Children ‘born of war’: a role for fathers?

Abstract

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.

Securing the Future: Transformative Justice and Children ‘Born of War’

“…Following the completion of the project in 2011, JRP supported participants in the Ododo Wa research project to form WAN, which grew rapidly in membership and embarked on building strong relations through storytelling, income generation and later, in writing and presenting a Petition to the Ugandan Parliament to seek reparations on the basis the state had failed to protect them during the war. 2 Between 2015 and 2017, the first author continued to conduct life histories in collaboration with WAN and JRP, this time with men abducted by the LRA in order to understand their experiences and perspectives of forced marriage and fatherhood (Oliveira and Baines, 2020). It was during this time that WAN began to work with JRP and the support of the Women’s Initiative for Gender Justice to conduct child tracing, and the first author, WAN and JRP agreed to create a virtual archive of documents, photographs and videos of efforts of child tracing.…”

“They Now Know That They Are Children of War”: Forcibly Abducted Mothers and Fathers Balancing Disclosure and Silencing to Their Children Born of War in Northern Uganda

“…Recently, scholars have started to explore the impact and continuation of post-captivity forced marriages for women and men, and the lives of children born of war (Aijazi and Baines, 2017;Lakor, 2017, 2018;Stewart, 2017;Oliveira and Baines, 2020;Suarez and Baines, 2021). Many accounts have related challenges in reintegration to rejection, discrimination and/or stigmatization connected to forced marriage and parenthood (Denov and Lakor, 2017;Stewart, 2017).…”

“…Many accounts have related challenges in reintegration to rejection, discrimination and/or stigmatization connected to forced marriage and parenthood (Denov and Lakor, 2017;Stewart, 2017). In particular, women's gender-specific roles as forced wives and mothers have hampered their own and their children's return and (re)integration (Baines, 2011), resulting into difficulties in post-conflict lives, marriages and parenthood (Apio, 2016;Atim et al, 2018b;Kiconco and Nthakomwa, 2018;Oliveira and Baines, 2020). of collective violence, military conscription and post-conflict settings onto gender (Saferworld., 2014;Reinke, 2016;UN General Assembly Security Council, 2021).…”

“…Especially studies on forced marriages highlighted that the vast majority (e.g., 98% in a study performed by Annan et al, 2008) of the mothers did not wish to be reconnected with the child's biological father. However, more recent studies have indicated that biological parents and clans do reconnect to support children born of war (Mutsonziwa et al, 2020;Oliveira and Baines, 2020;Baines and Oliveira, 2021) as they seek to "transform relations of violence into relations of care" (Rodriguez Di Eugenio and Baines, 2021, p. 341). We hypothesize that these differences in research outcomes could be connected to the increased need of resources and support when children born in forced captivity grow older, combined with the importance of belonging and identity for children born of war (see further).…”

“…Third, an important contribution of this study was the inclusion of the perspective of fathers, which has been lacking in research on forced marriages within the LRA (Apio, 2016;Aijazi et al, 2019;Denov and Cadieux Van Vliet, 2020;Denov and Drumbl, 2020;Mutsonziwa et al, 2020;Oliveira and Baines, 2020), and, more generally, in research and practice regarding the upbringing of children during and after collective violence (Wieling et al, 2015;El-Khani et al, 2016;Murphy et al, 2017;Mehus et al, 2018). When laying out the findings of our study, the gender-specific experiences and difficulties in the trajectories of trauma communication were highlighted.…”