Human Rights Education and Peacebuilding

A comparative study

Tracey Holland, J. Paul Martin

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781135968014
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book assesses the role of human rights education (HRE) in the peacebuilding field.

Today, most governments, international organisations and non-governmental organisations recognise the importance of human rights in peace- and democracy-building activities in post-conflict regions. However, compared with other components of peacebuilding, little attention and funding have been given to the cultivation of human rights knowledge and skills within these populations. Almost nothing has been committed to understanding how HRE is best accomplished in such difficult circumstances.

Human Rights Education and Peacebuilding demonstrates the promise of HRE programs to help bring about peace within challenging post-conflict contexts. Each chapter of this book (a) identifies the short and medium term impacts of seven different HRE programs on their respective target groups, and (b) provides an analysis of the peculiar local contextual factors that influenced each program's rationale for human rights education. More specifically, each chapter addresses these critical questions:

- How are communities around the world using HRE to help rebuild their lives in the aftermath of an armed conflict?

- How does HRE respond local problems and needs? How similar are the human rights impacts in the different projects?

- How can we understand the promise and challenges associated with HRE as a component of community peace-building?

This book will be of much interest to students of peacebuilding, conflict resolution, human rights, education studies and IR in general.

1 Mobilizing to change the status of women

A rights education project in Sierra Leone

DOI: 10.4324/9780203538999-2

The conflict in Sierra Leone

Sierra Leone was ravaged by civil war from 1991 until 2002. During the war an estimated 50,000 people were killed, over one million were displaced from their homes, and thousands more fell victim to brutal amputations, rapes, and assaults.¹ The chief victims of violence were civilians, not combatants. The Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels fomented political and institutional instability by committing massacres, burning of schools and courthouses, scattering the civilian population, and most insidiously of all, specifically targeting the chiefs—the traditional rulers in rural areas. Young RUF recruits often were deliberately sent to attack their own home villages, thereby leaving deep scars within their families and communities (Keen 2005: 60).

Even prior to the outbreak of violent civil conflict the failure of the state to provide public services and to promote economic development, had immeasurably aggravated Sierra Leone's social chaos. During the two decades preceding the 1991 outbreak, a one-party state had served the interests of a small group of the wealthy, including foreign diamond merchants, while basic social services disintegrated. As a result, in 1990 Sierra Leone had the second lowest human-development ranking in the world. Further the failure of the state to provide education and generate employment opportunities created a large pool of disenfranchised youth who felt they had little to lose by rising up violently against the system (Bellows 2006). The loss of educational opportunity is seen as a major factor in the decision to fight (Peters and Richards 1998). Women and girls also joined the conflict as fighters.

For the women and girls of Sierra Leone the war brought dreadful atrocities to their lives, especially the widespread acts of violence committed against them in all regions of the country. The human rights violations against women and children blatantly perpetrated by all groups included murder, rape, and other forms of sexual violence performed in brutal ways, sexual slavery, slave labor, abduction, assault, amputation of limbs, forced pregnancy, disembowelment of pregnant women, torture, trafficking, mutilation, theft, and the destruction of what little property they owned or rented.

In 1999, troops from the United Kingdom and the United Nations intervened and finally brought an end to the war. National elections for president and parliament were held in 2002, and local government elections were held in 2004. A reconstruction-and-reconciliation process, rife with challenges, began. The historically low status of women and the fact that so many Sierra Leoneans were made to believe that these women and girls were to blame for the violence, and that because they had been abused or violated, they were judged unworthy of respect and should not to be accepted back by their families. Attitudes like these added considerably to the challenges facing women.

In Sierra Leone today women continue to suffer from multiple forms of gender-based violence and discrimination, especially in the home. They are beaten and raped, and in some cases even killed, while many more endure psychological violence and tyrannical economic control within the home. Women who find themselves in violent relationships are often unable to leave the men on whom they and their children depend, due not only to that dependence, but also because discrimination is rampant in both education and employment and they are unlikely to find employment as a means of self-support. To compound the problem women have had little access to justice and virtually no rights within the spheres of marriage and divorce, property and inheritance. So embedded have these abuses become in the culture that even today, many men in Sierra Leone fail to see a cause for public concern in such supposedly personal matters (Maclure 2009).

The need for grassroots human rights education

The African Human Rights Education Project saw the strengthening of women's rights, and their achieving a greater participation in decision-making, as central to its task. This would mean substantial capacity building which would first confront the historical silence of women in Sierra Leone in relation to the violence which is inflicted upon them. There, as in many other countries, women are cowed into silence by a host of forces: including their own shame, fear of reprisal, fear of losing their breadwinner, and fear of being stigmatized by their communities. The most vital point here is that the culture of silence is not merely a by-product of the war; rather, it is deeply rooted in the many culture-based belief-systems that keep women and girls consistently silent. The implicit taboos against speaking out publicly in general, and in particular about the violence committed against them, make it very difficult for educators to elicit views from many women (Betancourt et al. 2010). In addition to encouraging women to speak out HRE also has to help to eradicate the deep-rooted belief that decisionmaking in the private and public spheres is not exclusively the province of powerful and educated men and, perhaps, the occasional woman. HR educators must not only foster the critical thinking that makes it possible for participants to reconceive that subordination but also give them, and especially the women, the skills they would need to take action.

