against the woman. You know that I am not raising my boys to hurt, let alone kill, your girls.” After a short pause, she added, “Or any girl, ever.” It was hard for me to understand if her expression was anger, guilt, blame, or frustration. But it seemed important that she gave her word to Senka to be a mother who would never raise a murderer. Or a rapist.

For a moment, there was a feeling of sudden estrangement, a stop in time. Perhaps there was the realization, a brief reflection of the burden of a survivor, now mother, and her everyday preoccupation with how to prevent the transfer of this burden of trauma, to her offspring. If they were to have met outside of the house, they would perhaps easily agree that they understand each other because they share the same memory of the war, because they both had the same experience. They were both raped. Now, they shared another similar role – that of mother. Yet one was a mother to boys; the other was a mother to girls. What they feared was that one of them would raise victims; the other would raise perpetrators. For both, there was perhaps a sense of responsibility and a feeling that it was all about them, the mothers. Perhaps the onus was on them to raise a generation that would not be haunted by the past but, rather, would learn from their mothers’ pasts and never repeat those circumstances in the future. This burden of a responsibility born of their pasts, although mostly uncommunicated in a cognitive way, is real for not only these two women but also for many rape survivors who are now mothers. What do I tell my kids about my past? How do I share with them my story but keep them from feeling rage? Or disgust for me? Not to shame me or abandon me?

Despite rich feminist scholarship and widespread pedagogy, in most of the world in the twenty-first century, mothers are still the main pillars raising the family. While giving their best through mothering, many women have to cope with their own traumas in order to spare their descendants the hostile results of intergenerational effects from the trauma transmission. Both Alma and Senka survived captivity, sexual violence, and rape, and, afterward, both were internally displaced. They each remarried and started families but were never able to return to their places of origin.

I had a chance to meet them at their regular occupational therapy group, where they and other survivors meet to knit and spend time together. One of them is receiving financial compensation as an officially recognized survivor; the other is unemployed and still in the process of obtaining this status. In their aspirations for restorative justice, they have both contributed to different state and international institutions by giving their testimonies. Both have collaborated with individual researchers and journalists. In addition, they regularly attend protests, sign petitions, and have been otherwise proactive in giving a voice to the issues of the stigma, public recognition, and social ostracism of women who are war-rape survivors.

Regardless of this activism, mothering is their priority, a part of their life where they feel they have agency. Sometimes, they act as if the lives they led during the war have been frozen in the past for years. It is true that in those frozen years, they were assigned new roles that, in fact, radically changed their life paths and perhaps forever labeled them as survivors of war rape. But becoming a good mother in the aftermath, with the power to teach their kids what they perceived to be good values, useful skills, and vital knowledge about the world, was evidence that a “normal” life had returned. Before the war, many had seen their future in mothering. For those who eventually did become mothers, despite the violent interruption of the war and despite the devastating damage to their sense of self, becoming a mother after the war was a sign of overcoming the past. For some, it was proof of their survival.

Today, Senka and Alma, and many other mothers I have met on my research journey, fully indulge in mothering, keeping their kids and grandkids at the center of their attention with a determined mission to teach them what their mothers taught them – to be not just good humans but also good husbands and wives, and, for their daughters, to become good mothers. What was not expressed as often by those who had sons was raising their boys to be good fathers. More often, they emphasized that they hoped to see their sons become fair and righteous men who do not steal or beat their wives and who do not drink or participate in murky business dealings.

Returning to certain traditional values and lifestyles, taking over the social roles that they are familiar with, is a prevalent trend for many postconflict societies. This return to the familiar not only symbolically denies that the war ever happened but also offers safety and known and predictable life situations. After spending years under chaotic and anarchic circumstances of war, traditional cultural patterns help survivors regain a sense of control over their lives, and this becomes particularly overt through mothering. Most of the mothers in peripheral regions where I conducted the majority of my ethnographic research apply the traditional hegemonic patriarchal rules in their maternal practices. Despite their war rape experiences, they feel that they have to fulfill their duty as mothers, and the role came effortlessly to them soon after the war. For some, motherhood was a revival of sorts, a return to normal. Others believe that it helped them move on and heal. Some did not want to look back and wanted to focus only on the future and the well-being of their children. Still others use the past to spur their resistance – which they pursue for the sake of their children and a better future.

But surprisingly, very few researchers have paid attention to how mother–survivors of war rapes navigate life between their own process of healing from trauma, their struggle for restorative justice, and their role as a mother, especially as it pertains to socialization in terms of gender and sexuality. While the subject of their children continually arose in conversations and encounters I’d had with survivors since the beginning of my research back in 2011, it had only recently occurred to me how deeply their experience of war rape was embedded in their mothering when it came to socialization about gender roles and sexual scripts. Until that very moment when I was listening to Alma and Senka, I had mostly thought of survivors as survivors, encompassing how they embraced (or not) the experience of war rape, how they co-created the collective memory, how they established new identities in the aftermath of the war, and how the healing process helped them reintegrate into the broader society. Only rarely had I reflected on the ways each woman’s violent past interlaced with the role of mother in the aftermath of the war and the unstable present day of their children and grandchildren.

