Support Programs for Women Survivors of Sexualized Gender-Based Violence From African Conflict Zones: A Contextual Review

Abstract

The increasing attention paid to sexualized gender-based violence (GBV) against women in African conflict zones by the international community is a welcome development to many stakeholders, including scholars, policy makers, human rights advocates, international organizations, and nongovernmental organizations. Little is known, however, about the experiences of survivors who end up in Western host countries, such as Canada, as newcomers. Much less is known about their interactions with Western-based mental health care intervention models and the assumptions and understandings they hold about survivors’ histories and life circumstances before, during, and after migration. We argue, therefore, for studies that place the experiences of survivors in a broader social and political context—as one crucial facet of culturally effective interventions. This review of the state of knowledge reveals the gaps in literature, identifies areas for future research, and contributes to the search for effective intervention measures that could enhance survivors’ transition and integration into Western societies.

Keywords

African immigrant women gender-based violence sexualized violence conflict zones

Gender-based violence (GBV) against women is broadly defined as any act of violence directed at women because they are women. It refers to “any act that results in, or is likely to result in physical, sexual, or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life” (United Nations, 1993). Sexualized GBV occurs when both symbolic gestures and concrete acts of violence are deployed to humiliate or degrade its targets, which may be of any gender (Burnet, 2014; Ola, 2013; Russo & Pirlott, 2006). The impact of GBV cannot be overstated, particularly, in the case of survivors with severe sexual trauma. However, it is equally important to ensure that the intervention put in place meet their intended goals.

The dearth of literature on African refugees and immigrants to Western industrialized countries, particularly, their more recent destinations such as Canada, is a major impediment to developing culturally effective responses to the needs of female survivors of sexualized violence. Newcomers to Canada from sub-Saharan Africa constitute one of Canada’s fastest growing populations. Yet, not much is documented about their experiences of transition and integration into their new homeland. To contextualize this review of existing knowledge, we also drew from our recent systematic review of literature on this population (Okeke-Ihejirika, Salami, & Karimi, 2016) as well as our exploratory study on African women survivors from the conflict (Yohani & Okeke-Ihejirika, 2018). The qualitative accounts of female survivors, in particular, cast a new light on conventional understandings of survivors’ responses in postmigration contexts, raising fundamental questions about voice, power, and responsibility in understanding the relationship between women survivors and Western-based support programs.

This contextual review is in many respects informed by our qualitative case study of six employees of immigrant serving agencies in Edmonton, Canada who work with women survivors of sexual violence from African conflict zones (Yohani & Okeke-Ihejirika, 2018). Our analysis identified the dominant narratives that shift attention away from both the complexity of localized relations of power such conflicts are immersed in and the external relations of power that dictate the measures and instruments for addressing the conflict (Badmus, 2009; Fuest, 2008). Our findings suggest that Western intervention models that embody a specific culturally bound chronology of intervention, with disclosure as the initial step, and regard psychological healing as the only way out of victimhood, the service providers explained, may not enable survivors to successfully transition and integrate into the new society.

We begin with a background of immigrant and refugee experience in the Canadian context. We go on to critically assess the state of knowledge on gender-based violence in pre- and postconflict contexts. Our analysis ends with a critical look at the culture of silence among survivors, a major concern shared by service providers (Yohani, 2014), and concludes with a reiteration of the major thesis of our findings—the need for interventions to go beyond the western boundaries of convention and consider the histories, cultural understandings, and contextual realities that shape women’s experiences of sexualized gender-based violence in African conflict zones.

Theoretical Context: Placing Women’s Psychosocial Interventions in a Transnational Context

The health and well-being of refugee and immigrant communities in resettlement countries are increasingly understood in relation to pre- and postmigration experiences (Maximova & Krahn, 2010; Wilson, Murtaza, & Shakya, 2010). The effectiveness of any intervention will depend, in part, on the recognition of how previous and current social contexts interact. Intervention programs must take into account, for instance, endemic notions of Africa as a land of lawlessness and the lenses of famine and war in which actions are often summed up. It also does not help to ignore the Western corporate and political interests that are complicit in the inception and sustenance of conflicts (Meger, 2011; True, 2012). We place our analysis in the context of postcolonial feminist debates and the emerging discourses surrounding transnational lived experiences. From both a postcolonial and a transnational framework, we examine the assumptions that provoke Western responses to GBV against women in recent African conflicts. We attempt to capture the as much as possible historical, political, and sociocultural contexts that would give meaning to African women’s involvement in conflicts (Badmus, 2009, p. 2). Thus, our article avoids simplistic narratives that remain fixated on “helpless female victims of GBV” in the immediate situations of conflict and its aftermath. These “dominant narratives” move attention away from both the complexity of localized relations of power such conflicts are immersed in and the external relations of power that dictate the measures and instruments for addressing the conflict (Badmus, 2009; Fuest, 2008).

In a context where discourse has framed reality in both controversial and questionable terms, it is tempting to slip into a narrow emphasis on African culture as the ultimate culprit responsible for women’s problems and into the perception of women as its passive victims (Okpalaoka & Dillard, 2012; Mohanty, Russo & Torres, 1991; Yohani, 2014). Instead, we also implicate colonization, capitalist expansion, and migration as crucial players that mediate the fluxed state of gender relations in which African women immigrants are mired. Postcolonial feminism, in principle, recognizes the knowledge bases women have and their resilience in engaging life’s challenges (Kandiyoti, 2010; Mkandawire-Valhmu, Kako, Kibicho & Stevens, 2013). We employ some core elements of transnationalism to problematize the centrality of the nation state as the locus around which migration revolves and the one geographic space in which immigrant life can be contained. African women’s lives capture the plurality of social spaces and identities that resides in and mediates the experiences of recent newcomers to Western host societies (Bacon, 2006; Braziel & Mannur, 2003; Iosifides, 2011).

