‘We just been forced to do it’: exploring victimization and agency among internally displaced young mothers in Bogotá

Armed conflict and internal displacement in Colombia

Armed conflict in Colombia has a history of more than fifty years that still continues, despite the peace treaty signed by government and the biggest guerrilla group FARC (Fuerzas armadas revolucionarias de Colombia, in English: Revolutionary armed forces of Colombia). According to the Victims Record of Colombia, from 1985 to 2013 there are 2.683.335 women that are victims of the armed conflict. From those, 2.420.887 women have been forcibly displaced, 1.431 have suffered sexual violence, 2.601 have been forced to disappear, 12.624 have been killed, 592 have been hurt by an antipersonnel mine, 1.697 have been illegally recruited and 5.873 have been kidnapped [1].

Women have been described as the main victims of the armed conflict, especially in the Colombian cultural context that in some regions is still considered to be ‘machista’ and patriarchal one [2]. Cadavid shows how women in Colombia are vulnerable targets of the armed conflict, a condition that requires specific policies that aim to protect them [3]. Alzate points out how displaced women in Colombia are victims of all kinds of violations of their sexual and reproductive rights, such as the right to health, right to decide on the number of children, right to physical integrity and to live free from violence, and the right to privacy [4]. In addition, according to the Consejo Nacional de Política Económica y Social (CONPES, in English: Politic, Economic and Social National Council), there is visible recognition of the power relationships among men and women, whereby masculinity is considered as privileged, unequal and unjust [5].

On the other hand, some authors in Colombia have also explicitly stressed Colombian women’s agency instead of being victims only. Osorio described them as ‘survivors’ of the war but even more, he showed their impressive resistance to these extremely painful and precarious situations, positioning them as ‘agents’ who can restart life and overcome their displacement [6].

In this study we were interested in how Internally Displaced Women (IDW) living in Bogotá themselves articulate their experiences of victimization and agency. To that purpose, we studied how they reconstructed their life stories and reflected on their own experiences.

Debates about victimization, survivorship and agency

Violence against women during and after armed conflict is globally recognized. United Nations reports explain how armed conflict exacerbates patterns of violence against women in different ways: increasing the incidences of everyday violence, particularly domestic violence, and increasing as communities break down during and after conflicts [7]. Additionally, among different kinds of violence, sexual violence in particular is used against women during and after armed conflict. As Haeri explained, sexual violence is used to punish, shame, intimidate, or simply to destroy the fabric of a community. Jack et al., explain that ‘By raping women, who represent the purity and culture of the nation, invading armies are also symbolically raping the nation itself” [8].

Violence against displaced women has been documented worldwide [9]. In Europe, for example, Freedman [10] showed how women refugees from Syria who arrived recently in Europe to find protection, are vulnerable to multiple forms of insecurity and violence. They have been forced to engage in sex to pay for their passage, among other violent acts [10]. In Asia, experiences of armed conflict and displacement in Syria, Sri Lanka and Nepal, clearly show how women experience violence [11–15]. Alsaba pointed out how even new forms of violence emerged and existing patterns of violence are often amplified and intensified as sexual violence. The author said that violence against women is understood as a tactic of war that includes military sexual slavery and forced prostitution in Syria [11]. Africa is not an exception, with examples in different countries such as Uganda and the Republic of Congo [16, 17]. Jacobsen and Dryden pointed out how refugees in these countries have been found to be at risk of sexual violence, human trafficking or labor exploitation [16, 17]. In addition, Knap pointed out how migration represents a drastic life change and gender roles and relations often shift in this process; this has been even more difficult for women [18].

Historically, violence is considered to be committed by men [19]. For example, Goldstein’s historical review pointed out how it is implied in history that men fight and women do not [20]. Women are portrayed as supportive to men when they go to war, in example providing them with entertainment and relief after battles while the ones who fight are the men. Furthermore, the author explained how the roles of women remained consistent after war, especially the responsibility for home life [20]. As Jack argued, the construction of the identities of women in their gendered roles as mothers and guardians of the culture implies that they are vulnerable and need protection [9]. This identity is embedded in culture as described by Elshtain in 1989. She suggested the features of women’s role in war as two opposites: the ‘beautiful soul’ or the ‘Spartan mother’. The first depicts women as better human beings, distanced from the dirt and brutality of the world, with the mission of being mothers and wives. On the other hand, the Spartan mother encourages men to fight, or wishes to fight herself, and actively supports war [21].