In the aftermath of the war, motherhood has been recognized in today’s collective memory of Bosnia-Herzegovina as mainly (although not exclusively) in two contexts. When referring to mothers, one will most probably first come across the Mothers of Srebrenica, a grassroots movement of mothers searching for their loved ones and demanding the truth about, and recognition of, genocidal crimes perpetrated against their family members, particularly their male family members: sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers. Although testimonies about sexual crimes and violence have also been reported in relation to the Srebrenica massacre, and several scholars have critically examined the abuse of power and sexual exploitation of local women by Dutch UN peace-keepers, the question of rape has been somewhat alienated from the main focus of the group. In fact, I have personally experienced avoidance of this topic when I sought more evidence on war-rape survivors among mothers from Srebrenica. While one of the surviving mothers shared with me her story of being asked for sexual and emotional compensation in exchange for some essential household goods she needed after being internally displaced, she then changed the topic whenever I tried to bring sexual violence and motherhood together in the same conversation.

However, interest has recently begun to increase on a national and international level with regard to mothers who gave birth as a direct consequence of war rape. Those women and the stigma related to this issue came to prominence in great measure because of help from their now adult children, many of whom decided to engage in activist work and speak openly about issues related to the long-term legacy of war rapes. Contrary to the mothers of Srebrenica, who committed their lives to searching for the remains of their lost sons, mothers of children born as a result of war rape have struggled with losing their children by giving them away at birth. In a culture where women can only be fully accomplished through acts of self-sacrificing caring and nurturing, giving away an unwanted child is yet another trauma for the war-rape survivor to carry with her in the aftermath. The struggle of those mothers in accepting the guilt and stigma is constantly reinforced through socially favored myths of ideal motherhood, wherein a mother, the “primal giver of life,” subjugates her own needs to those of her offspring. While these traumas are socially inflicted and perpetuated, most of the mothers are left to their own devices to cope with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptoms and taking care of their own healing and social reintegration.

Unlike the mothers from Srebrenica, who after years of efforts to gain restorative and retributive justice started to receive recognition, respect, and honorable status in the international community, mothers of children conceived through war rapes remain in the shadows. Other than these two mothering experiences related to the war, little to nothing is said about survivors who became mothers only in years after the war. While they perhaps did not lose their children in combat nor had to decide whether to keep or give away the “perpetrator’s” child, they also carry the burden of traumatic experiences of war rape and sexual violence. But all of those mothers, in one way or another, question how to incorporate their war rape experience into mothering in such a way that prevents the transmission of destructive emotions like rage or hatred but, rather, results in their children giving them loving support and safe shelter but also working toward reconciliation and sustaining peace in the aftermaths of the conflict.

A common characteristic in the narratives of mothering experiences from women who were sexually traumatized during the war is their struggle between two seemingly incompatible identities, a war-rape survivor, on the one hand, and a mother, on the other. Despite these split identities, for many women, mothering has been a crucial step toward embracing healing from the trauma. It has helped many survivors to make sense of the aftermath of the war and provided them with a reason to move on and live again. The decision to focus on mothering after a war rape experience often presents a survival strategy through which one is able also to postpone the systematic and intentional process of healing and coming to terms with the trauma. By being fully occupied with taking care of children, and later, grandchildren, survivors have been able to suppress their experience of rape for many years. For those who suppressed these traumas, did they succeed in protecting their offspring from potentially transmitted trauma? Did any of the children or grandchildren suspect or feel something in their mother’s past and search for more information? Was suppressing the trauma beneficial for the descendant’s future?

Although being haunted by the legacy of rape and facing difficulties in denying their personal history was part of the everyday struggle, most of the survivors I spoke to had never disclosed their experience to their children. In the years immediately following the war, the sociopolitical denial of war rapes was so prevalent that disclosure was impossible. Furthermore, many survivors were preoccupied by the survival of their loved ones first. They were busy with rebuilding, emotionally and physically, their now destroyed world, and, at the same time, they feared stigmatization and being abandoned. Unfortunately, this was what actually happened to some of the survivors who were courageous and trusting enough to hope for the support and understanding of their families. But it happened also to some of the survivors who faithfully believed that silence would help them bury their past and the trauma and live only with their postwar newly attained role of mother. After years had passed, the tool of silence had bounced back and become so defining for their identity that today, although there are more opportunities and better chances for disclosure, some survivors cannot establish their identities and social relationships outside of the social expectation of silent/silenced survivor.

