| Popis: |
This research focuses on Maya Q’eqchi women survivors of wartime sexual violence and their struggle for justice. In particular, I consider their specific experiences and the agency they have been able to realise in the process of bringing to trial two former members of the military. I analyse their participation in this process and their experiences of organising alongside Guatemalan women’s rights organisations and other Mayan women survivors of wartime sexual violence. Furthermore, I consider what justice means for these survivors, focusing, in particular, on the significance of the trial1 and the sentencing both for them and for the women’s rights activists working in the organisations that have supported them. I go on to examine the extent to which the survivors and the activists have achieved their objectives within their particular struggles. Additionally, I consider the extent to which the legal process is able to truly capture the harms that they have experienced and provide redress for those harms. This is a pertinent consideration, given that justice may take on many different meanings; international law and the Guatemalan legal system more closely reflect their European and US counterparts, frameworks far removed from Mayan cosmovisions and customary legal practices. To close, I examine the meaning of the trial for the women’s rights organisations and what they feel has been its real impact, considering, in particular, the silence surrounding wartime sexual violence and widespread impunity for that violence before the trial took place and, in general, the high levels of gender-based violence and attendant impunity in contemporary Guatemala. |
