Sexual violence has been employed as a weapon of war by all armed groups involved in the Colombian conflict. State military forces, paramilitaries and guerrilla groups have used sexual violence with the goal of terrorising communities, using women as instruments to achieve their military objectives. The use of sexual violence has become a generalised and systematic practice. We hope that through processes of reconciliation, reparation and truth, the victims can enter a journey of healing.
“We Afro-Colombian women have been pushed around on our own lands and wherever we go by the different groups and by both legal and illegal armed actors. They kidnap us, they kill us, they rape us, they humiliate us… eroding our people’s social fabric in the process. Because of all that, there can be no doubt that the armed conflict has damaged the sensibilities of black women; our ancestral legitimacy, our instructive creativity, our reproductive lives and our love for our land.”
Afro-Colombian woman from Chocó
available at:
http://www.oxfam.org/sites/www.oxfam...e-colombia.pdf