“My body is the truth” Women in the Colombian Armed Conflict

Proceedings of The 4th Global Conference on Women’s Studies

Year: 2022

DOI:

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“My body is the truth” Women in the Colombian Armed Conflict

Paola Consuelo Ramos Martínez

ABSTRACT: 

Being a woman in an armed conflict, under the parameters of the structural oppression of the patriarchal system, means the reduction of her person to an object of use, exchange, and negotiation, that is, the increase in her exposure to various types of violence that are exercised against her for the very fact of being a woman. According to the Single Registry of Victims, women represented 49.73% of the 8,347,566 victims of the Colombian armed conflict. After the signing of the Peace Agreement in 2016, a process of recognition and dignity of the victims of the entire territory of the country began through the search for truth, justice, reparation, and non-repetition. Once the process was over, the “Truth Commission”, a temporary and extrajudicial mechanism to find out the truth about what happened in the context of the conflict, presented in chapter seven of its “Final Report” the voices of pain and suffering of 10,864 women, who told the world about the intolerable acts they suffered, their healing process, their peaceful resistance and their collective defense of life and dignity. The present work seeks, among other things, to show the situation of women in the Colombian armed conflict, describing the context of gender-based violence suffered, the impact on their lives, and the strategies implemented to work from their territories as agents of change for peace.

keywords: Colombian armed conflict, gender-based violence, women, peace