It should be noted that the need for educators to teach human rights and address the huge challenges facing women and girls became even more pronounced after the national government signed on to various international human rights treaties. Two actions undertaken by the government after the war have been particularly significant and helpful in the eyes of human rights educators: the implementation in 2007 of the Child Rights Act (CRA), modeled upon the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), and of what have become known as the Three Gender Laws of Sierra Leone: the Domestic Violence Act, the Registration of Customary Marriage and Divorce Act, and the Devolution of the Estate Act. The latter three instruments came in direct response to the priority recommendations stipulated in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report, with the Commission having been set up by the government of Sierra Leone as part of its effort to improve the situation of women and girls. The Domestic Violence Bill of 2007 criminalizes violence in the family, providing the police with the legal tools they need to investigate and prosecute such crimes. The Registration of Customary Marriage and Divorce Act and the Devolution of the Estate Act jointly serve to strengthen women's rights with respect to both marriage and property, thereby making it easier for them to leave abusive relationships.

This legislation also is designed to strengthen women's rights all over Sierra Leone and thereby upgrade women's social status, particularly in rural areas. The HRE community in Sierra Leone is well aware, however, that its role is to make the people aware of rights and their potential usefulness. Human rights educators also are motivated by a profound conviction that learning about their human rights allows women to radically reconceive what they used to perceive as being strictly personal problems—for example, maternal mortality—as human rights and public policy issues that affect women throughout the country. In the process of doing their consciousness-raising work, the educators and other human rights activists are learning how to use the language of international human rights law to describe the associated human rights abuses and to advocate for their victims. According to the coordinator of the African Human Rights Education Project in Sierra Leone, spreading the word about international human rights standards has simultaneously spread an awareness of the problems that plague women within their homes, and has thereby begun to break down the taboos that surround them “so we can talk about the issues openly and ultimately solve them.” (Telephone interview with Moisa Saidu, October 2010).

The African Human Rights Education Project

The African Human Rights Education Project currently delivers community-level human rights education in ten countries across East and West Africa, in partnership with twenty-one local organizations.² The local partners mobilize community-level HRE workers and support them with the resources needed to design and deliver a range of innovative HRE projects. The project seeks to anchor a culture of human rights within specific communities, enabling people to identify local human rights issues and to connect them to human rights norms and standards. In every country where AHRE is found, one sees micro-projects in human rights education bringing their participants information on a wide range of issues including women's rights, children's rights, minority rights, economic, social and cultural rights, political violence, and maternal mortality. A central component of AHRE's strategic plan details the expectation that by training people who will then train others, the initiative will spread to many more individuals. The plan says that the micro-projects should focus on groups of 100 to 350 people.

It must also be noted that this training project and the micro-projects associated with it had to respond to, or reconcile, two mandates. The first of them sprang from the AHRE itself, a four-year project which was designed to (a) enhance civil society's capacity to deliver locally relevant human rights education, and (b) improve the human rights of the most disadvantaged by empowering marginalized communities to promote and defend their members’ human rights. The term “human rights education” is carefully defined by Amnesty International as a deliberate, participatory practice aimed at empowering individuals, groups and communities through fostering knowledge, skills and attitudes consistent with internationally recognized human rights principles. The second implicit mandate was imposed by the British Government's Department for International Development (DFID). All of DFID's funded projects must promise to increase good governance and transparency by working through a variety of local partnerships and networks and by strengthening the ability of civil society and media to hold governments to account. Indeed, DFID expects all of its funded projects to improve the participants’ knowledge of underlying political systems, power relationships, the role of institutions, and the dynamics of pro-poor change.

The AHRE in Sierra Leone was expressly designed to bolster the efforts of the emerging HRE community there. In February 2010, the local Amnesty International office invited fifteen human rights educators from diverse parts of Sierra Leone to participate in a three-day workshop held in the capital city of Makeni. They came from various regions of the country and represented a wide range of jobs and roles in their communities. During the workshop the participants had a chance to network and to share the new skills and knowledge about implementing human rights education that were largely drawn from the standard kit of Amnesty's HRE work. The content of the many HRE programs now being introduced into Sierra Leone conforms to the international human rights frameworks and the aforementioned national laws and policies that have incorporated them.

After the workshop in Makeni the participants returned to their home communities of Moyamba, Kenema, Kambia, and Bombali to implement various HRE micro-projects. The educators first did a needs-assessment of their respective communities, to choose one or more foci relating to HR that seemed to align with the identified needs, and designed various micro-projects that were implemented in the regions of the country. Most of the micro-projects involved the organization of discussion groups, plays and sketches, and human rights clubs— as a means to increase awareness of the human rights violations that were rampant in these communities. All of the projects were designed to bolster the status of women in these communities by addressing directly the human rights issues faced by women and children. Morrison Saidu, AHRE's national coordinator for Sierra Leone, has noted that “women living in communities have little or no knowledge of their human rights, and therefore the information and awareness provided by the micro-projects empowers them to begin to change their situations and to seek redress when violations occur” (telephone interview, October 2010). The trained educators initiated such projects armed with their knowledge of the national and international human rights laws, and the campaign that Amnesty International is currently concentrating most of its efforts on – that of maternal mortality prevention. The 15 volunteers trained in Makeni to be educators are also intended to serve as what AHRE calls “conflict mediators,” trained to oversee and adjudicate the HRE efforts in their communities and well versed in effective ways to enact change that takes realistic account of likely short- and long-term impacts.