Many authors over time have agreed that in war zones, being a woman is a synonym of being a victim, just based on their gender. Some authors define ‘victim’ as any form of violence of abuse committed against women [19, 22]. This concept even initiated a specific research field in criminology, namely victimology [19, 22]. The use of the concept ‘victim’ has been controversial especially related to sexual violence and rape. Discussions about this notion reflect the tensions between the fields of feminist studies and victimology. Victimologists, working in a specific research field in criminology, prefer the use of ‘victim’ for persons who suffer a sexual assault, and feminist researchers prefer the term ‘survivor’ [19]. As Walklate explained, the use of the term ‘victim’ has been associated with blaming and re-victimization of the person who was sexually assaulted. The author also argued that the term ‘victim’ has implicit the assumption of a specific stereotype of ‘normal’ victim. The stereotype of a victim allows men to judge if the behavior of the victim was or was not appropriate, for example, dressing in a particular way that may incite male to rape [19]. According to Seririer, the concept of ‘survivor’ was introduced in the eighties in order to empower women to ‘speak out’. When women share their experiences, their speech permit them to recover their autonomy. They are not blamed or made to feel guilty. They become heroic activists and speakers, rather than silenced victims. It also is an inspiration for others who suffered assault to change their thinking around self-blame or isolation. They could understand that there are more survivors of this kind of assaults. It contributes to changing the social myths and victim-blaming attitudes about rape [23].

The use of the term victim or survivor is fundamental, because can be internalized and made part of one’s identity [24]. For example, the label ‘victim’ could imply several things. First, it could mean that the individual was passive or accepting of their assault and may not currently be actively working to overcome the situation. Second, it can theoretically lead to self-conscious emotions such as shame, guilt, and a lack of self-compassion: feelings which impede recovery from traumatic events. [24]. On the contrary, the term ‘survivor’ implies strength of will, resistance to the assault or self-shaming after-effects, and an active role in facing one’s traumatic experience and recovery. Survivor labels present the individual as an agent who does not experience abuse passively. In that sense, self-labelling as a survivor would result in coping better with traumatic events and experiencing positive mental health outcomes [24].

In addition, it might be a better strategy to frame oneself as a victim to stress innocence and vulnerability, for example, in the context of a court trial [25–27]. However, to recover from the experience and create a positive self-identity, adopting the term survivor might be the better strategy.

Although we found the use of the term ‘survivor’ to be very important, in this study, we focus more in the term agency, because we think that our participants expressed in their narratives not only experiences of sexual assaults (survivors), but they expressed how they passed though many other different traumatic experiences including armed conflict and internally displacement.

However, some authors have a different perspective regarding men and women roles in conflict and post conflict settings. For example, according to the Human Security Report, 2005, ‘With the critically important exception of sexual violence, there is considerable evidence to suggest that men, not women, are more vulnerable to the major impacts of armed conflict’ [28]. In this report, it is pointed out how males are more likely to die on the battlefield, but also more likely to be victims of collateral damage [28]. Moreover, Haeri explained how, far from being passive victims, ‘women from all walks of life including peasants and members of the educated class such as teachers, nurses, journalists and even nuns played a key role in sustaining the conflict and demonstrated their potential for inflicting extraordinary cruelty’ [8]. Examples include the atrocities committed in the genocide of Rwanda, where women participated actively as killers from the Hutu group and other women fought in the Tutsi resistance [29].

Cohen points out that men and women are likely to succumb to and participate in violent behavior under certain conditions [30]. She explains how combatants of both sexes may face enormous social pressure to commit violence and that both sexes are likely to respond to such pressures in similar ways [30]. For example, gang rapists where pressures from a group can cause individuals to behave in ways that they would never do on their own. Women and men are subjected to similar pressures from within armed groups and, facing similar circumstances, can be expected to commit similar atrocities. Moreover, she explained that, ‘women perpetrate wartime atrocities is surprising only because of the gendered assumptions that scholars and policymakers often make about women’s capacity to commit violence’. [30] Inspired by these studies, some scholars discuss the conceptualization of agency and victimization in zones of war, violent conflict and displacement. Hutchinson, in her literature overview reframes women from passive victims to active agents, able to draw upon personal strengths and resilience to develop strategies, which maximize survival chances. She also points to the paradoxical character of ‘passivity’ as a potential strategy of women to survive [31]. She observed this for instance in the case of North Uganda, where young women seek to marry or to become pregnant by high commanders due to the associated privileges such as exceptions from hard labor [16]. Some authors described how girls can use sex and marriage consciously and voluntarily to bargain themselves into units and to gain access to food, water and other material goods [8, 31, 32]. According to Heari, women show remarkable strength in coping with the challenges of living in war and often adopt new roles and responsibilities to care of their families and take part in community life [8]. In Sri Lanka for example, Rajasingham suggested that despite the psychosocial traumas that displacement entails, women found an opportunity for greater personal and group autonomy finding new spaces as heads of households or income generators in a post-conflict setting [13].

