Gender and Reparations:

Cusco, Peru, 2005. Peruvian women participate in the Walk for Peace and Solidarity seeking to promote a message of unity and reparations for victims of political violence. Photo by Rolly Valdiva.

It is widely acknowledged that a significant number of victims of authoritarian regimes and conflict are women, and that they experience both in distinct ways. Similarly, women usually play a crucial role in the aftermath of violence such as:

• searching for victims or their remains
• trying to reconstitute families and communities
• upholding memory and demands for justice.

 

Despite all of this, reparations programs are rarely designed with an explicit gender dimension in mind. This project seeks to explore ways of introducing this dimension into reparations programs, in order to maximize the potential redress for female victims and their families.

In 2006, the ICTJ launched the publication of The Handbook of Reparations (Oxford, 2006), containing the results of a multiyear, large-scale research project on reparations for victims of human rights abuse-the single largest study of reparations anywhere in the world. This global study highlighted an important gap: an absence of information and understanding of the ways in which reparations programs could incorporate a gender perspective.

Despite the fact that truth commissions have become increasingly sensitive to gender issues, they have not expressed this sensitivity in drafting reparations plans shaped by a deep understanding of the impact of reparations benefits on women. Just as until now there has been almost no factual information on the different needs of men and women regarding reparations, there has been almost no normative work on the difference a gender perspective would have on reparations. This has made it exceedingly difficult to articulate arguments for gender-differentiated reparations measures and to influence emerging policies.

One of the goals of a reparations program is to provide a measure of justice, albeit imperfect, to victims. But reparations are also intimately tied to building a just and peaceful foundation for a transitioning society. A program that fails to provide redress or justice to women in effect undermines the link between the goals of reparations and establishing a democratic state.

The ICTJ's research project on gender and reparations aims to:

• Collect and analyze information about how past and ongoing reparations programs have dealt with a variety of gender issues
• Articulate views about how the adoption of a gender perspective in reparations could better serve women's justice interests
• Contribute to the more general debate about gender equity
• Strengthen local and international expertise on the topic of reparations
• Facilitate and solidify a network of experts on the issue of gender and reparations
• Identify best practices
• Enrich the tools available to transitional and post-conflict societies for redressing victims, particularly women

The results of the first part of the project are gathered in the book What Happened to the Women? Gender and Reparations for Human Rights Violations (SSRC, 2006), edited by Ruth Rubio-Marín, which discusses reparations for women in Guatemala, Peru, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and Timor-Leste. The book is the first publication in the ICTJ's new Advancing Transitional Justice Series. The thematic studies were commissioned in October 2005, and will be published in an edited volume entitled The Gender of Reparations in early 2009 by Cambridge University Press. The book's chapters include:

• The Gender of Reparations in Transitional Societies
• Gender and Violence in Focus: A Background for Gender Justice in Reparations
• Sexual and Reproductive Violence through the Lenses of Reparations
• The Widow, the Spouse and the Parents: Reparations and Family Members as Communities of Harm
• The Role of Reparations in Recognizing and Addressing Crimes and Grave Rights Violations Against Girls and Boys
• Tort Theory, Microfinance, and Gender Equity Convergent in Pecuniary Reparations
• Gender, Memorialization, and Symbolic Reparations
• Gender and Collective Reparations

Two dissemination activities have been organized to discuss the results and policy implications of the initial phase of research. The first one targeted policy makers specifically and took place in Caux, Switzerland, February 23-24, 2007, under the auspices of the Swiss Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The second activity took place March 26-28, 2007, in Bogotá, Colombia, targeting a wider audience that included academics, practitioners, activists, and major institutions and officials currently involved in discussing and designing reparations policies in the country.

What Happened to the Women? Gender and Reparations for Human Rights Violations is available for purchase or free download from the Social Science Research Council.

 

(Updated July 2008)