No place for a war baby : the global politics of children born of wartime sexual violence

Abstract

Children born of wartime sexual violence are rarely included in post-conflict processes of reconciliation and recovery. Instead, these children are often marginalized and rejected by their mothers, community, and nation. As a consequence, children born of wartime sexual violence are often subject to infanticide, abandonment, political exclusion, social and cultural stigmatization. In some cases these children are pariahs within their own birth community and lack formal membership of any state. By positioning children born of wartime sexual violence as a point of enquiry, this thesis aims to create a space in which the rights, experiences, and identities of this specific group of war-affected children can be theorized. This thesis argues that these children have fallen between the analytical gaps of the two most relevant approaches within global politics: feminist International Relations (IR) and children's human rights regimes. It argues that despite the differences within feminist approaches to IR, the focus has often been on the war-affected woman rather than the child. This thesis finds that children born of wartime sexual violence are also marginalized within the children's rights debates on war-affected children. To reflect this argument, this thesis is structured in two parts. First, it questions why children born of war are largely absent from existing feminist IR discussions of wartime sexual violence. In doing so it explores a number of feminist approaches to IR, with particular focus on the debates regarding the manipulation of women's identities and roles in conflict, and the debates surrounding wartime sexual violence. The first section also presents a case for how feminist IR might accommodate a consideration of children born of wartime sexual violence. Secondly, this thesis will address why these children are excluded from human rights regimes and humanitarian programs that deal specifically with war-affected children. This will proceed through an exploration of the debates behind childhood as a concept. The second section reveals that children born of wartime sexual violence are unable to fit into the existing concept of childhood that is used by the children's rights regime and humanitarian organizations. As a consequence, children born of wartime sexual violence are left out of the international humanitarian discourse concerning children.