The postcolonial perspective intersects strategically with a transnational context that focuses upon the “multiple centers and peripheries . . . (and) the relationship of gender to scattered hegemonies such as global economic structures, patriarchal nationalisms, ‘authentic’ forms of tradition, local structures of domination, and legal-juridical oppression on multiple levels” (Grewal & Kaplan, 1994, p. 17). Within these troubling contexts, we analyze the role of support systems, which seek to facilitate the adaptation of women who have suffered sexualized GBV in African conflict zones as those whose knowledge base and skills remain best positioned to express their experiences (Mkandawire-Valhmu et al., 2013).

Understanding Sexualized GBV Against Women in Conflict Zones

The discourse that has developed around narratives of GBV embedded in local cultural constructs has in some ways framed the existing understanding of women’s experiences of sexualized GBV in conflict zones (Husanovic, 2009; Razack, 2003). A number of scholars have drawn parallels between GBV against women and John Galtung (1969) analysis of structural violence (Cockburn, 2004). John Galtung defines structural violence as “the systematic exclusion of a group from the resources needed to develop their full human potential” (cited in Mukherjee, Barry, Satti, Raymonville, & Smith-Fawzi, 2011, p. 593). He places a strong emphasis on the “needed sense of both brutality and intent that shape the lives of poor and marginalized groups” whose treatment characterizes the experience (Mukherjee et al., 2011, p. 593). From this perspective, GBV against women could easily be understood as a culturally embedded pattern rooted in the severely gendered social roles that define the structures of most societies (Epstein, 2010; Shidhaye & Patel, 2010).

But critics of this discourse point our attention instead to globally endemic misogyny that strongly connects “militarism, masculinity and sexualized violence” (Borer, 2012, p. 14). The gender relations surrounding this violence are located in “a set of attitudes including hyper masculinity, adversarial sexual beliefs, sexual promiscuity, acceptance of violence against women (and) hostility towards women” that render women in conflict zones vulnerable to sexualized GBV (Rayner, 1997, p. 29). This pervasive social construct, other scholars equally argue, engulfs different specificities of male cultures but on a global scale (Whitman, 2010). These debates, in the context of African conflict zones, beg the question of how women’s experiences of sexualized GBV are interpreted and responded to.

In the last decade, the sexual violence in conflict has garnered increased global attention, leading among other things to international declarations, summits, and a proliferation of advocacy measures to end sexual violence (Alam, Klein, & Overland, 2011; Klenke, 2011). Although rape is the most widely known form of sexual violence, it can also include sexual mutilation, forced prostitution, slavery, and forced pregnancy, thus calling for an expanded view of sexualized violence beyond acts of sexual penetration (Hagen & Yohani, 2010; Whitman, 2010). The United Nations has recorded hundreds of thousands of cases of rape alone in countries such as Sierra Leone, DRC, and Rwanda. However, these statistics do not include other forms of assault or the large number of violent incidents that have gone unreported (UNHCR, 2013). In several of these conflict regions, there appears to be a connection between developments in Western markets and the incidence of sexual violence. For example, in DRC, the impending release of PlayStation 2 in North America was correlated to increased reports of sexual violence by the armed militias who sought to bring coltan to traders, in a market that was blind to its source or productions methods (Whitman, 2010).

There is also a vast literature outlining the connections between modern male militarism and the use of sexual violence (Chinkin, 1994; Mcginley & Cooper, 2013; Payne, 2016). Rather than being about sex or opportunity, sexual violence strategically targets women as a result of their central role in the family for communal and cultural reproduction and often occurs at the intersection of ethnicity, class, religion, and other factors relevant to the particular context of conflict (Yohani, 2014). For most scholars, militarized rape in particular should be seen as “delink[ed] from biological natural drives and [re]frame[d] as an act of violence and aggression that builds upon sexist discourses at play in society more generally” (Baaz & Stern, 2009, pp. 498-499). Sexist discourses, which arguably underpin the occurrence of rape, become particularly toxic and pervasive when intermeshed with other power relations making up the climate of masculine violence inherent to militarized and armed conflict. Violence in a militarized context embraces “globalized discourses defining militarized masculinity and heterosexuality” (Erikson Baaz & Stern, 2009, p. 499). By targeting a woman’s virtue, the goal is to inflict an assault through shame and humiliation upon a community and to attack the sanctity of its fundamental principles, values, and dignity (UNSCR 1820, 2008). This could shove the community into a slow descent with its bonds of social belonging weakened and its resistance to opposing forces within and beyond severely decimated (Maedl, 2011; Yohani, 2014). But even beyond these potential results, the unique consequences of sexualized violence on women as unwilling instruments for weapons of war are grossly reaching, especially, in a transnational context.

Africa Women and Sexualized GBV in Contemporary Conflict Situations

The experiences of African women survivors from conflict zones extend beyond the immediate preconflict factors and their aftermath. Far from this near ahistorical context in which their experiences could be placed, African women live out a diversity of histories. These factors shape various situations and stamp their own particularities in specific ties in conflict situations to which women differently respond. It is especially important to politicize the preconflict conditions that set the stage for GBV against women, particularly, the role of Western colonization and the political divisions it fostered, both of which continue to shape African contemporary conflicts. As Abdalla Bujra (2002) points out, political, economic, and social forces together constitute or provide an environment within which conflicts occur; these environments change according to a particular historical period, thus affecting both the nature and extent of conflicts. As the “combination of these forces varies in different countries and sub-regions,” they endow “conflicts in those countries their specificities” (p. 28).

