Justice in Transitional Societies: has gender become a central issue?
In societies that experience conflict, this role in the private sphere often
subjects women to additional harms that are often not experienced by
men. In addition to direct physical harms such as sexual violence, women
often experience indirect harms as a result of conflict. O’Rourke (2013:
20) discusses women’s experience of ‘secondary-victimhood’ whereby
women are subjected to a range of indirect harms. These can include displacement, whereby women are often exposed to further danger in refugee camps in which their needs and priorities are often neglected (Turano
2011: 1064). Additionally, women are often reliant on their husbands or
fathers for support. As a result of conflict, a void is left in this support as
many men leave to fight, are killed, imprisoned, disappear or are disabled
as a result of the conflict. This can subject women to great emotional and
economic pressures. Furthermore conflict frequently collapses the effective functioning of primary healthcare, which in turn subjects women to
other indirect harms including: rises in maternal mortality and morbidity (Cockburn 2001: 21). The concept of ‘secondary-victimhood’ can be
seen by looking at the case of Argentina under the rule of the military
junta in the late 1970s. The junta was responsible for mass violations
of human rights as it waged war on what it considered to be a “Marxist
subversive threat’ (Filippini 2009: 1). The emotional distress as a result
of the disappearance of thousands of (mainly) men was widely displayed
in campaigning by the ‘Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo’ (Bille, Hastrup
and Sørensen 2010: 50).1
Women are not susceptible to these harms as a result of their biological
1 Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ saw the disappearance of an estimated 30,000 Argentines
between 1976 and 1983. Many of the disappeared are thought to have been murdered
at detention camps or taken on ‘death flights’ whereby detainees were sedated and
dropped to their deaths from military aircraft. For an in-depth analysis of the practice of
disappearances and other atrocities carried out by the military junta during this period see
Guest (1990) and Kritz (1995). The ‘Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo’ is an organisation of
Argentine mothers seeking truth and accountability for the disappearance of their children
during the Dirty War, see Arditti (1999).
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