The term ‘agency’ is linked as well with resilience. Some authors define resilience as: ‘psychological attributes of an individual which may protect against negative consequences’ [33]. It is also conceived as the maintenance of healthy/successful functioning or adaptation within the context of a significant adversity or threat and is better characterized as a dynamic process, since individuals can be resilient to specific environmental hazards or resilient at one time but not another [34]. Nevertheless, subsequently the focus shifted towards exploring how broader systems facilitate processes of resilience. This led to an understanding that resilience processes are facilitated by culture and context-specific transactions between individuals and their social ecology [35].

Regarding the term ‘agency’, the debate goes further. As Hitlin notes, ‘Agency remains a slippery concept because of inconsistent definitions across theoretical projects’ [36]. For example, Campbell [32] defined this debate as the ‘black box’ of ‘personal agency’. In his essay, he identified two main conceptions regarding agency. The first one, agency is defended for some authors as ‘the power that individuals possess that enables them to realize their chosen goals’. Against this position, some other authors, such as Weber [32] defined agency as ‘the probability that one actor within a social relationship will be in a position to carry out his own will despite resistance’. Salzman argued that the concept of agency includes the intention, options, purposes and how people could achieve their goals, but in a context of social norms that they are not following passively, but modifying their social worlds [37]. Hitlin also explained, that agentic behavior is influenced by the requirements of the interactions; as actors become more or less concerned with the immediate moment versus long-term life goals, they employ different social psychological processes and exhibit different forms of agency according to the self and the time [36].

In their book: “Beyond Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Thinking about women’s violence in Global Politics”, Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry, pointed out regarding agency, that people do not make choices independent of either other people or the social structures around them. They argued that people do make choices, but that those choices are both heavily and differentially constrained: “By heavily constrained, we mean that a wide variety of social structures, expectations and significations play a role in constituting conditions of possibility for choices and the choices themselves. By differentially constrained, we mean that both the level and type of constraints differ across people’s positions in social and political life – based on gender, race, class, nationality and other features of position in global politics’ [38].

Inspired by these scholarly discussions, this paper will explore the different tussles between agency and helplessness that internally displaced young mothers in Bogotá lived, according to their life stories and their own perspective.

Study design

This research was qualitative in nature and took an ethnographic approach, seeking to learn from the life stories of young mothers how they experienced agency and helplessness before, during and after forced displacement. Alongside that, we organized workshops with IDW in the community, which enabled a process of sharing and exchanging experiences in a safe atmosphere and to collectively reflect on the issue of victimization and agency.

Study setting

This research was conducted in Ciudad Bolivar, a locality¹ in Bogotá, Colombia. This locality is the one that receives the majority of Internally Displaced Persons in the capital [39]. The 94% of people who live in this locality are in the lowest socioeconomic status. This locality is one of the most violent of Bogotá, with a high incidence of murders and violent acts [40]. In this area, there are some members of the illegal armed groups, even guerrilla or paramilitary [41–43].

Data collection

The first author, YC is a female physician-anthropologist who worked there since 2006 as part of the social extension program of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, known as the Vidas Móviles Project. That project wanted to help internally displaced families in different areas such as health, housing, and life-conditions. The fieldwork for this research was developed between June 2015 and May 2016, a period when the first author visited the locality two or three times per week, and irregularly (twice per month) in the following two years. During the first year of fieldwork, YC who was familiar with the research context and had experience in the field, collected the life story narratives through in-depth interviews from twenty internally displaced women who were pregnant during adolescence. In addition, YC organized eight workshops with the same twenty women who were interviewed, but also with another fifteen women from the neighborhood. All of them were invited to these workshops as taking part of interesting activities provided by the project for the neighborhood. It allowed participants to elaborate freely on their experiences and their ideas about topics that were discussed in the interviews. These workshops developed these topics through creative processes such as painting, writing, writing on the wall, singing, and role-playing. The last two workshops provided were developed in addition to provide feedback of the results of this research. Six of the workshops took place in the project building, and the last two in two houses of participants.

Participant observation was made by the first author during the visits conducted to the neighborhood, taking notes about informal conversations in the daily life activities with people form the community including visits to some of the houses of participants.