The history and circumstances of colonization have, in specific contexts, redefined gender relations of power in contemporary Africa, including the manner in which conflicts emerge and intensify women’s social subordination to men (Aniekwu, 2006; Muiu & Martin, 2009). Colonization decimated the indigenous support systems that enabled women to assert authority in defined spaces, legitimizing in its aftermath women’s poor participation in public decision making. In most African countries nationalist struggles for political independence rendered African women second class citizens to men and firmly defined the boundaries of their social and private lives (Chadya, 2003; Robertson, 1987).

Some feminist constructions of traditional relations between the genders in Africa imported Western assumptions and biases, including reductionist approaches to family and household, dichotomies between economics and kinship relations, and gendered public/private spheres (Aniekwu, 2006; Okeke-Ihejirika, 2004). These approaches failed to recognize key pillars of gendered relations in many traditional African societies, including bi-gendered power relations, in which power resided between and was shared between men and women. Literature provides many accounts of these bi-gendered relations. For example, in precolonial Rwanda, although women were prohibited from land ownership and inheritance, they employed legitimate gendered spaces and roles as mothers and food producers and by holding powerful religious roles (Jefremovas, 1991). Similarly, Congolese women’s major contribution to food production provided a critical space to navigate around their subordinate status and negotiate privileges, including access to land (Women for Women, 2014). Prior to the emergence of “black colonialism” that tilted political power to American slave returnees, Liberian indigenous societies equally created gendered spaces that enabled women, despite their subordinate social status, to veto decisions in social spheres controlled by men, accumulate economic resources, and secure the labor and allegiance of male and female subordinates (Fuest, 2008).

Ahistorical accounts of sub-Saharan African gendered relations often overlook the gender-specific spaces and boundaries within which men and women conducted gender-specific affairs based on gendered roles and built around support systems (including extended family and clan organizations). These spaces were built around support systems, including extended family relations and clans and provided foci around which women located themselves and negotiated power with men. Given their traditional subordinate status, women depended very much on these support systems (Afonja, 1990; Chadya, 2003; Okeke-Ihejirika, 2004). Colonization and its governance order eroded the traditional gendered spaces in which men and women in many African cultures conducted communal affairs. Within “complex tapestries of consent and coercion” (Mama, Okazawa-Rey, 2012, p. 98), men were firmly placed as leaders, whereas women were left with a severely qualified citizenship and became forced to depend on mother politics as the main route for voicing their concerns in public and political forums (Chadya, 2003; Okeke-Ihejirika, 2004). This order of governance and subsequent capitalist expansion, to some extent, created a state of flux between indigenous and Western cultures, redefining gender relations. Consequently, women became forced to juggle different sets of social expectations and renegotiate power and privilege with men within and outside the family (Robertson, 1987).

It is therefore not surprising that African women in conflict zones have not been visible in many prominent roles. Although often left to negotiate their claims as subordinates in good standing, this upheaval in gendered power relations has made it unsurprising that African women in conflict zones are largely invisible in prominent roles (Afonja, 1990; Chadya, 2003). Nonetheless, women’s invisibility in African political conflicts as decision makers does not suggest that they have neither played active roles nor been implicated in GBV (Fielding, 2014; Randall, 2015). African women are, for the most part, absent in the sphere of public governance and politics in which decisions about political conflicts are made. However, they are also highly involved willingly or unwillingly as destabilizing agents as well as peacemakers (e.g., see Oppermann, 2014, p. 3). In many cases, scholars and other analysts of the situation have focused on women solely as victims of wars.

Although the close of the Cold War brought an end to festering conflict in some parts of Africa, neoliberal globalization, particularly, a rush to resource exploration, and the expansive reach of the war on terror have perpetuated in some cases and in others ushered in a new era of conflict (Abrahamsen, 2013, p. 3). Historically, religion played a relatively minor role in African conflicts (Ellis & Ter Haar, 2004). However, in many contemporary cases, religious and ethnic identity has become entangled by the influences of global elites on resource exploitation, the exportation of jihadist sentiment, globalizing forces such as commodification and the influences of modern media forms. For example, in the DRC, the literature recounts as having a defining influence on the ongoing conflict: a heightened ethnicism portrayed in the public media, the destabilizing and militarizing effect of Western-based coltan exporting companies and the geopolitical forces of Western nations, who have prolonged conflict by both supplying arms and training to different sides of the conflict (Mama & Okazawa-Rey, 2012).

Within these new contexts of insecurity, neocolonial forces have largely stepped into the shoes of former colonial leaders, perpetuating the gendered relations of the colonial era. Women’s identities in many ways have remained tied to marriage and procreation, with mother politics as the primary vehicle of expression. In this context, sexual virtue has taking on a heightened meaning (Burnet, 2012; Meger, 2011). At the same time, physical, emotional, and identity insecurity has increased as both men and women struggle to carve out a safe space for themselves, their families, and their communities within competing claims of identity and against local–national–transnational forces. Postcolonial identities have become an organizing force and for women, healthy survival lies in accessing identities and relationships with which to locate and create supportive networks (Korieh & Okeke-Ihejirika, 2009). Against this backdrop, the increase in incidence and implication of GBV against women is profound—not only for its female survivors in the immediate aftermath but also for men, their families, and their communities into the future. But what has become even more profound is the manner in which sexualized GBV women has been interpreted and responded to. It raises the question of whether attempts to force an end to silence among survivors, without attending to contextual factors, actually harms those it seeks to heal and protect.

