Challenging Conceptions : Children Born of Wartime Rape and Sexual Exploitation

Tens of thousands of children worldwide have been born as a result of mass rape campaigns or wartime sexual exploitation. What about these living legacies of rape and sexual violence? What do we know about these children and their life chances? To explore these and other questions, Challenging Conceptions gathers together an interdisciplinary and international roster of scholars. They include professors and doctoral students in the fields of anthropology, gender studies, history, law, transitional justice, social work, and sociology among others. Some of these practitioners and scholars, as they explain in their chapters, are also themselves women who gave birth to children born of wartime sexual violence. The exchange of their voices and perspectives shines through in this collection to produce new and cutting-edge knowledge on children born of war time sexual violence.

Governments, international organizations, and international laws and courts increasingly pay attention to conflict-related sexual violence. The core of the UN Women Peace and Security Agenda is stopping conflict-related sexual violence against women. Yet, with over two decades of grappling with conflict-related sexual violence and its legacies, there is only passing mention of the potential and obvious outcomes of sexual violence: pregnancy, abortion, forced maternity. What do we know about children conceived through acts of sexual abuse? What are their life chances? How do they exist with their mothers and within their families? In this collection we hear from the leading researchers and practitioners from around the globe, each of whom has spent decades working with women who survived wartime rape and with their children who were the result of that violence. This ground-breaking collection explores the life cycles of children born of wartime rape across time and space. It shines light on why young people born of rape are or are not able rejoin their families and society in the post-conflict. It explores the different ways these children learn about their origins and how they, their families and societies react to that understanding. It reveals the local, national, and international actions of how children born of wartime rape and their families are positioned in society and how they strive to transcend this and position themselves as they move from abuse, marginalization and pain into belonging and justice.