Excellence for the Elimination of Violence against Women (CEVAW).
Jacqui True is Professor of International Relations at Monash University and Director of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Elimination of Violence against Women (CEVAW).
They applied the "Page 99 Test" to their new book, Hidden Wars: Gendered Political Violence in Asia's Civil Conflicts, and reported the following:
When you open page 99 of our book you learn that sexual and gender-based violence in situations of protracted conflict, can be hidden, silenced, and kept in private spaces. Page 99 falls in the middle of Chapter Four, ‘Probing Silences in the Philippines’, the second of three empirical chapters in the book that examines patterns of reporting sexual and gender-based violence in three protracted civil conflicts in Asia: Burma, the Philippines and Sri Lanka – from 1998 to 2016. The book’s premise is that while there has been increased international awareness of widespread and/or systematic sexual and gender-based violence as crimes against humanity and acts of genocide, most attention has focused on situations recognised by the UN Security Council as meeting the definition of ‘conflict-related’ sexual violence. However, there are many situations around the world where sexual and gender-based violence is systematic, widespread, and targeted against particular groups, but is not identified as connected to the patterns of armed conflict. As a result, conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence is under-reported. In the book, we argue that the political support required to safely report this violence is often lacking, but needs to be taken seriously by the international community.Learn more about Hidden Wars at the Oxford University Press website.
Returning to page 99, the page under examination has two paragraphs. The first paragraph concludes a section on what we know about reported sexual and gender- based violence in the Philippines on the politically fragile island Mindanao where there has been decades-long protracted conflict as well as the rise of violent extremism over the past decade. We find that while local actors understand that sexual and gender-based violence is associated with local-level armed conflict, the violence is rarely recorded as being related to conflict events. Violence against teenage girls and young women from different clans, may escalate armed violence or be a form of retaliation by armed groups, but it is rarely recorded by authorities as such. As a result, the impunity for perpetrators is high, and the culture of accountability in the Philippines government to end these crimes is low.
In the second paragraph on the page, we discuss the patterns of sexual and gender- based violence reported in Mindanao between 1998 and 2016. We find that they were closely associated with key conflict-related events. Namely, the highest level of sexual violence was recorded in 2010 and 2014. The former (2010) was associated with the settlement of disputes amongst clans during a fragile negotiation phase (2009-2014), which included the Zamboanga siege in 2013 by an armed group that was excluded from the peace process. The large-scale displacement of people as a consequence of the siege was associated with higher rates of sexual violence. Even though the Philippines government was aware of this relationship between conflict and sexual violence and the need for early warning reporting and monitoring, there was no system put into place during the peace process.
So, if you opened our book at page 99, you would be able to glean two of its key ideas: First, conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence is frequently under- reported in situations of protracted armed conflict. Thus, the patterns between political violence and gendered violence are not apparent. Second, and consequently, we don’t identify the political conditions necessary to make reporting of this violence safe and to improve our knowledge and responses to it. While Hidden Wars meets the Page 99 Test, two further contributions of our book are not evident on this page.
First, our book explains why describing acts of sexual and gender-based violence as gendered political violence transforms how we understand conflict. We examine the societal conditions in each context, Burma, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka, to explain why gender-targeted violence may be advantageous to armed actors to secure political gains at particular junctures of the conflict. Second, our knowledge of widespread and/or systematic acts of sexual and gender-based violence should not be dependent on a political process on the UN Security Council that determines which violent situations can be called ‘conflict’. In so many situations we observe only the tip of the iceberg of conflict because violence is not counted and there are no institutions to report to or safe pathways for victim-survivors. Reporting sexual and gender-based violence is fundamentally a political act. It is inseparable from conflict dynamics, political struggles, and local understandings of gender relations.
We focus on silence and power – including the power to report and when violence receives attention – in this book. We argue that a key focus for researchers in each situation of concern is to identify the preventative and protective factors that can improve reporting and build institutional capacity at the ‘early warning’ stage to reduce the risk of sexual and gender-based violence. Scholars have an important role to play in breaking silences that perpetuate impunity alongside and in collaboration with local actors.
--Marshal Zeringue
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