Western Intervention Models in a Transnational Context

The dominant discourse relating to trauma in the field of mental health revolves around the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Until recently, the only recognized trauma-related disorder was Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which was categorized as an anxiety disorder. For one to be diagnosed with PTSD, a person has to meet specific criteria as indicated by the DSM including exposure to actual or threatened death, serious injury, or sexual violence by one of more of the following: (a) directly experiencing the traumatic event(s), (b) witnessing, in person, the event(s) as it occurred, (c) learning that the traumatic event(s) occurred to a close family member, and (d) experiencing repeated or extreme exposure indirectly through hearing from another person. Subsequent to such traumatic exposures a person will develop clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning (at least for a month) as a result of the symptoms that generally fall in the following areas: (a) intrusion symptoms such as recurrent, intrusive distressing memories, or distressing dreams, (b) avoidance of stimuli such as attempts to avoid external reminders of the trauma such as people or places, (c) negative alternations in cognitions and mood such as the inability to remember an important aspect of the traumatic event(s), and (d) alterations in arousal and reactivity such as difficulties concentrating and sleeping (American Psychiatric Association [APA], 2013).

Clearly, there is a wide range of experiences and events that can be psychologically traumatizing but not all people who are exposed to traumatic events develop PTSD as presented by the DSM (Mancini & Bonanno, 2006). Some trauma survivors present with partial PTSD symptoms, and as noted in latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders’ (5th ed.; DSM-5; APA, 2013) section on Trauma and Trauma-Related Disorders, there is now an expanded understanding of trauma to recognize there are other responses to trauma across the lifespan, particularly, long-term (Type 2) chronic traumatic stressors (APA, 2013). Nevertheless, the DSM, with its emphasis on the individual, continues to be the primary framework within which the mental health field conceptualizes trauma, and therefore most evidence-based interventions are naturally built upon this system. As such, the current interventions for addressing trauma, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy (EMDR), and Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET) are built on Western models of therapy with individuals. These interventions, although highly effective within the contexts they were designed for, when delivered to immigrants and refugees in the absence of an understanding of the specific needs and circumstances of individuals, families, and communities, can be ineffective. For example, as we learned from the service providers in our study, in the absence of an assessment and understanding of the external factors that are contributing to the distress a woman is experiencing both from pre- and postmigration factors, the delivery of EMDR, CBT, or NET may be inadvertently “joining the forces that perpetuate social injustice” (Albee, 2000, p. 248). That is, a woman may feel she is forced to disclose when she is not ready or safe to do so or when doing so can create more distress or harm, and it may send her the message that she must change to cope with the environment rather than change the social context that is contributing to her distress.

More importantly, a narrow view and reliance on the DSM system alone can lead those working in intervention fields to focus on safety-related issues and leave out other key psychosocial domains that are affected by trauma such as sexualized GBV. When further examining the consequences of human rights violations (HRVs) resulting from conflict, including torture and other war-related traumas, Silove (2000, 2004) proposed that the depths of the traumatic experiences faced by victims challenges multiple psychosocial adaptive systems that exist both at the individual and communal levels. More specifically, when reviewing the psychopathological issues that plague survivors of torture and war trauma, Silove identified that a stronger understanding of the relationship between experience (e.g., torture) and outcome (e.g., PTSD) is needed. As such, he offered a theoretical framework that identified how torture and other HRVs experienced by refugees may threaten individual and communal adaptive systems. Silove’s ADAPT model helps to draw a connection between traumatic experiences and psychological dysfunction as the inability to adapt (e.g., develop coping mechanisms) after threats to these systems have been issued within a context in which the lack of postconflict supports to re-establish balance leaves individuals and communities in a state of psychological turmoil (Silove, 2000, 2005). Although the ADAPT model is used to conceptualize a range of war-related traumas facing refugees worldwide, it is certainly applicable to the topic of war-related sexualized violence in Africa (Yohani, 2014). More specifically, the array of devastation associated with war-related sexualized violence can certainly be conceptualized as threats to each of the five systems identified by Silove (2000), whereas a failure to adapt due to lack of internal and external resources and supports following these experiences can help to understand the resultant psychological sequel that plague survivors, their families, and their communities.

As noted earlier in practice, the foci of international attention is often based on the incorrect assumption that most individuals who are exposed to such atrocities will automatically develop trauma-related disorders such as PTSD. This emphasis on a clinical approach to addressing all trauma-related experiences does not assert “a perspective on trauma and precarity, . . . silence,” that could bring “histories of losses and remains to speak beyond the bounds of speech” (Husanovic, 2009, p. 107). The choice to remain silent, according to Thiesmeyer (2003),

rests on an important distinction: that between silence and silencing. It says that choosing one kind of silence may be the result of another, imposed silence in a wider sphere. It also shows the contradictory nature of silencing, the fact that it operates through discourse itself. (p. 3)

Silencing in this context is a relationship that not only enforces one way of knowing above another but creates barriers around the relationship to coercively or manipulatively discourage the emergence of the “subaltern” knowledge. Thus, although the silence that emerges might be perceived as the action of the interrogated, it is, in essence, a decision made by two active parties in discourse—one in resistance and the other in a determined stance to intervene. The silencing process becomes very effective when it does not reveal any traces of excluded material (Conklin, 1997).

Following similar assumptions to Western efforts at psychosocial intervention, it is notable that Western legal models exported internationally have also become implicated in the ahistorical alienation of silence. Following the success at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), international focus has often fixed on individual prosecution, including improved documentation and investigation as the keys to increased accountability during conflict. For example, at the 2014 Global Summit to end Sexual Violence in Conflict, a key identified goal was improved legal processes, including reformed punishments such as reparations, as means to deter future sexual violence. The first point of the action plan focused upon improved accountability measures, including national and international investigation and prosecution (Foreign and Commonwealth Office, 2014). As with the medical treatment model, this legal prosecutorial model requires that a survivor voice her story to an outside expert body, her relationship with whom is marked by a significant power imbalance. This body is in the role of savior, seeking to provide a resolution to her circumstance that is often abstracted from her complex historical and social background and experience. If a woman makes the choice of silence in response to fear of stigmatization or for other reason, her choice is considered an unhelpful barrier to a successful outcome.