In the next section we explore the ways in which the AHRE in Sierra Leone has fulfilled its goals in the community; that is, how the Makeni training the people have received impacts their lives in their communities, and also how the educators provide information that addresses human rights violations that are occurring contemporaneously. As for the impacts, in its dictum on the measurement of any project's impact, Amnesty International speaks of “the extent to which a project or program contributes to significant changes—positive or negative, expected or unexpected—in the lives of people and communities.” Impact usually takes some time to manifest itself, however; in the early stages of a project, it makes more sense to assess the “potential” for impact. Thus in our analysis of the interview data,³ we coded for comments or anecdotes that illustrated the short-term impacts the training had on the ability of interviewees to implement in their own communities both what they had learned and the skills they had acquired—for example, inclusionary practices, community organizing, facilitating contentious discussions, and staging sketches and dramas, that bring human rights to life. We also sought to understand how the training helped educators to identify and redress human rights related problems faced by women and girls in their homes, and how to redress such violations.

Assessing the impacts

During the Makeni Workshop, the educators spent a great deal of time acquiring and honing the skills needed to lead participatory discussions about topics related to human rights. In their interviews for this study, 12 of the 15 project participants said that within four months of receiving the Makeni training they had organized at least one discussion group, play, or human rights club that led community members to mobilize women and other actors in dialogue about the human rights related issues of women.

Given the tumultuous context, the inclusion of women within discussion groups constitutes a major achievement, since historically, Sierra Leone's women and children have had no voice in decision-making at any level. These educators have gone even further, however, by getting key authority figures involved in discussions about women's rights. All of them are males, and thus the educators have sought to engage them in critique of the cultural factors that implicitly condone the perpetuation of violence against women and girls. Several of the educators interviewed about AHRE have reported success here, in that that the participatory discussions attended by several of the traditional authorities in their communities have convinced them to include women and children in various development projects, aimed at upgrading their social status and living conditions. Most notable here is the fact that the male elders in the four principal communities within the chiefdom of Nongowa have invited local women to help them establish human rights clubs in these places. Sessions of the latter will be held regularly, with the members themselves choosing the human rights related issues to be addressed.

In several communities where the micro-projects have been initiated, educators also reach out to religious authorities, primarily because the latter are in turn able to touch so many people with their messages. The results are just beginning to be felt in some places. For instance in Konta Dubalai, a village in the Kambia district, a discussion about human rights ended with a consensus on the part of community members that imams and pastors would include human rights messages in their sermons. In Grafton, in the Western Area, the Soweis, formerly some of the worst offenders when it comes to female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM), have agreed to arrest and fine any Sowei who continues to practice it in the community. The fact that the religious authorities are raising awareness about those family matters that are also vital human rights concerns is an important outcome of these discussion groups. More specifically, they are making valuable connections between HRE teachings about violations that take place in the home and pertinent passages in the Bible and the Koran.

During the Makeni workshop the participating human rights educators also received training in the use of dramatic or theater productions, as a way of raising awareness about human rights in their communities. As a result, several of the HRE micro-projects that the educators have led in their home communities have involved community theater projects. For example in all six of the mountain villages in the Western Area, educators have introduced women and children to human rights through workshops and then helped to facilitate plays and theatrical productions that address such local human rights concerns as domestic violence, the social reintegration of former child abductees, maternal mortality, and FGM. The plays have utilized as actors, local teachers, parents, girls, traditional authorities, and members of NGOs. In order to participate in this capacity, local women and children also must help to research the human rights issues that are being explored in dramatic fashion. Those explorations are in some respects quite explicit, in the sense that as opposed to leaving the underlying points merely implicit, there are moments in the plays when the other actors freeze as the protagonist asks the crowd such questions as “What are you seeing? Tell me, if it were you, what would you do?” and “What can you do to stop this from happening?” What keeps such interruptions from being too jarring is the explanation provided by an educator before the performance begins, that what is being sought is not just their verbal answers but their active participation, as human rights agents so to speak, within the flow of the drama. Music also is a vital component of such productions, given its effectiveness in conveying strong ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Mobilizing to change the status of women: a rights education project in Sierra Leone
• 2 Melel Xojobal: addressing the rights of child workers in Chiapas, Mexico
• 3 Education to address violence against women in rural Peru
• 4 Human rights education in a secondary school in a conflict-torn region of Senegal
• 5 Never again: the Master’s degree in human rights in Lima, Peru
• 6 Addressing the causes of conflict: human rights education in Liberia
• 7 The City of Women in Cartagena, Colombia, a human rights community of practice
• The promise
• Bibliography
• Index