Children born as the result of conflict related sexual violence often embody painful memories of war-affected communities. As a result, children ‘born of war’ experience abuse and neglect, social isolation and a sense of never-belonging. Existing scholarship grapples with the challenges of seeking justice for children ‘born of war’ given the complex ways their suffering is entangled with that of so many other victims. In post-conflict northern Uganda, a community-based organization composed of survivors of forced marriage and motherhood collectively seeks justice for their children in a process locally referred to as child tracing. The Women’s Advocacy Network brings together differently affected victim groups to help identify the paternal relatives of their children, mediate conflict and transform fractious relationships in order to secure a future for their children. Through this process, children who once divided communities, propel a collective reach towards justice.

In this article, we examine exceptional circumstances in which men who father children born as the result of conflict-related sexual violence assume full or partial responsibility for their child's well-being. Children ‘born of war’ are increasingly recognized as a particular victim group in relevant international policy frameworks. Their social status falls somewhere between the victimization of their mother and perpetration of their father. Given the circumstances of their birth, they often experience social rejection and loss of identity with a long-term impact on their well-being. Previous scholarship has primarily documented the challenges faced by their mothers as caregivers and as victims of wartime sexual violence. A discussion on fathers to children ‘born of war’ is absent, attributable not only to their perpetrator status, but also to the assumption that their identity is unknown or that a relationship between father and child is undesired. The article demonstrates this is not always the case. Based on research in northern Uganda between 2016 and 2019 which included interviews and focus group discussions with former male combatants in the rebel group the Lord's Resistance Army, we explore how some fathers seek to maintain a relationship with children born as the result of ‘forced marriage’ and assume partial or full responsibility for their well-being and care.

In the strain of remaking the social world after a violent conflict, women who conceive children as the result of sexual violence must often raise them amongst resentful victim communities. Abducted and forced into marriage by the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda, Acholi women are perceived to have returned with the children of the enemy and are subsequently told they do not belong. Based on ten years of collaborative research with war-affected mothers in northern Uganda, we consider the ways women repair webs of kin relations to secure a future no longer dictated by the circumstances of their children’s birth.