Conclusion

At an epistemological level a postcolonial perspective challenges, at its core, the assumption that Western-based organizations have the knowledge, ability, and political freedom to wade into the experiences of African women survivors of sexualized GBV and to respond to the choices these women make, particularly, in a transnational context. A postcolonial perspective also questions whether international organizations, founded according to Western assumptions such as the primacy of the individual and the sanctity of codified law, and international NGOs, often operating from within Western medicalized models, can understand the historical and contemporary conditions of survivors sufficiently to support them in the choices they make. The social location Western-based organizations occupy as “saviors” also raises questions about the structural forces their work is rooted in and the connection these forces have to the instability, poverty, and oppression that lie at the base of contemporary conflict (Ticktin, 2011). The weight of responsibility demands a critical self-examination of our own complicity in the production of oppression vividly personified in the traumatic brutalities women from the conflict zones embody. Assisting the vulnerable other without interrogating the various ways we are politically and economically advantaged by these brutalities amounts to what Razack (2007) refers to as “stealing the pain of others” (p. 390-391).

Similarly, the intervention measures developed by Western agents of humanitarianism and social well-being to assist women from African and other conflict zones must be foregrounded in critical reflections about the various ways our economic, political, and social investments in these conflict zones not only facilitate the violation of women as gendered persons but also forestall any measures aimed at improving the situation. The key imperative that flows from this understanding, Razack argues, is to unearth in our dealings with survivors, the broader social and political contexts of a conflict situation in which we are in many ways implicated. Razack challenges us to examine the level of transparency and accountability that exists regarding how development and aid funding has become increasingly tied to Western nations’ own economic development priorities and their role in the historical and contemporary conditions that sustain political conflicts, the victims of which they, with self- congratulation, seek to support (Razack, 1994, 2007; Trinh-Ma, 1989). For example, it points to important questions regarding the source of and conditions attached to Western funding for victims of DRC sexual violence at the same time that Western and Chinese governments have been slow to adequately regulate the sources of coltan supply to technology producers (Ayres, 2012; Bleischwitz, Dittrich, & Pierdicca, 2012; Verbruggen, Francq, & Cuvelier, 2011).

There is also an imperative to interrogate how, and from what structural positions, aid is provided and intervention occurs. Our existing help models must be examined and challenged, and questions must be asked regarding whether the survivors’ experience must be reconstituted in deference to these models or whether the models distort the survivors’ experiences (Jiwani, 2006). In this context, the victim-centered approach must be interrogated, and questions must be asked, whether it can adequately represent the unique experience and fluid meaning sexual violence has for women and the active decision survivors make regarding what part of their story they want to share. More importantly, the contested value of silence must be examined in the context of the relations of power that normalize and bolster silence.

From this viewpoint, it is safe to assume that rather than conceptualizing survivors as victims who are forced into silence due to fear of stigmatization, survivors might equally be seen as strategic agents who choose silence as the most effective route, at a given time, for personal, familial, and community identity reconstruction. Instead of a mere symptom of oppression, silence comes to be seen as a communication tool that women use as a reflection of their experiences, the lack of trust they invest in Western “help” models that have come to save them, and as a sign of their autonomy, courage, and hope for the future. This perspective also requires new ways of listening and new forms of responses which not only dehomogenize “African women survivors” but also resist the assertion of “official” processes that could provide a barrier to the process of healing. Moving away from typical processes of dealing with trauma also calls for “. . . a new language or new symbolic frameworks for the negotiation between silence and speech within the official political noise around us that prevents one from reformulating identity and community outside the conventional registers that produce trauma/violence/loss” (Husanovic, 2009, pp. 108-109).

In many of the psychological intervention processes, survivors might pass through as transnationals, there is a lack of sufficient appreciation for the importance of “community” as an entity in which they are already embedded. Although it affects the community in situ, the effects of sexual violence can also be felt transnationally among members who have fled but retain strong ties and may provide forms of support to the local community. To this end, metaframeworks of adaptation after trauma such as Silove’s ADAPT model help to frame the importance of building communities that are safe, bonded, and support the rebuilding of identities and roles within resettlement contexts. The ADAPT model addresses individual level experiences, such as discovering one can no longer perform particular tasks (i.e., role changes) due to a trauma-induced physical disability, as well as collective experiences, such as religious persecution through desecration of places of worship (i.e., threats to meaning). With its attention to universal psychosocial systems that support adaptation under all circumstances, the ADAPT framework shows promise to guide interventions for groups and individuals who have undergone mass violence in manner that attends to both individual and contextual factors.

Findings from our recent study lean closer to interventions that are anchored on a broader understanding of survivor’s life’s circumstance and worldview that proponents of ADAPT attempts to capture (Yohani, 2014; Yohani & Okeke-Ihejirika, 2018). As the findings of our recent study suggest, intervention models which focus mainly on psychological healing, upholding disclosure as a necessary and primary step to overcoming the negative effects of trauma, may not ultimately enhance survivors’ capacity to successfully transit and integrate into the new society. Our participants note that many African women survivors value healing as an important component of integration and rebuilding of lives but opt for more variety in the types and chronology of interventions that move them along the path of rebuilding their lives rather than continually revisiting their past. In the face of stigma, for instance, these women survivors turn to self-preservation through silence regarding their premigration experiences of violation. However, they do seek support and often request assistance in the areas of community support, parenting, and education, which are practical and urgent needs.

