`The One God Sent to Stop the Boys from Killing Me': Using Storytelling to Communicate Survey Findings about Liberian Women Living in Displaced-Persons Camps

Abstract

In this article we describe a collaborative project addressing violence against women by faction fighters and government soldiers during the Liberian civil war (1989‐97). In 1994, members of Women’s Rights International (WRI) began a long-term collaboration with six Liberian women in the Women’s Health and Development Program (WHDP) at the Mother Patern College of Health Sciences in Monrovia. WRI and WHDP worked closely together in the field to design a project that would meet the needs of women who were living in Liberia during the war. During small group discussions with women and girls in a variety of settings it became clear that many women had experienced physical and sexual violence by soldiers and fighters. But without some form of probability sampling the true scope of violence against women during the war could not be known. How many women had been beaten, raped, and detained illegally? Were women from specific ethnic groups targeted? In what kinds of situations were women at greater risk of sexual violence? During the ongoing conflict, WRI and WHDP developed a survey to document the impact of the war on women’s lives (Jennings and Swiss, 2001). The goals for conducting a survey were twofold: (1) to document the scope of physical and sexual violence against women during the war, and (2) to develop a program that would promote discussion and community action among Liberian women to address the consequences of violence in their lives, and to rebuild communities that had been shattered by the civil war. The WHDP collaborators wanted to document the experiences of as many