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Peace A. Medie, "Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence Against Women in Africa" (Oxford UP, 2020)
01:02:06
An interview with Peace A. Medie
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- [00:00]
Marshall Poe
Limu Imu and Doug. Here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
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Peace Medea
Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
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Marshall Poe
Cut the camera. They see us.
- [00:22]
Peace Medea
Only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings vary unwritten by.
- [00:28]
Jack Daniels Advertiser
Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates.
- [00:29]
Peace Medea
Excludes Massachusetts.
- [00:31]
Jack Daniels Advertiser
This episode is brought to you by Jack Daniels. Jack Daniels and music are made for each other. They share a rhythm in the craft of making something timeless while being a part of legendary nights. From backyard jams to sold out arenas, there's a song in every toast. Please drink responsibly. Responsibility.org, jack Daniels and Old no. 7 are registered trademarks. Tennessee whiskey, 40% alcohol by volume. Jack Daniel Distillery, Lynchburg, Tennessee.
- [00:55]
Marshall Poe
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Poe. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBM Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:02]
Lamis Abdelahi
Hello and welcome back to New Books in Political Science, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Lamis Abdelahi from the Maxwell School of Syracuse University. Today I'll be talking to Peace Medea about her book Global Norms and Local the Campaigns to End Violence Against Women in Africa, which was published by Oxford University Press in 2020. This book bridges the literatures in international relations, gender politics, African studies and and Public administration to examine the micro foundations of norm implementation. Peace. Welcome to the show.
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Peace Medea
Thank you. Thank you for having me.
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Lamis Abdelahi
So I wonder if you could begin the interview by just telling us a little bit about yourself.
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Peace Medea
I am associate professor in politics at the University of Bristol. Global Norms and Local Actions. The Campaign to Advance Against Women in Africa is my first book. I am also a novelist, so I write fiction as well. And my first novel is Only Wife, and the next one comes out next June. And I work broadly on gender based violence on norm implementation.
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And I also teach about gender based violence and gender insecurity more broadly.
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Lamis Abdelahi
And you're too humble to mention that you received much critical acclaim for your first novel. But we're here to talk about global norms and local action. So can you tell us how you came to write this book?
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Peace Medea
Yes. So I lived in Liberia in the early stages of the civil war. And so from a very early age, I was aware of violence against civilians. I was aware of.
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How people experience armed conflict. And so I've always had this interest, this general interest in, in studying armed conflict and its effect on people. And I also knew I wanted to study women, partly because I'd heard the stories of many women, including people I knew personally. But of course, it wasn't until I became a doctoral student or maybe when I started my masters that the personal interests began to.
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Converge with the academic interests. Because when I became a student, I then had the language.
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And I guess the skills to study this topic.
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Lamis Abdelahi
And the result is a really compelling book. So the book examines a particular norm, the international women's justice norm. What does that phrase mean?
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Peace Medea
Yes. So when I started doing this work, I noticed that over time, and I will say across Africa, especially From the early 1990s, there's been a focus on accountability, on ending impunity for gender based violence. And a lot of it is, it's partly international in that some of it is coming from the UN and from initiatives like the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 that sought to address, among other things, violence against women in conflict and after conflict. But what this norm did, and what I noticed was there were several international policy documents from the African Union, from regional organizations like sadc, the South African Development.
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Committee.
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That sought to basically move the conversation beyond, you know, gender based violence being something that is addressed outside of the criminal justice system and something that requires.
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Offenders to be held accountable. And so I saw this in international policy documents, international instruments. I saw this also in just the creation of organizations and institutions. And so what the message coming from International organizations, but also from women's movements within countries was we need to hold offenders accountable, but also we need to treat victims with sensitivity. We need to end the re victimization of survivors. Because it was very common. For example, when I did interviews in Cote d', Ivoire, for example, and they said, you know, before.
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We had a specialized unit, it was very common that if a woman had experienced rape, she would come to the police station and the police will begin questioning her at the front desk in the presence of other people. And I mean, that is just so traumatizing. And so what this international justice norm was basically saying is that we need to end that we need to hold offenders accountable, but we also need to treat victims better.
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Lamis Abdelahi
Thank you. Now, as I understand it, and please correct me if I've misunderstood, the book deals with one practice or one technique for operationalizing this norm, which is specialized criminal justice sector mechanisms like specialized police and gendarmerie units. And you argue that there are three stages of implementation. There is creation, institutionalization and street level implementation. And that these three stages are influenced in turn by international pressure, domestic pressure, and domestic political and institutional conditions. Now, it's a very, very nuanced argument, but can you explain it to us in sort of general terms?
