Digging in the Archives: The Promise and Perils of Primary Documents

• Author: Michele Leiby
• Published date: 01 March 2009
• Date: 01 March 2009
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0032329208329754
• Subject Matter: Articles

Digging in the Archives: The Promise and

Perils of Primary Documents*

MICHELE LEIBY

This article explores the methodological obstacles to research on wartime sexual

violence and the extent to which they can be overcome with archival research. It

discusses issues of concept formation, counting victims of human rights abuse,

and coding violations. It compares figures from the Peruvian Truth and

Reconciliation Commission’s final report, an analysis of the Commission’s pub-

lished materials, and an analysis of the primary documents and finds that (1) the

number of reported cases of sexual violence is significantly higher than the 538

cited by the Commission, (2) men were more often the targets of sexual violence

than previously thought, and (3) sexual humiliation and sexual torture were com-

mon practices during the war.

Keywords: sexual violence; rape; war; archives; Peru

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I would like to thank Kathryn Hochstetler, Marie Manrique, Elisabeth Wood, and the editorial

board of Politics & Society for their very helpful comments on previous drafts of this article. I would

also like to thank the participants of the Workshop on Sexual Violence at Yale University for their

comments. Special thanks to the dedicated staff of the Centro de Información para la Memoria

Colectiva y los Derechos Humanos in Peru for the important work that they do in preserving the

historical record so that we may never forget the extraordinary costs of civil war.

Thanks to the Feminist Research Institute and the Research Project and Travel Grant Committee

at the University of New Mexico and the Council on Latin American and Iberian Studies at Yale

University for their financial support.

POLITICS & SOCIETY, Vol. 37 No. 1, March 2009 75-100

DOI: 10.1177/0032329208329754

© 2009 Sage Publications

*This article is part of a special section of Politics & Society on the topic “patterns of wartime sexual violence.”

The papers were presented at the workshop Sexual Violence during War held at Yale University in November 2007.

For more information, please refer to the introduction to this section.

INTRODUCTION

Accounts of wartime rape, sexual torture, forced impregnation, and sexual

slavery have been reported in Liberia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, Congo,

Sudan, Sri Lanka, East Timor, and Sierra Leone in the last ten years alone.

Sexual violence is one of the most horrific and intimate forms of nonlethal

violence during war. Victims of sexual violence may suffer chronic health

problems, face social stigma and isolation, and often confront inordinate obstacles

to obtaining justice and reparation. The urgency of documenting the occurrence

and understanding the causes of wartime sexual violence should not be under-

estimated, as stories of such atrocities in the Sudan and displacements camps in

the Republic of Congo continue to appear frequently in media reports.

Emerging research on the patterns and determinants of wartime sexual violence

represents one of the most exciting developments in the political violence and human

rights literatures. Scholars are making significant advancements in documenting the

prevalence and patterns of sexual violence and identifying the determinants of its use

in civil and international conflicts.1 Employing different methodological approaches

and research designs, they are developing new theories to explain individual, group

and state, or conflict-level variation in sexual violence. However, research on wartime

sexual violence is faced with unique practical, ethical, and methodological obstacles.

Using Peru as an illustrative case study, this article discusses the challenges of col-

lecting and coding data on wartime sexual violence and offers suggestions for over-

coming them. I argue that the methods employed by truth commissions, including in

how cases of sexual violence are defined and counted, are too narrow, and may ulti-

mately miss or misrepresent “the truth.”

This article is organized as follows. In the section below, I will provide a

brief overview of the civil conflict in Peru and the subsequent work of the

Comisión para la Verdad y Reconciliación (CVR; Commission for Truth and

Reconciliation). I then discuss the four most common methodological obstacles

confronted by scholars of political and sexual violence. I compare the figures on

rape reported in the Commission’s final report with those I have found after a

careful reading of the final report and published supplementary materials. I also

compare these figures to those in my sample of the original testimonies. Doing

so provides a unique opportunity to examine the processes through which

reports of human rights abuse are collected, information sorted, and statistics

transmitted. I show that what we know about wartime violence depends greatly

on the choices we make in designing our investigations.

Manchay Tiempo (Time of Fear): The Peruvian Civil War

and Political Violence, 1980–2000

On May 17, 1980, a small group of armed persons broke into the local election

board offices in Chuschi and burned the ballot boxes to be used the following day

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