I address this in the very beginning of the book through the prism of “narrated silences,” as I believe that this intentionally created and systematically reproduced discursive mechanism attached to the experience of the survivors has had an important influence on the production of knowledge and the representation of survivors that we have today. But in addition, it has influenced how we approach incorporating questions about the legacy of war rape in today’s (peace) education. Societal preferences for silence, with the implication that silence is the most dignified position for survivors, has allowed everyone in society, particularly survivors, to confirm that opening up to their children is not going to be beneficial for anyone. Narrated silences help with the reasoning that sharing testimonies with survivors’ family members only causes the children to have confused feelings toward their mothers and risks alienation of the mother–child relationship or creates mistrust of maternal authority. In addition, many believe that the silence in fact protects children from the toxic legacies of the violent past. While sharing the story would perhaps ease the survivor’s pain, it also risks the pain of becoming owned by their children. At worst, the pain might get turned into revenge fantasies and biases that could lead to intergroup hatred with ethnic profiling based on the roles that the ethnic groups played in the war and the postwar criminal proceedings: those of survivors or of perpetrators.

The narrated silences also explain the paradoxical social statement about war rapes today: while survivors are supposedly silent, the persistent resistance of local and international activists, scholars, artists, and engaged civic populations have made the crime of war rape visible and widely discussed. The rights and political demands of women survivors are being slowly, yet increasingly, met, and there is social progress against denial and stigmatization. The topic is brought to public attention through street protests, events, and public commemorations. For the descendants and postwar generations in general, this means that no matter how strong the intentions originally were to ensure that the silence remained unshattered and unbroken and how persistently these mothers kept their mouths shut, when growing up in today’s Bosnia-Herzegovina it is almost impossible to not learn about war rapes and the long-term trauma of survivors. Not only are today’s postwar generations exposed to the continuous flow of information on social media but also the developments in memory politics have made active participation much easier and activities related to this topic more accessible. While I believe that children are not merely passive receivers of their parents’ collective memory, the ethnographic evidence for how families can contribute in either ideological consumption or critical learning when dealing with violent pasts is still vague and sometimes discrepant.

Despite their different experiences, understandings, and perceptions of surviving war rape, most of the mother–survivors have never been able to fully recover from the trauma, and as a result, the trauma has, despite their efforts to the contrary, become persistently present within their families. No matter how great the joy of seeing children and grandchildren grow and prosper in their lives, the burden of surviving war rape and how to share this with their kids remained. So the stigma attached to survivors of war rape remains and is passed on not only by one survivor to another but also from one generation to another. From the time that girls are born, we are told that we are not safe. You know that you are at risk because of your gender and are taught that it is your sexuality that makes you vulnerable. If most of our mothers told us this because their mothers had told them the same, what do mothers who were not told the same story but experienced it in their own bodies tell us? If our identity as women includes the shared experience of fear of potential male inflicted sexual violence, how do survivors of war rape, who are victims of this in a very immediate sense, incorporate these experiences into their mothering practices? How do survivors for whom justice has never been done and whose attackers have never been prosecuted manage to negotiate their complex emotions, calls for forgiveness, and the nurturing of a positive attitude toward reconciliation?

The importance of intergenerational dialogue has been widely promoted, but in practice, it is hard to get parents and grandparents on board when they have never had access to effective methods of healing their own traumas. In the case of survivors of war rape, this is made even more difficult due to mothers whose experiences are hidden behind the wall of silence and who have not openly shared their experiences, even with other women who experienced the same trauma or in spaces where they could receive support services. I remember one of the first encounters I had with a group of women when I was presenting the purpose of the research. The leader shut me down, saying, “No woman has ever spoken to their kids, so they have nothing to say in this research.” However, with persistence and by posing semi-rhetorical questions, I asked them, “But would you like to share with your kids what happened to you? Do you think this would be something important for you?” After a moment, the silence broke, and I was unable to catch everything they said because the women were talking over each other. It was clear that, in fact, those women had a lot to say in this research. There was a need to have space to talk about this, and so we started to meet.

Researching and understanding the impact of these mothers on their children and grandchildren in a cultural context where women still represent one of the most important pillars of the family seems to be of the utmost importance prior to embarking on any efforts toward peace education. Years ago, when I was engaged in v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 I will not raise my child to kill your child
• 2 Edifying ethnography and a voice-in-between
• 3 Social (ab)uses of war-related sexual trauma
• 4 Mothering with the trauma of war rape
• 5 Intergenerational effects of trauma transmission and continuation of violent sexual culture
• 6 War-rape legacies: Transmission, agency, transformation
• 7 Survivors and postwar youth in intergenerational dialogue to prevent the transmission of sexual traumas
• Index