Expressions of Gender-based Violence in the Impact of Anti-personnel Mine Attacks in Colombia

Abstract

This text, based on fieldwork carried out between 2014 and 2015, firstly analyses the way that Gender-Based Violence (GBV) in armed conflict is also expressed through forms of victimization like anti-personnel mine (APM) attacks. It also studies how women who belong to associations of APM victims confront the consequences of this victimization, much of which has clear gender connotations, placing them at the highest level of vulnerability and stigmatization. The article shows that, although mines originated as an indiscriminate form of violence (given the nature of the instrument used), the violence exercised by their use contains two main components of GBV by which women are profoundly affected, in view of the patriarchal context in which such violence takes place: firstly by using the body as a space of dispute and secondly in the continuum that affects women’s lives. These two components enhance the physical and psychological consequences for the direct victims of these devices and the emotional impact for their indirect victims (victims’ relatives), and are a factor in the considerable disruption of women’s traditional roles within families, thus weakening the community’s social fabric.