Exchange to Change Sept 2017 20170911 E2C zomer web | Page 19

INTERVIEW
E2C: Does your own gender affect
who you can talk to?
HP: The book that I’ve just written [After
Rape] focused on the experiences of
women and the research was with women.
It was also with their communities,
families, husbands, brothers, fathers—
whoever was important in their lives—but
the starting point was women.
My current work includes quite a lot of
men, and a key part is talking to former
Lord’s Resistance Army [LRA] fighters. I’m
interested in how they look at the sexual
norms and practices in the LRA and their
own experiences. Many of them were
coming of age in the LRA—going through
puberty, having their first relationships—
and some of them were in forced
marriages. How do they understand that,
and what are their relationships like now?
Regarding the effect of my own gender on
the research, I think men really like talking
about sex, in fact I think men like talking
about it even more than women do. And I
think they like talking to a woman about
sex, it’s a performance of masculinity. I’ve
also worked with several male research
assistants who conducted interviews with
men for me, so that I could gauge whether
men speak differently to a male researcher.
Of course the male researchers had a
different rapport, but the things people
told them confirmed what I was also
hearing in my interviews.
E2C: What has been the biggest
challenge for you in your research?
HP: In the beginning of my research, I did
believe it was important to understand the
men’s side, but I just found it emotionally
difficult to engage with it. In my current
project, I want to understand men’s
perspective. If we want to understand
sexual violence and war, we have to wrap
our head around why it happens, who
is doing it, and what is motivating it.
But it took a long time before I felt like I
was emotionally ready to do that. In my
conversations with men, one difficulty
is that I know a lot of the people from
these stories. When a man is telling me
about something that happened, I know
the woman on the other end of the story,
I know her kids, I’ve talked to her about
her version of events. It can be deeply
unsettling.
E2C: Has your work resulted in any
policy recommendations?
HP: I think there is a lot of potential for
various types of policy recommendations,
both within Uganda but also in more
global institutions. Within Uganda,
there are actually two institutions that I
think are really important but are often
overlooked: churches and schools. They
are the institutions that are the most
sustainable, the most pervasive, and are
such massive factors in influencing gender
norms and what people come to view as
being an appropriate relationship between
men and women. I did some research in
schools talking to teachers, and in the
course of the interviews I’d ask them how
their students learn about sex, and, if they
were parents, how they thought their own
children learn about sex. Then I would ask
them how they actually learned about it
themselves when they were kids. I think in
the process, many realized that there was
a conflict between what they would desire
for their own children and what they were
actually doing for their students. But most
of the programs that touch on sexuality do
so in the context of HIV awareness, it’s not
very holistic. There are some programs,
little add-on things that schools are open
to, which could be tweaked to be more
effective. For example, an activity called
Family Groups, where students talk about
things like body changes and puberty. But
in these talks, they do role-playing and
designate a mother and father role in the
group. Well, most mothers and fathers
here don’t ever talk to their children about
sex—that role falls to an aunt or uncle.
So even just changing how the roles are
defined could improve the effectiveness of
this type of activity.
In the international arena, the ICC has
asked me for advice on various things, for
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instance notions of consent. There were
five warrants issued for former LRA, and
initially none of the crimes included had
to do with sexual violence. I was able to
offer input into that process as well as
how victims and witnesses could give valid
testimonies while minimizing their risk
of exposure in the communities that they
come from.
I think a lot about what ‘justice’ means
and what ‘repair’ means after sexual
violence, and I have ideas about
reparations. Right now, there’s not a lot
of hope for that happening on a big scale,
but one of the places where it does happen
is through the Trust Fund for Victims. They
have a couple of different programs but
they are not particularly well-targeted. So,
I have policy recommendations that have
currently been ignored. But, I think there
are some that are gaining traction!
E xchange to change S eptember 2017