PKSOI Lessons Learned Report January 2019 | Page 21

part in the violence or fighting, girls/women in this context on the whole were classified as
victims. Many of these women were in fact victims on one level. Sexual violence was
rampant, used systematically as a currency during the war and experienced by an estimated
70-90% of the women. However, focusing on only one aspect of their experience isolated
many female ex-combatants from their lived reality of also participating in the violence.
Furthermore, women in supporting roles were not considered to be ‘real soldiers,’ even
though male ex-combatants in similar supporting capacity were treated as soldiers by the
DDR programs. In this way, the DDR program was based on gendered stereotypes of how
men and women experience war, which “led to a disarmament process that did not address
the ‘actual lived experiences’ of girls and women,” (MacKenzie, p. 246).
There were several barriers that limited female participation in DDR due to how the process
was structured. One such barrier to the participation of female ex-combatants in the Sierra
Leone DDR process was the weapons policy. Initially, each combatant was required to
turn in a gun during the “Disarmament” phase in order to be eligible for the DDR program.
However, “both males and females who performed support roles during the conflict (includ-
ing domestic tasks, acting as spies or messengers, and looters) may or may not have ever
possessed a gun,” (MacKenzie, p. 251). Many female ex-combatants did not have a gun
or no longer had a gun, or had used an alternative type of weapon, such as a machete.
A NOREF report maintains that “[...] women often shared guns when engaged in fighting.
The fact that sometimes four or five women shared one gun became a challenge during the
DDR process, when the handover of an individual gun was required for an individual to be
considered eligible to participate in DDR programmes,” (UNAMSIL, p. 2). Over 11 years of
war, items were lost, stolen, and/or transferred; furthermore, some commanders deliberately
took weapons from women/girls to preclude their eligibility in DDR.
Another obstacle preventing female ex-combatants from participating in the DDR process
was the way in which the children’s and adults’ DDR processes were separated. The
distinction and eligibility for each respective program was based on international definitions
of the age limits for children and youth. However, these international standards did not
make sense in the local context. Local traditions differentiated children from adults based
on the completion of certain traditional ceremonies, not on age. As such, even if a young
girl had been with the rebel forces and had already born a child of her own, she would not
be considered an adult in the local community if she had not completed the milestone
rituals. If she was young enough, she could still qualify for the children’s DDR process –
however, she might not consider herself to be a child because of having had her own child.
In this situation, attending a DDR process might be shameful for her or her family. This
distinction between adult’s and children’s DDR caused many such female ex-combatants
to avoid the process altogether.
The “Reintegration” stage of the DDR process also posed challenges for female ex-combat-
ants. “Women were given few choices in their reintegration process: silence or stigma,
limited training or nothing, isolation or marriage, motherhood, and returning to their families,”
(MacKenzie, p. 258). Traditionally, reintegration for women has been treated as a sensitiza-
tion process to their marriageability if they had been raped or had children out of wedlock.
This is an important consideration, especially given the high degree of sexual violence many
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