Book ManuScript
The Paradox of Protection: How Civil War Shifts Tolerance of Violence Against Women
This book investigates the critical question of how tolerance of violence against women changes in the context of civil war. I examine this question in the case eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where large scale civil war and subsequent violence by armed groups has affected the population for over two decades. A wide array of scholarship has been designed to learn about the heinous practices of armed groups and the violence that they perpetrate in this case. But do these documented norms and practices bring about changes to how people tolerate violence against women in the societies in which they operate? How civilian norms that support violence against women change is perhaps least understood in the context of civil war and yet most integral to women’s present and future security.
Prevailing wisdom suggests that armed conflict fosters runaway norms of violence that lead civilians to perpetrate violence against women in their own communities and in their homes. Critical feminist scholarship reinforces this understanding by describing a single, violent, militarized masculinity as dominant in civil war. This book intervenes to show that civilians adopt protective rather than violent masculine norms, leading tolerance of violence against women to change in otherwise unexpected ways.
My central argument is that armed conflict fosters protective masculine norms that, in turn, affect the extent to which communities tolerate or punish violent local crimes against women. The theory builds from the concept of civilian self-protection which recognizes civilians as agents of their own protection in the midst of ongoing civil wars. Community men will act against public forms of violence against women as they perform protective masculinity during insecure times. However, there is a paradox associated with this masculine protection; community members will more greatly tolerate private forms of violence against women because men are highly valued for the protective role they might provide.
This book draws from original fieldwork in eastern DR Congo, including 80 focus groups and 40 interviews and a range of secondary sources and incorporates both quantitative and qualitative analyses. The main finding is that men prefer to punish rape more severely while both men and women prefer to punish domestic violence less severely after their communities are exposed to armed violence. The findings push scholars, policy makers and advocacy workers to rethink the widespread assumption that norms related to different forms of violence against women are affected by armed conflict in the same, unidirectional way. Through the theory of protective masculine norms, The Paradox of Protection offers a framework for thinking about how different forms of violence against women are differently changed at critical junctures because civilians see only some forms of violence against women as public community threats that call for protection while they see other forms of violence against women as mere private harms.