Health care providers or settlement workers who suspected or were aware of a history of sexualized violence, noted the fact their clients often stayed away from direct disclosures of personal experience. In other cases, the sexualized violence was not the primary focus of their expressed concerns but emerged later after other immediate concerns were addressed and safety was established in the therapeutic relationship. Service providers spoke of clients sharing with them the need to remain silent about their experiences both with family and community members; the experience of sexual violence, at times, appeared to be a secondary issue or not even an issue for some of their clients.

Silence was associated with fears of stigmatization in most of the conversations, but rarely did these service providers view their clients as passive victims. Silence appeared to be a decision made in relation to both the new context of their lives and their premigration experiences. Ultimately, the service providers in our study did not view silence as a barrier to working with their clients. They walked alongside them and were prepared to respond to the women’s needs and disclosures in their own time. Following the service providers’ interpretations of African women’s responses, it seemed that victimhood implied by conventional intervention models could paralyze communication between the listener (service provider) and the assumed victim, creating a silence between both.

These silences around trauma experiences, service providers explained could be viewed as a refusal to embrace the process of healing. Instead, they appeared more as resistance from the African women to moving through a prescribed channel that could threaten or negate the process of reconstituting self to build a new identity away from an old self (Husanovic, 2009; Thiesmeyer, 2003). Beyond the conventional discourse that unveils experience as a pathway to healing trauma, we interrogate victimhood as situational, yet culture-bound, the position of listener versus the “victim” and most importantly, we explore what Sherene Razack (1994) refers to as the possible organization of responses into “dominant narratives,” which could, with respect to our research, negate the reconstitution of personal identity, one of the most important projects for involuntary immigrants who find themselves in a new homeland

Transnationals, whatever the circumstances of their migration, are united by the acute loss of social support, a crucial factor in the experience of settlement and integration. The need to build social support is in a sense tied to the response to trauma which has touched many members of a transnational community although not to the extent which survivors could lay claim to. There is, to some extent, a sense of communally shared trauma that lies underneath the anxiety to build new settlement space. As Ahluwalia (2000) argues in a different context, this shared pain could be mobilized as a resource to “galvani[ze] a community” to “to act as the main locus for the sharing of pain, intimacy and tradition . . . It is because of this sense of community damage that the healing [also] has to take place at the level of the community” (p. 38).

Western interventions must consider a postcolonial perspective that views African women as active players who understand the community-based help model and navigate it deliberately. From a postcolonial feminist perspective, survivors of sexualized violence need to be primarily located in a broader and diverse group population of African female transnationals who have been historically “gendered” and racialized prior to their migration (Afonja, 1990; Robinson, 1986). There are examples of support programs in the United States (Akinsulure-Smith, 2014; Falicov, 2007) and in Canada (Hagen & Yohani, 2010) that point the way to more culturally effective interventions that involve affected communities in conversations beyond those that are provided specifically for survivors. In our current research project on gender relations within African immigrant families in Alberta, Canada, we have also made a point of actively involving community partners, both as cultural knowers as well as critical agents of change whose insights could significantly transform approaches to addressing sexualized trauma in a transnational context.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Philomina Okeke-Ihejirika

Author Biographies

Philomina Okeke-Ihejirika is a full professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, University of Alberta, Alberta, Canada. She also heads the Pan African Collaboration for Excellence (pace@ualberta.ca), a global research network for scholarship on African populations.

Sophie Yohani is a practicing psychologist and an associate professor in the Department of Educational Psychology, University of Alberta, Alberta, Canada.

Claire McMenemy is a doctoral student in the faculty of Social Work, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada.

References

Abrahamsen

(Ed.). (2013). Conflict & security in Africa. Rochester,Y: James Currey.

Afonja

(1990). Changing patterns of gender stratification in West Africa. In Tinker

(Ed.), Persistent inequalities: Women and world development (pp. 198-209). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Ahluwalia

(2000). Towards (re)conciliation: The post-colonial economy of giving. Social Identities, 6(1), 29-48.

Akinsulure-Smith

A. M.

(2014). Displaced African female survivors of conflict-related sexual violence: Challenges for mental health providers. Violence Against Women, 20, 677-694. doi: 10.1177/1077801214540537

Alam

Klein

Overland

(2011). Globalisation and the quest for social and environmental justice: The relevance of international law in an evolving world order. London, England: Routledge.

Albee

G. W.

(2000). The Boulder model’s fatal flaw. American Psychologist, 55, 247-248. Retrieved from https://www.uvm.edu/~galbee/boulderflaw.pdf

American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (5th ed.). Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Publishing.

Aniekwu

N. I.

(2006). Converging constructions: A historical perspective on sexuality and feminism in post-colonial Africa. African Sociological Review, 10, 143-160. doi:10.1177/1461444810393901

Ayres

C. J.

(2012). The international trade in conflict minerals: Coltan. Critical Perspectives on International Business, 8, 178-193.

10.

Baaz

M. E.

Stern

(2009). Why do soldiers rape? Masculinity, violence, and sexuality in the armed forces in the Congo (DRC). International Studies Quarterly, 53, 495-518. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2478.2009.00543.x

11.

Bacon

(2006). Communities without Borders: Images and voices from the world of migration. Ithaca, NY: ILR Press.

12.

Badmus

I. A.

(2009). Explaining women’s roles in the West African tragic triplet: Sierra Leone, Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire in comparative perspective. Journal of Alternative Perspectives in the Social Sciences, 1, 808-839. Retrieved from http://www.japss.org/upload/15._Badmusarticle.pdf

13.

Bleischwitz

Dittrich

Pierdicca

(2012). Coltan from Central Africa: International trade and implications for any certification. Resources Policy, 37, 19-29. doi:10.1016/j.resourpol.2011.12.008

14.

Borer

T. A.

(Ed.). (2012). Media, mobilization and human rights: Mediating suffering. London, England: Zed Books.

15.

Braziel

J. E.

Mannur

(2003). Theorizing diaspora: A reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

16.