Sampling

Participants were twenty IDW, all living in the locality, who were mothers during adolescence, and Their age at the time of this study varied from 18 to 35 years. We choose the definition of adolescence according to The World Health Organization, that is ‘young people between the ages of 10 and 19 years’ [44]. Most of these mothers had their first child at the age of 14. They had one to six children.

As the first author has contact with people from the neighborhood, we chose key informants to invite different participants via a snowball sampling strategy until reaching saturation point [45]. The inclusion criteria for this research were: women who have been forced displaced and have been mothers during adolescence. The majority of participants were part of the program, but it was not an inclusion criterion. For example, to be part of the project, participants need to have had the status of displacement provided by the government, that was not the case for participants of this research. The project had different family members including fathers and boys, that was not the case of this research.

All participants were interviewed by the first researcher individually in Spanish once, twice or three times, and all the interviews were recorded. All interviews were open, giving participants freedom to talk about their life stories.

Data analysis

To analyse the data, all the life stories, interviews, and workshops were transcribed in Spanish and translated in to English.

We analyzed the narratives of their life-stories from the moment of their childhood in the countryside to their situation at the moment of the interview in Bogotá. For this study, life story is defined in accordance with Pujadas: ‘It is a story about the self-life, which is obtained by the researcher through different interviews. The objective is to show the subjective testimony of a person. It includes the experiences but also the perceptions that that person made of his/her own existence’ [46]. The objective is to understand all the aspects of that life, and it is incentivized by the presence of a researcher. It means that the story is a result of all those interactions [46].

We use the comprehensive analysis defined by Bichi, 2002, that takes in to account the life cycle, the experience and the interview itself [47]. We started with familiarizing ourselves with all narratives and subsequently we analyzed the narratives on specific themes meaning the moments of their lives when they showed agency, or were survivors or victims. As Charries explains, the biographies try to cover time and place form childhood until the moment the life-story is narrated, including different aspects of the self. They allow as identifying the ambiguities and changes, as a vital process, and the critical moments in the individual. They permit as well to identify the subjective perspective of the individual, as well as the interpretation of their own acts. Biographies permit to understand social phenomena that only could be understood though the personal experiences of the concrete individuals. [48]

In this article, we present an analysis of four life-stories that, besides the similarities that those cases represent regarding rural origin, armed conflict context, and teenage pregnancy, show as well the diversity of experiences that could be followed during a lifetime. We selected those particular life-stories primarily because of the way each one deals comprehensively with the maneuvers made by victims-survivors over a lifetime. We will follow their narratives from their childhood in hometown to their settlement in Bogotáin the four moments as turning points or transitions in their lives. It provides a better understanding of how they deal with agency and helplessness during the same life. Those were the moment they left home, when they became pregnant, when they were forced to leave their towns, and when they came to Bogotá as IDW.

The analysis was regularly discussed with the other authors. In order to receive feedback regarding the adequacy of the interpretations, the analysis was presented to and discussed with the participants in two workshops.

Limitations

As a qualitative approach, the empirical findings cannot be generalized to other populations in other contexts. The focus on life-stories limits an in-depth focus on a specific theme. Nevertheless, the conceptual analysis can provide important insights that may be helpful to understand difficulties of displacement in other contexts.

People from the neighborhood known the first author as a physician and as part of the project Vidas Móviles. Participants in the study expressed that condition as a plus, because they trusted the researcher and felt that they could share their experiences, including medical issues.

Eventual bias is also reduced because all data and interpretations were discussed with the other members of the research team, who were not part of Vidas Moviles.

Ethical framing

Research and ethical approval was granted by the Ethic Committee of the School of Medicine of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá (Act 21/2015.FM-CIE-8744-15). In the same way, research protocol and methods were consistent with the Colombian Law. All participants had their first baby during adolescence, but at the moment of the interview their age was between 18 and 35 years old. Participants were asked to provide and to sign informed consent. We took care that the participants were fully informed about all aspects of the project and were aware that they could withdraw at any moment without providing reasons, and that eventual withdrawal would not affect their relationship with the community project Vidas Moviles in any way. Recordings were destroyed, and transcripts will be stored in accordance with Dutch Law in a protected location at Maastricht University for 10 years.

This research followed the ethical recommendations from the American Anthropology Association and continuously reflected on possible ethical concerns beyond informed consent during the study. We protected the identity of the participants by changing their names in the text. In addition, we did not identify the violent groups that are mentioned as causing displacement. We took care of the participants by following up during monthly workshops and helping them with some difficulties they were facing (e.g., helping them to access the aid offered by the government, finding schools for their children, or attending to certain questions related to health).