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Peace Medea
Yes. So I realized very early on that if I wanted to understand what states were states were doing, I would have to really go beyond what is on paper because states will sign on to international agreements that say we are going to pass laws, we are going to create institutions. And if I realized that if I wanted to conduct a study based only on what states had agreed to, the picture would actually be very, very rosy. And it will show that post conflict state or states in general were really doing an excellent job at addressing gender based violence. In fact, if I also just wanted to look at the construction of buildings, that these police stations existed, these specialized mechanisms existed, it would also give me a very positive picture of what was happening. But I realized that I needed to do more than that, that I needed to look at what was happening within the institutions, what was happening in terms of the daily decisions around the creation of these institutions, but also what happened after the institutions had been created. And so I decided to study norm implementation not as this one action, but I broke it down into three different things. One was a creation. And at this stage I said, if a document has been signed, even if it's just a press release saying that we are creating this specialized unit, I'm going to count it as creation. And then the much deeper level is institutionalization. And this is formalization of the unit beyond writing on paper and having a press release. And this is saying that this unit is being made a key part of the police force because I was focusing on specialized police units. And so I was looking at things as like, was there.
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A directorate, was there a central directorate where there's specially trained officers and where these officers devoted to addressing gender based violence and did they have offices? So it went beyond what was written on paper to kind of in depth analysis of what was happening within these institutions. And then I also look at a street level implementation, because why is any of this important? It's just that I wanted to understand how women and survivors of gender based violence more broadly were being served. So at the end of the day, it wasn't only about, oh, let us see whether these institutions have been established and are a key part of the police force, but whether or not it was making a difference in the lives of survivors of violence. So that is why I had these three categories or three things that I'm looking at as implementation.
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Lamis Abdelahi
So, and what is the role of these international and domestic factors? Right. You know, what role do international pressure, domestic pressure and domestic conditions play in shaping the salience and the speed of, you know, these three stages that you just described?
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Peace Medea
Yes. So what we, what we know, or what we knew then from the.
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Literature on international norms and norm implementation was that international actors were important. And they use a variety of tools, including coercion, for example, to get states to act and to comply. But we also knew that domestic actors were important. And when you go beyond the IR literature to look at the gender studies literature, the African studies literature, the policing literature, the public admin literature, you get a wealth of insights into how domestic actors and conditions matter.
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But within IR literature, some of what we needed to understand was.
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How much do domestic actors matter in comparison to international actors. But also at what stage.
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Are domestic actors more relevant, more impactful? So what we know is that domestic actors are important, international actors are important. And I wanted to know, well, at what stage are they important and how exactly are they important? And can you have movements, can you have institutionalization in the absence of maybe strong international pressure or strong domestic pressure? So I think those are very interesting questions to ask when it comes to the establishment of specialized police units.
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Lamis Abdelahi
But.
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Peace Medea
Also when you just in study norm implementation more broadly, because I think some of this is relevant for understanding.
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Other areas of norm implementation. And I should just also say briefly that there really wasn't much work done on specialized policing in Africa. So Most of the literature when I started working focused on Latin America, especially Brazil, that created the first woman's police station, I believe, in 1985. And there just wasn't much work on even just describing what specialized policing when it comes to gender based violence looked like in African countries. So this was why I, I wanted to study this. And my argument and the key points that I, I make in the book is that international actors are very important. Like we know, however, international actors matter most at the creation stage. And so that is the stage where you get the people at the top to say, we are going to create a specialized police unit and maybe a document is signed. International actors are very important at this stage. So what I found in my comparison of Liberia and Cote d', Ivoire, where Liberia had.
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Four different specialized mechanisms, as opposed to Cote d' Ivoire that had one. But also Liberia had done a much better job at institutionalizing its special mechanisms in that there was a central directorate for the Women and Children's Protection section of the police force. Police officers were specifically trained to address gender based violence. They worked only on gender based violence, in contrast to Cote d', Ivoire, where it was normal for a police officer to in one day work on a rape case and the next day is working on theft. And because at that point gender based violence basically was not an issue that was being given the kind of attention that they needed.
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And so the question was, why did these countries differ in how they were implementing this norm? And my argument is that at the creation stage, the UN was extremely important. So the international actor, the main international actor, the UN was key to creation or the creation of these specialized units. However.
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When it came to institutionalization.
