Conflict and Violence Against Women

This chapter explores specifically some of the ways in which conflict and war affect women directly as a way of setting the stage for understanding women’s possible responses to the situation at various points from the early onset of conflict, during the conflict, and in preparing for a post-conflict society. [The authors] focus on the primary ways in which women are violated, either literally or figuratively, during situations of conflict, that is, rape and displacement. Both of these inflict harm on women who were not directly involved with the decisions to go to war or engage in conflict, but were nonetheless affected by those decisions in a way that altered their existence significantly. In the approach [the authors] are taking here it is important to understand the ways in which women are affected by conflict...in order to get a better understanding of the options open to them as they determine how to respond to the situations they face. Implicit in this is [the authors'] assumption that although they had little input into the initial decisions to engage in war and conflict, women can and do make choices about the situations that they are forced to confront as a result of the decisions made by others. [Author]