Colombia’s Peace Court Opens New Case on Conflict-Related Gender-Based Violence

BOGOTÁ — A Colombian peace court is opening a new legal case that could bring justice for the first time to thousands of victims of gender-based crimes committed by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and the military during decades of bitter conflict.

On September 27, the Special Peace Jurisdiction (JEP), a court created out of the 2016 peace deal between the FARC and the government to try conflict-related crimes, announced that gender-based violence (GBV) — a term used by the European Institute for Gender Equality for violence against a person because of their gender — would be the subject of their latest investigation (which will include sexual and reproductive violence, as well as other crimes based on prejudice).

While such crimes were widespread, they were underreported and largely went unpunished by the judicial system. The new case provides a rare opportunity to try these crimes and understand the motivations that underlie them.

“Victims always ask, ‘Why did this happen?’ and ‘Why did it happen to me?’” said Yajaira Gaviria, a victims’ rights activist. “The hope is that the JEP can provide answers.”

Since the 1990s, women’s rights organizations have advocated for victims of sexual violence in the conflict and framed the use of rape as a weapon of war. According to Rene Urueña, an associate law professor at Andes University in Bogotá, the new JEP case builds on that activism not only by centering sexual violence but also by expanding the scope of the investigation to include lesser known crimes, which were initially thought to have been unrelated to the conflict.

“Gender violence outside of sexual violence is an issue that is still being explored judicially in Colombia,” said Urueña. In that way, he said, the case is breaking new ground.

In a preliminary analysis, the JEP found that 35,178 Colombians were subjected to gender-based crimes between 1957 and 2016. The crimes were manifold and cover sexual violence, nonconsensual abortions, and coerced domestic work, among other offenses. Nearly 90 percent of victims were women, and of them, 35 percent were underage at the time of the act. (According to a press officer, the JEP is still investigating cases of male victims of GBV, but it estimates that some 10 percent of cases will involve them, likely as LGBTQ victims.)

The circumstances under which these types of crimes occurred varied. During the conflict, which erupted in 1964 with the FARC’s armed rebellion against the state, the FARC and right-wing paramilitary groups imposed rules over communities as they fought for territorial control across Colombia. Their codes of conduct often reflected societal norms — and its inequities — which disproportionately endangered the safety of women and LGBTQ individuals.

According to the Truth Commission, a body established by the 2016 peace deal to compile an account of the 52-year conflict, FARC threatened women who defied their orders, including female leaders and mothers who demanded the safe return of recruited children. Pregnant combatants were ordered to undergo abortions — sometimes against their will. LGBTQ civilians were ostracized and ordered to flee their homes because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. And rape against civilians was weaponized by armed groups to instill fear and control.

“The armed actors quickly understood that controlling the territories implied controlling women, and for this it was necessary to control their lives and bodies, and break the social fabric,” wrote the Truth Commission in its final 2022 report.

In areas where the military was deployed, security forces abused their authority to arbitrarily detain women, who were sexually assaulted and intimidated from reporting the crimes. According to the JEP, these actions were motivated by broader patriarchal notions that women must be subservient and sexually available to men.

But cases were rarely reported or tried in court. According to Viviana Rodriguez, a lawyer with the women’s rights organization Corporacion Humanas, cases usually went unreported because it could endanger the safety of the victim, who often lived in remote regions controlled by armed groups. Oftentimes, Rodriguez said, there was no police in the area to report the crime, and on rare occasion when victims reported the violence, they would be met with prejudice from investigators, or the charges were dropped altogether because the case dragged on for years.

When the JEP launched in 2017, it began to categorize thousands of individual cases into larger “macro cases,” which investigated particular crimes, such as kidnappings or extrajudicial killings, or regions of the country where the violence was concentrated. Gender-based crimes were investigated as part of these other cases, but advocates say that this approach didn’t do enough to explain why these crimes were widespread and committed by all sides.

“A big part of the difficulty is where you start to look at the problems,” explained Urueña. “If you start to look at it as a territorial problem, then you can talk about gender issues, but you are still framing it as a territorial problem.” But by locating the issue of gender as the starting point, “as the prism through which the dynamics of war are understood,” the peace court is attempting something novel.

In this new case, the JEP argues that crimes were motivated by discrimination based on the victims’ sex, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, and that such prejudice seen in the war reflected structural discrimination.

Now, the peace court must develop legal strategies that investigate the crimes and determine the perpetrators without falling into the same pitfalls that the regular courts did, said Rodriguez. Oftentimes, scarce evidence keeps these cases from moving forward, especially when a criminal report is based solely on a victim’s testimony. Rodriguez said the JEP will have to be innovative in the way it uses the evidence it has at its disposal.

“It requires a new way of listening to the victims,” said Rodriguez.

Accruing fresh testimonies and evidence will be key to understanding how gender discrimination played out during the conflict. To help build its case, JEP judges have called on victims to report crimes to the court. That meeting with the JEP will likely be the first time a victim opens up about the violence they’ve endured, said Wilson Castañeda, director of the LGBTQ rights group Caribe Afirmativo, which is working with victims who’ve brought their cases forward to the JEP.

“For many LGBTQ+ people, the peace court has been the first court to deal with their cases,” said Castañeda.

Such testimonies are also novel for the Colombian public. As the case advances, Castañeda hopes that these testimonies will compel society to reflect on its stigmas around gender and sexuality that enabled these crimes to go on. Castañeda said that the challenge ahead is “to create a great debate that allows us to move from [a place of] complicity to [one of] protection.”