The Silent Victims of Sexual Violence during War: Evidence from a List Experiment in Sri Lanka

• DOI: 10.1177/0022002719828053
• Author: Markus Freitag,Sara Kijewski,Richard Traunmüller
• Date: 01 October 2019
• Published date: 01 October 2019
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

The Silent Victims of

Sexual Violence during

War: Evidence from a List

Experiment in Sri Lanka

Richard Traunmu

¨ller

1,2

, Sara Kijewski

3

,

and Markus Freitag

3

Abstract

Sexual violence is believed to be widespread during war. Yet empirical evidence

concerning its prevalence is often limited. Victims, out of feelings of shame or fear,

underreport this form of violence. We tackle this problem by administering a list

experiment in a representative survey in Sri Lanka, which is only recently recovering

from an ethnic civil war between Sinhalese and Tamils. This unobtrusive method

reveals that around 13 percent of the Sri Lankan population has personally expe-

rienced sexual assault during the war—a prevalence ten times higher than elicited by

direct questioning. We also identify vulnerable groups: Tamils who have collabo-

rated with rebel groups and the male-displaced population suspected of collabora-

tion with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Our experimental evidence thus

lends support to reports on the asymmetric use of sexual violence by government

forces, qualifies conventional wisdom on sexual violence during war, and has

important implications for policy.

Keywords

sexual violence, civil wars, Sri Lanka

1

Department of Political Science, University of Mannheim, Mannheim, Germany

2

Department of Social Sciences, Goethe University Frankfurt, Frankfurt am Main, Hessen, Germany

3

Department of Social Sciences, Institute of Political Science, University of Berne, Bern, Switzerland

Corresponding Author:

Richard Traunmu¨ller, Department of Social Sciences, Goethe University Frankfurt, Theodor-W-Adorno-

Platz 6, Frankfurt am Main, Hessen 60323, Germany.

Email: traunmueller@soz.uni-frankfurt.de

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2019, Vol. 63(9) 2015-2042

ªThe Author(s) 2019

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0022002719828053

journals.sagepub.com/home/jcr

Sexual violence is believed to be a widespread consequence of war and has been

documented to varying degrees in armed conflicts around the globe (e.g., Butler,

Gluch, and Mitchell 2007; Cohen 2013a, 2013b; Cohen, Green, and Wood 2013;

Cohen and Norda

˚s 2014; Green 2004; Leiby 2009a, 2009b; Plu

¨mper and

Neumeyer 2006; Wood 2006, 2009, 2014; Koos 2017). Several detailed qualitative

case studies, nongovernmental organization (NGO) reports, and quantitative large-

Ncross-national data collections (e.g., the Social Violence in Armed Conflict data

set by Cohen and Norda

˚s 2014) have contributed greatly to our understanding of

this particular form of violence. Despite this progress in recent years, the problem

of underreporting remains a critical challenge in the study of sexual violence

during war.

Due to its delicate nature, many victims of sexual violence remain silent about

their experiences. Rape and other instances of “sexual assault” are often followed by

feelings of shame, guilt, or fear of stigmatization on part of the victim. This problem

is exacerbated in traditional social contexts with rigid cultural norms concerning

sexuality and gender roles. In addition, reporting personal experiences of sexual

assault can be dangerous in (post)conflict situations when perpetrators hold political

power and victims must fear further repression. These concerns lead to underreport-

ing of sexual violence in conflict environments. As a result, our knowledge about the

exact prevalence of this type of violence remains limited, and adequate policy

recommendations are difficult to make.

In this article, we attempt to tackle this problem and expand our insights into

sexual violence with the help of a survey experiment. In particular, we turn to an

unobtrusive method known as “list experiment” that has been shown to effectively

elicit attitudes and behaviors that are fraught with problems of social desirability

bias, shame, or fear of repression (Kuklinski, Cobb, and Gilens 1997; Corstange

2009; Blair and Imai 2012; Glynn 2013). Instead of confronting respondents with a

direct question, list experiments indirectly infer respondents’ responses to a sensitive

topic. This is achieved by randomizing respondents into treatment and control

groups and presenting them different lists of survey items including the sensitive

item of interest. Evidence concerning the sensitive topic is then inferred from dif-

ferences in responses between treatment and control units. Recent successful appli-

cations of list experiments include general social scientific problems such as racial

prejudice (Berinsky 1999; Kuklinski, Cobb, and Gilens 1997), attitudes toward

immigration (Janus 2010), voter turnout (Holbrook and Krosnick 2010), or vote

buying (Gonzalez-Ocantos et al. 2012), as well as more specific problems related

to armed conflict, for example, civilians’ feelings of safety (Jayasuriya and Gibson

2013) or their support for combatants (Blair, Imai, and Lyall 2014). We aim to

leverage the methodological promise of list experiments to reveal the scope, distri-

bution, and determinants of sexual violence during war. Whereas “wartime sexual

violence” in a narrow sense refers to conflict-related sexual violence committed by

armed groups (e.g., Cohen 2013a; Wood 2009), we adopt a broader view that also

2016 Journal of Conflict Resolution 63(9)