Child tracing: locating the paternal homes of “children born of war”

“They Now Know That They Are Children of War”: Forcibly Abducted Mothers and Fathers Balancing Disclosure and Silencing to Their Children Born of War in Northern Uganda

“…However, the parents indicated a need for future disclosure when the demand of resources and support (e.g., school fees, land) would increase. Customary "marriages are patrilocal, a woman marries into her husband's clan" (Madhani and Baines, 2020, p. 3) and, consequently, her children belong to and are supported by the man's wider family and clan (Carlson and Mazurana, 2008;Porter, 2015;Apio, 2016;Mutsonziwa et al, 2020). Consequently, as a way of accessing more resources, some mothers indicated that they have or would consider reconnecting with their "partner" with whom they stayed in forced captivity.…”

“…Especially studies on forced marriages highlighted that the vast majority (e.g., 98% in a study performed by Annan et al, 2008) of the mothers did not wish to be reconnected with the child's biological father. However, more recent studies have indicated that biological parents and clans do reconnect to support children born of war (Mutsonziwa et al, 2020;Oliveira and Baines, 2020;Baines and Oliveira, 2021) as they seek to "transform relations of violence into relations of care" (Rodriguez Di Eugenio and Baines, 2021, p. 341). We hypothesize that these differences in research outcomes could be connected to the increased need of resources and support when children born in forced captivity grow older, combined with the importance of belonging and identity for children born of war (see further).…”

“…Ethnographic research has explored the importance of the paternal home in Acholi, providing accountability, identity, embeddedness in wider social spaces and, by consequence, various material and social resources in the upbringing of children (Mergelsberg, 2012). Consequently, children who did not know their biological fathers don't or have less access to crucial resources for belonging, marriage, and land access and inheritance (Opiyo, 2015;Lakor, 2017, 2018;Mutsonziwa et al, 2020;Baines and Oliveira, 2021). However, in her research among children born of war in Northern Uganda, Stewart (2017) found that "the children challenge the boundaries of their positionalities to negotiate a partial, or limited, belonging" (p. 17) as they "refuse to accept their exclusion" (p. 179).…”

“…Third, an important contribution of this study was the inclusion of the perspective of fathers, which has been lacking in research on forced marriages within the LRA (Apio, 2016;Aijazi et al, 2019;Denov and Cadieux Van Vliet, 2020;Denov and Drumbl, 2020;Mutsonziwa et al, 2020;Oliveira and Baines, 2020), and, more generally, in research and practice regarding the upbringing of children during and after collective violence (Wieling et al, 2015;El-Khani et al, 2016;Murphy et al, 2017;Mehus et al, 2018). When laying out the findings of our study, the gender-specific experiences and difficulties in the trajectories of trauma communication were highlighted.…”

The “secret war”: Silence, testimony, and wartime sexual violence

“…Through the mediation work of other survivors, injured parties reach an agreement on how to live together in the fray of war's afterlives. 18 In between voice and silence, Adok navigates patriarchal institutions to repair relationships, and in so doing, reaches towards a future unmarred by the past. 19 "I still hope.…”