7 - Mozambique: The Gendered Impact of Warfare

Summary

Introduction

Men's and women's relative social positions, as well as their differential access to rights and resources, have important implications for their experiences during and after war. However, there is still a tendency to overlook women's experiences of warfare in favor of a male-centered paradigm that governs responses to survivors of armed conflict. Because of the assumption that women's experiences mirror the experiences and needs of men, gendered postwar recovery processes often do not receive sufficient attention. In fact, prior to about the 1990s, Western social scientists and practitioners not only failed to fully consider women's experiences of trauma, but they also ignored the experiences and needs of non-Western communities impacted by armed conflict. As a result, programming aimed at African war survivors often does not sufficiently consider factors that support women's postwar recovery. In order to address this gap in social science and practice, I carried out a qualitative investigation of factors that have facilitated Mozambican women's recovery from the impact of warfare. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with forty-seven women who had lived through the recent war.

In recent wars, as many as 90 percent of all casualties have been civilians, the majority of whom are estimated to have been women and children. How-ever, civilian women who survive wars also endure significant aftereffects. These women's war experiences result from their differential gender roles and related needs, but women are also often deliberate targets of violence. For example, women who perform gender-specific tasks, such as fetching water and firewood or working in agricultural fields, may be particularly vulnerable to land mines or attack by enemy combatants. In addition, as a result of their responsibility for children and elderly family members, women may not be as mobile as men and may not be able to flee violence as readily, rendering them more susceptible to harm. Finally, during wartime, women may be targets for sexual violence for a variety of reasons, ranging from the offering of their bodies as rewards to soldiers to the use of sexual violence as a deliberate attack on the integrity and identity of an opposing side.

However, in spite of the nature of their wartime experiences, women's needs often go unmet, because their devalued social status provides them with access to fewer resources than men. It is also because service providers often overlook women's specific biological needs, related to pregnancy, childbirth, lactation, and so forth.