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| Book Title | The Gender of Reparations Unsettling Sexual Hierarchies While Redressing Human Rights Violations |
| Book Author | Rubio-Marin |
| Bibliographic Information | Cambridge University Press, 2009, Pages : 416, $99.00, ISBN 9780521517928 |
| Review Title | |
| Reviewer(s) | Sriram, Chandra Lekha |
Ruth Rubio-Marìn (ed.). The Gender of Reparations. Unsettling Sexual
Hierarchies while Redressing Human Rights Violations.
Reviewed by Chandra Lekha Sriram,
Reparations are increasingly being offered, or
at least recommended, in transitional justice processes, and the literature
examining them has grown concomitantly.[1]
At the same time, practitioners of both peacebuilding and transitional justice
have begun to recognize that the needs of women and girls have been dealt with
inadequately. This volume edited by Ruth
Rubio-Marìn, a foremost expert on gender and reparations, promises to fill a
critical gap, with three categories of contributions considering, as the title
indicates, ‘the gender of reparations’.[2] The first set of chapters examines the ways
in which violations during violent conflict are gendered, targeting or
incidentally affecting women and girls but also in some cases specifically
designed to emasculate men and boys. The
second set of chapters considers the ways in which reparations programmes have
to date failed to address the range of harms suffered, largely by females, from
such violations. Finally, several of the
contributions seek to offer specific recommendations for reparations
programmes, including microfinance and symbolic recognition, which could better
respond to those harms.
Many of the contributions explore in detail the
range of sexual and gender based violence (SGBV) which occurs in many armed
conflicts, disproportionately targeting women and girls. These are well-known and need not be
addressed in great detail here, and include rape, sexual slavery, forced
pregnancy and sterilization. Such
violations have been found to be genocide and crimes against humanity by
international or internationalized criminal courts. However, criminal
prosecutions alone cannot address the harm inflicted on victims of SGBV, who
may experience enduring damage both physically and psychologically, and be
ostracized or punished by family and community. Reparations programmes may
provide for both the moral and material needs of victims.
However, while SGBV is perhaps the
most-discussed gender dimension of rights violations during and after violent
conflict, there are other aspects of gender-related harms, which may also have
long-term effects once the conflict has ended, as several of the contributions
to the volume observe. These include the
likelihood that women will experience indirect as well as direct harms. They may lose the means of support for
themselves and their families where male relatives are killed or rendered
unable to work by conflict, particularly in societies where opportunities for
women in the workplace are limited. They
may also become caretakers to the injured, and thus unable to work. In countries where they are denied property
and inheritance rights, they may also lose their homes if male relatives who
owned them have been killed, or be unable to acquire another home where they
have been displaced. The damages are not only material, but also moral: women
may be stigmatized where male relations have been killed as somehow complicit
in others’ “deserved” victimhood, and emotionally damaged by the burden of the loss
of relatives and caretaking of survivors.
Despite the significant contributions of the
volume, areas where the studies might have been more detailed can be
identified. While many of the chapters make the crucial point that the gender
dimension of harms is not limited to SGBV, most do not discuss this in great
detail, nor do they consider the ways in which reparations might be tailored to
respond to these. In particular, where women are denied land ownership,
inheritance, or employment, how can reparations programmes provide for their
well-being? As the chapter by Colleen Duggan and Ruth Jacobson points out,
“[i]t would indeed be ironic if, after years of struggle to give adequate
recognition to the multiple expressions of gender-based violence that accompany
conflict and mass atrocity, women’s heavy economic and material losses were to
be overshadowed by the more visible realities of mass rape, sexualized torture,
mutilation, and sexual enslavement…” (p. 122).
This is indeed a critical point, and one which the book might have
addressed in more detail, particularly in the chapters dealing with modes of
reparations which might be more gender-sensitive.