Bujra

(2002). African conflicts: their causes and their political and social environment. Ethiopia. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: Development Policy Management Forum. Retrieved from http://www.dpmf.org/images/occasionalpaper4.pdf

17.

Burnet

J. E.

(2012). Genocide lives in us: Women, memory and silence in Rwanda. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

18.

Burnet

J. E.

(2014). Sexual violence, female agencies, and sexual consent. In Buss

Lebert

Rutherford

Sharkey

Aginam

(Eds.), Sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict societies: International agendas and African contexts (pp. 131-144). New York, NY: Routledge.

19.

Chadya

J. M.

(2003). Mother politics: Anti-colonial nationalism and the woman question in Africa. Journal of Women’s History, 15, 153-157. doi:10.1353/jowh.2003.0064

20.

Chinkin

(1994). Rape and sexual abuse of women in international law. European Journal of International Law, 5, 326-341.

21.

Cockburn

(2004). The continuum of violence: A gender perspective on war and peace. In Giles

Hyndman

(Eds.), Sites of violence: Gender and conflict zones (pp. 24-44). Berkeley: University of California Press.

22.

Conklin

(1997). The assimilation of the other within a master discourse. In Riggins

S. H.

(Ed.), The language and politics of exclusion: Others in discourse (pp. 226-248). London, England: Sage.

23.

Ellis

Ter Harr

(2004). Worlds of power, religious thought and political practice in Africa. London, England: C. Hurst.

24.

Epstein

(2010). Death by gender. Dissent, 57, 54-57. doi:10.1353/dss.0.0143

25.

Falicov

(2007). Working with transnational migrants: Expanding meanings of family, community, and culture. Family Process, 46, 157-171.

26.

Fielding

(2014). Female genocidaires during the Rwandan genocide: When women kill. Hamburg, Germany: Anchor Academic Publishing.

27.

Foreign and Commonwealth Office. (2014, June 13). Chair’s summary: Global summit to end sexual violence in conflict [Policy paper], London, England: Author.

28.

Fuest

(2008). This is the time to get in front: Changing roles and opportunities for women in Liberia. African Affairs, 107, 201-224. doi:10.1093/afraf/adn003

29.

Galtung

(1969). Violence, peace and peace research. Journal of Peace Research, 6, 167-191. Retrieved from https://www-jstor-org.web.bisu.edu.cn/stable/pdf/422690.pdf

30.

Grewal

Kaplan

(1994). Scattered hegemonies: Postmodernity and transnational feminist practices. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

31.

Hagen

Yohani

(2010). The nature and psychosocial consequences of war rape for individuals and communities. International Journal of Psychological Studies, 2(2), 14-25. Retrieved from http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.666.663&rep=rep1&type=pdf

32.

Husanovic

(2009). The politics of gender, witnessing, postcoloniality and trauma. Feminist Theory, 10, 99-119. doi:10.1177/1464700108100394

33.

Iosifides

(2011). Qualitative methods in migration studies: Critical realist perspective. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.

34.

Jefremovas

(1991). Loose women, virtuous wives, and timid virgins: Gender and the control of resources in Rwanda. Canadian Journal of African Studies, 25, 378-395. doi: 10.2307/485975

35.

Jiwani

(2006). Discourses of denial mediations of race, gender, and violence. Vancouver, Canada: University of British Columbia Press.

36.

Kandiyoti

(2010). Bargaining with patriarchy. In McCann

Seung-Kyung

(Eds.), Feminist theory reader: Local and global perspective (pp. 80-81). London, England: Routledge.

37.

Klenke

(2011). Women in leadership: Contextual dynamics and boundaries. London, England: Emerald.

38.

Korieh

Okeke-Ihejirika

(Eds.). (2009). Gendering global transformations: Gender, culture, race and identity. New York, NY: Routledge.

39.

Maedl

(2011). Rape as weapon of war in the Eastern DRC: The victims’ perspective. Human Rights Quarterly, 33, 128-147.

40.

Mama

Okazawa-Rey

(2012). Militarism, conflict and women’s activism in the global era: challenges and prospects for women in three West African contexts. Feminist Review, 101, 97-123. doi:10.1057/fr.2011.57

41.

Mancini

Bonanno

(2006). Resilience in the face of potential trauma: Clinical practices and illustrations. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 62(8), 971-985.

42.

Maximova

Krahn

(2010). Health status of refugees settled in Alberta: Changes since arrival. Canadian Journal of Public Health/Revue Canadienne de Sante’e Publique, 322-326. doi:10.17269/cjph.101.1971

43.

Mcginley

A. C.

Cooper

F. R.

(2013). The influence of Ann scales. Denver University Law Review, 91, 187-210. Retrieved from http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2379030

44.

Meger

(2011). Rape in contemporary warfare: The role of globalization in wartime sexual violence. African Conflict and Peacebuilding Review, 1, 100-132. doi: 10.1080/03057070.2013.823319

45.

Minh-Ha

(1989). Woman, native, other. Writing postcoloniality and feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

46.

Mkandawire-Valhmu

Kako

Kibicho

Stevens

(2013). The innovative and collective capacity of low-income East African women in the era of HIV/AIDS: Contesting Western notions of African women. Health Care for Women International, 34, 332-350. doi:10.1080/07399332.2012.699986

47.

Mohanty

Russo

Torres

(Eds.). (1991). Third World women and the politics of feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

48.

Muiu

Martin

(2009). A new paradigm of the African state: Fundi wa Afrika. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

49.

Mukherjee

Barry

Satti

Raymonville

Smith-Fawzi

(2011). Structural violence: A barrier to achieving the millennium development goals for women. Journal of Women’s Health, 20, 593-597. doi:10.1089/jwh.2010.2375

50.

