From poverty to power - Oxfam-Québec

4 RISK AND VULNERABILITY VIOLENCE AND CONFLICTIn the cruel calculus of war, civilians rarely remain untouched,especially if they are already poor and vulnerable. Combatants, bethey insurgents or governments, routinely view civilians as potentialsources of enemy support and therefore legitimate targets, no matterthat international law insists on respect for civilian neutrality. Evenwhen not deliberately targeting civilians, governments at war oftenrestrict human rights and mechanisms of democratic accountability,thus undermining incentives to win popular support rather thancoerce it through fear.Conflict affects men, women, and children differently. In themassacres in Rwanda in 1994, or in Srebrenica, Bosnia in 1995, themajority of victims were men. Elsewhere, women and girls have bornethe brunt. Of approximately 21 million internally displaced people inthe world, 70–80 per cent are women and children. 141 The 2005 UNHuman Development Report estimated that two million of the threemillion deaths directly related to violent conflict since 1990 weredeaths of children. 142During armed conflict, violence against women takes on a newand even more sinister dimension when armies use mass rape andsexual enslavement as weapons of war. This sophisticated strategy killsand scars women, and inflicts deep psychological wounds on entirecommunities. The intent is to destroy social cohesion by impregnatingwomen so that they bear the children of the enemy. The women whosurvive this act of warfare, broken and traumatised, are commonlystigmatised and rejected by their own families and communities.In 2005, the UN reported that one region of the DRC suffered25,000 such attacks a year. 143 In Sierra Leone, a 2002 study found thatmore than half the women in the country had been sexually attackedduring the war that ended that year. 144 Mass rape in war has also beendocumented in Peru, Cambodia, Uganda, Liberia, and Somalia. 145 InDarfur, the threat of sexual violence against women is most prevalentwhen women leave villages or camps to collect firewood. They mustchoose between the threat of rape and feeding their families.(In response, Oxfam has piloted the use of fuel-efficient stoves toreduce the need to collect firewood.)Even in democracies, the violence that one group inflicts onanother is often rooted in the idea that the victims are ‘the other’ –279