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Many wives of child soldiers were forcibly taken then raped and beaten, says Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee
Liberian peace activist Leymah Gbowee, joint winner of this year's Nobel Peace Prize, says the county’s civil war did not just brutalise the boys who fought as child soldiers but also the girls they forcibly took as wives.
Boys felt they had to prove their maleness not just by fighting but by taking a wife and rendering her totally submissive, Gbowee writes in an article published by Open Democracy. Many of these girls were forcibly taken, raped and beaten into submission.
She says around 80 percent of child-soldiers’ wives she worked with said they accepted their fate because it at least offered protection from having numerous unwanted sexual partners.
Many learned to be violent themselves as a way coping and “exhibited a kind of violent nature that was even more frightening than the behaviour the young soldiers displayed”, Gbowee adds.
Although the war ended in 2003, the girls continue to be victimised by their husbands and cannot leave because they now have children.
“The sad state of life for these girls is that their entire life is caught up in a spiral of one individual trying to prove their ‘maleness’,” Gbowee writes.
But the harrowing abuse she describes is not particular to Liberia.
“This is the everyday story of girls and women in conflict situations. Sexual violence has become a norm and unfortunately, young boys and men trying to prove their maleness has become the status quo in conflict situations,” she writes.
Gbowee says recent accounts from female survivors of war “are all about rape and rape and more rape”, mentioning the conflicts in Ivory Coast, Democratic Republic of Congo and Sierra Leone.
She tells one particularly chilling anecdote which reflects how badly the civil conflict in Liberia has desensitised many boys.
“During the early days of the Liberian civil war, one of the child soldiers, I worked with, told me he didn’t rape anyone; he had sex with them and then added, ‘Isn’t that what women were made for’.”
Gbowee's Women For Peace movement is credited by some for helping end the war. She made headlines for promoting a sex strike, urging the wives and girlfriends of leaders of the warring factions to deny them sex until they laid down their arms.
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