As several authors note, simply seeking to
repair, in the sense of seeking a return to something like the status quo
ante is not an appealing solution where women were seriously disadvantaged
prior to the conflict. Distinct modes of
providing reparations may be particularly essential where being made to
females, given that cash payouts to women and girls are frequently spent on the
care of others, paying down debts, or simply taken by family members, such as
husbands or fathers. One alternative might be to provide reparations which are
not cash and which benefit communities rather than individual victims. However,
while such collective reparations may have their virtues, they may in the
process fail to acknowledge individual victimhood.
Surprisingly, few of the chapters directly
address the possibility that available forms of reparations such as individual
or collective compensation or symbolic reparations such as apologies and
memorials cannot truly repair victims of gross violations such as SGBV. This is of course not an argument against
providing reparations, or against seeking to refine them in ways that better
meet the needs of specific types of victims, but rather to acknowledge, as many
victims themselves will say, that no measure can eliminate the harm that was
inflicted upon them. Nonetheless, as the chapter by Anita Bernstein suggests,
while truth-telling and compensation are each alone insufficient, together they
can support more genuine reparation. She argues specifically that compensation
through microfinance and shareholding, rather than quick compensation, can both
serve as reparation for harm and ameliorate prior economic injustices against
women.
Several of the chapters, as well as the editor’s
introduction, refer to the need for victims’ rights as citizens to be
vindicated, and the importance of state recognition of the harm done to them by
the state. This is certainly a valid point, particularly where there is evident
state responsibility for violations.
However, at least two lacunae may result from this legal approach. First, who should provide reparations where
the violence was inflicted, as it so frequently is in internal armed conflict,
by non-state actors? Obviously, in some
instances such actors can be compelled to provide reparations, as is the case
with paramilitaries in
Perhaps the greatest innovation of the volume is
Rubio-Marìn’s addition to the taxonomy of reparations developed by de Greiff in
his groundbreaking handbook. De Greiff’s taxonomy of reparations identifies key
dimensions of reparations programmes.
These are: scope, completeness, comprehensiveness, internal and external
integrity or coherence, finality, and munificence.[3]
Rubio-Marìn adds “transformative potential” and “openness”. Openness refers to the degree to which
victims and victims groups can participate in the design of a reparations
program; a more open process may in itself reinforce their status as active
citizens recognized by the state.
Transformative potential refers to the degree to which a reparations
program can subvert existing gender hierarchies, rather than reinforce them.
The idea of transformative potential which is reflected in proposals for the
use of microfinance and other measures to not simply seek to “repair”, but to
redress broader social injustices, is perhaps the greatest contribution of the
volume, and one which those contemplating future reparations programmes ought
to take into account.
Individual Contributions
Ruth Rubio-Marín, Introduction: A Gender and Reparations Taxonomy;
Margaret Urban
Justice in Reparations;
Ruth Rubio-Marín, The Gender of Reparations in Transitional Societies;
Colleen Duggan and Ruth
Jacobson, Reparation of Sexual and Reproductive Violence:
Moving
from Codification to Implementation;
Dyan Mazurana and
Khristopher Carlson, Reparations as a Means
for Recognizing and Addressing
Crimes and Grave Rights Violations against Girls and Boys during
Situations of Armed Conflict and under Authoritarian and Dictatorial Regimes;
Ruth
Rubio-Marín, Clara Sandoval, and Catalina Díaz, Repairing Family Members: Gross Human Rights
Violations and
Communities of Harm;
Anita
Bernstein, Tort Theory, Microfinance, and
Gender Equality Convergent in
Pecuniary Reparations;
Brandon Hamber and
Ingrid Palmary, Gender, Memorialization, and
Symbolic Reparations;
Ruth Rubio-Marìn, Gender and Collective Reparations in the Aftermath of Conflict and Political Repression
[1] Pablo de Greiff, ed., The
handbook of reparations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Basic Principles and Guidelines on the Right
to a Remedy and Reparations for Victims of Gross Violations of International
Human Rights Law and Serious Violations of International Humanitarian Law UN
Doc. A/
[2] See also Ruth
Rubio-Marìn, What Happened to the Women?
Gender and Reparations for Human Rights Violations (
[3] de Greiff, “Introduction,” in de Greiff, ed., The handbook of reparations pp. 6-13.