Okeke-Ihejirika

Salami

Karimi

(2016). African Immigrant Women’s Experience in Host Societies: A Scoping Review. Journal of Gender Studies. doi:10.1080/09589236.2016.1229175

51.

Okeke-Ihejirika

P. E.

(2004). Negotiating power and privilege: Igbo career women in contemporary Nigeria. Athens: Ohio University Press.

52.

Okpalaoka

C. L.

Dillard

C. B.

(2012). (Im)migrations, relations and identities of African peoples: Towards an endarkened transnational feminist praxis in education. Journal of Educational Foundations, 26, 121-142. Retrieved from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ968821.pdf

53.

Ola

T. M.

(2013). Women’s bodies, battle ground and commodities: Violence against women in Niger Delta, Nigeria. Afrrev Laligens: An International Journal of Language, Literature and Gender Studies Bahir Dar, Ethiopia, 2(6), 11-19.

54.

Oppermann

(2014). Hawks, doves and canaries: Women and conflict. Small Arms Journal, 13(2), 1-47.

55.

Payne

W. J.

(2016). Death-squads contemplating queers as citizens: What Colombian paramilitaries are saying. Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 23, 328-344. doi:10.1080/0966369X.2015.1013442

56.

Russo

Pirlott

(2006). Gender-based violence: Concepts, methods, and findings. Violence Against Women, 1087, 178-205. doi:10.1196/annals.1385.024

57.

Randall

A. E.

(Ed.). (2015). Genocide and gender in the twentieth century: A comparative survey. New York, NY: Bloomsbury.

58.

Rayner

(1997, June 22). The warrior besieged. New York Times Magazine. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/22/magazine/the-warrior-besieged.html

59.

Razack

(1994). What is to be gained by looking white people in the eye? Culture, race, and gender in cases of sexual violence. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 19, 894-923.

60.

Razack

(2003). A violent culture or culturalized violence? Feminist narratives of sexual violence against South Asian women. Studies in Practical Philosophy, 3, 80-104.

61.

Razack

S. H.

(2007). Stealing the pain of others: Reflections on Canadian humanitarian responses. Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 29, 375-394.

62.

Robertson

(1987). Developing economic awareness: Changing perspectives in the studies of African women, 1976-1986. Feminist Studies, 13, 97-135.

63.

Shidhaye

Patel

(2010). Association of socio-economic, gender and health factors with common mental disorders in women: A population-based study of 5703 married rural women in India. International Journal of Epidemiology, 39, 150-152. doi:10.1093/ije/dyq179

64.

Silove

(2000). A conceptual framework for mass trauma: Implications for adaptation, intervention and debriefing. In Raphael

Wilson

(Eds.), Psychological debriefing: Theory, practice and evidence (pp. 337-350). NewYork, NY: Cambridge University Press.

65.

Silove

(2004). Considerations in planning mental health services in conflict-affected countries in the developing world. In World Bank book of best practices: Trauma and the role of mental health in post-conflict recovery (pp. 123-152). Rome, Italy: World Bank.

66.

Silove

(2005). From trauma to survival and adaptation: Towards a framework for guiding mental health initiatives in post-conflict societies. In Ingleby

(Ed.), Forced migration and mental health: Rethinking the care of refugees and displaced persons (pp. 29-51). New York, NY: Springer.

67.

Thiesmeyer

(2003). Introduction: Silence in discourse. In Thiesmeyer

(Ed.), Discourse and Silencing: Representation and the language of displacement (pp. 1-33). Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins.

68.

Ticktin

(2011). The gendered human of humanitarianism: Medicalising and politicising sexual violence. Gender & History, 23, 250-265. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0424.2011.01637.x

69.

Trinh-Ma

(1989). Woman, native, other. Writing postcoloniality and feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

70.

True

(2012). The political economy of violence against women. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

71.

United Nations. (1993). Declaration on the elimination of violence against women. United Nations General Assembly. Retrieved from http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/48/a48r104.htm

72.

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. (2013). Sexual violence on the rise in DRC’s North Kivu. Retrieved from http://www.unhcr.org/51f79a649.html

73.

Verbruggen

Francq

Cuvelier

(2011). Guide to current mining reform initiatives in Eastern DRC. Antwerp: International Peace Information Service. Retrieved from http://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/Full_Report_130.pdf

74.

Whitman

(2012). Sexual violence, coltan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In Schnurr

M. A.

Swatuk

L. A.

(Eds.), Critical environmental security: Rethinking the links between natural resources and political violence (pp. 128-151). London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.

75.

Wilson

R. M.

Murtaza

Shakya

Y. B.

(2010, Summer). Pre-migration and post-migration determinants of mental health for newly arrived refugees in Toronto. Canadian Issues-immigrant Mental Health, pp. 45-50. Retrieved from http://www.metropolis.net/pdfs/immi_health/Immigrant%20Mental%20Health%20-%20pgs45-50.pdf

76.

Women for Women. (2014). Women inherit wrappers, men inherit fields: The problem of women’s access to land in South Kivu, Democratic Republic of Congo. London, England: Author.

77.

Yohani

Okeke-Ihejirika

(2018). Pathways to help-seeking and mental health service provision for African female survivors of conflict-related sexualized gender-based violence. Women & Therapy. Retrieved from https://www-tandfonline-com-s.web.bisu.edu.cn/doi/full/10.1080/02703149.2018.1434302

78.

Yohani

S. C.

(2014). Considering gender relations and culture in the psychosocial adaptation of individuals and communities affected by sexualized violence in African conflicts. In Buss

Lebert

Rutherford

Sharkey

Aginam

(Eds.), Sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict societies: International Agendas and African Contexts (pp. 111-127). New York: Routledge.