Armed Conflict, Psychosocial Impact and Reparation in Colombia: Women’s Voice

Abstract

The armed conflict in Colombia has gone on for fifty years and produced numerous victims. Women make up a collective that has been especially affected and made invisible by the violence. Based on 935 interviews of Colombian women (17-83 years) belonging to different ethnic communities (who had identified themselves as mixed-race, afro-americans, indigenous or whits), the present study explores the Human Rights violations they experienced, the psychosocial impact of these violations, the strategies the women used to cope with the violence, and the measures they consider valuable to redress the damage inflicted. Using a feminist methodological perspective (Harding, 1987), data collection was carried out by women interviewing other women who wanted to bring back often invisibilized experiences of violence and thus contribute to their collective learning and empowerment process. This they were to do as from a shared redefinition of the facts. The instrument used included study methods used in other contexts of human rights violations (Arnoso, Beristain & Ginzalez Hidalgo, 2014; Beristain, 2009) and the answers were coded for further quantitative and qualitative treatment. A relationship was found between the different types of violence and the regions the sample came from, with indigenous and Afro-American women affected more negatively by the conflict. The results indicate that the paramilitary groups were the agents identified most often as the perpetrators of the violence.