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Domestic actors, specifically the women's movement, as well as domestic conditions within and outside of the police force were extremely important. So while international pressure remained consistently high.
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Domestic pressure was not as high in Cote d' Ivoire as it was in Liberia. And my argument is that that that greatly contributed to a very rapid institutionalization of the specialized police force in Liberia in comparison to Cote d'.
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Marshall Poe
Ivoire.
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Lamis Abdelahi
Thank you. Now, so as you mentioned, right, and listeners now understand that the book focuses on these two countries, right? Liberia and Cote d'. Ivoire. So what led you to select these two countries and what sort of research did you do in, in both contexts?
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Peace Medea
So I adopted a kind of a very structured focus comparison of these two countries. And Liberia was the country, I think across Africa has the most specialized units. Liberia has a, or at that time I conducted in, I worked in Liberia in 2020, 2010 and 2011. And during this time it had the Women and Children's Protection section of the police force, which was my focus. There was Criminal Court E and it was a court devoted exclusively to rape. There was a sexual and gender based violence prosecution unit within the Ministry of Justice and there was a gender based violence prosecution unit that dealt with non sexual gender based violence also within the Ministry of Justice. So they had all of these specialized mechanisms were created after the Civil War in 2003, with the women and Children's protection section my focus created in 2005, whereas Cote d' Ivoire only had the gender desks created in 2014. Before the civil war and even during the war in Cote d', Ivoire, there were what were called gender focal points. And these were individual police officers who had received some training and were in a regular police station and would deal with cases as they came. But they weren't in every police station and it wasn't something that was formalized. And like I said, they didn't have like a central directorate that was overseeing all of this action. So these countries very much. They differed in terms of how much had been done. But also by 2007, Liberia had established specialized units across the country.
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Whereas three, four years after D' Ivoire had created its gender desk, they were not established across all regions of the country. And so there were a lot of differences. But what it allowed me to do was to compare two countries, one that seemed to have made great progress in establishing a specialized police unit and one that had not.
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Come as far in establishing a specialized unit. And I should say that in the book I talk about how even with the specialized units being established, there were still many weaknesses when it, when it came to policing, when it came to addressing gender based violence. So the fact that the units exist or existed and were spread across the country in Liberia did not mean that they had solved the problem and everything was going well. In fact, many of the police stations I visited in Liberia were heavily under resourced. So, yes, the institution exists, but the resources you have, the personnel you have the structure, but they don't have vehicles to go to a crime scene and they don't have money to buy petrol to put in a vehicle to go to the crime scene. So I like to kind of make this distinction that the existence of these units does not mean that they work the way we want them to work. But what it allowed me to do is to compare two countries, one that had made more progress than the other. And.
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It became clear very quickly that I would have to spend a lot of time talking to a lot of people because like I said, if I relied on what was in like policy documents and legal documents, I would not get a full picture of what was happening in the country. And so I did over 300 interviews in, in, in both countries.
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And so I worked basically from like 2010 to 2017, I was collecting data. This started as my, started as my doctoral dissertation. I studied Liberia only for my dissertation. And after I then added Cote d' Ivoire as a comparative, a comparative case.
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But what I did was I spent a lot of time in police stations.
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Just talking to police officers, wanting to understand how they worked and why they worked the way that they worked. But also because I couldn't rely only on what the police officers told me. I had to speak with survivors of violence, I had to speak with social workers, I spoke with women's rights activists, I spoke with UN officials, I spoke with officials from a range of international and local human rights organizations just to try to get a picture of what was happening within police stations, but also at the decision making stage before the police, the units were even created.
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Lamis Abdelahi
And I think that that's what makes the empirical chapter so rich in this book. So, you know, you've already alluded to this a little bit, but.
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In the book you spend quite a bit of time for each country.
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Describing trends in violence against women and then the response to that. So I wonder if we could start with Liberia and if you could tell us about violence against women in that country and what the response to that looked like.
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Peace Medea
Yes. So I wanted, I really wanted the book to give a historical picture. So I start way before the civil war in talking about what violence against women looked like and recognizing that there was no data at that point, I could not really get data. So I was relying on things like.
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Police reports from the 80s just to get a kind of an idea of the kind of cases they were getting.
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And how frequently people were reporting these cases.
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So it became clear that.
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Like in, I think every country, there was a lot of gender based violence, violence against women, physical violence, sexual violence. But most cases were not reported to the police.
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And even when I spoke with police officers who had worked before the war, they said, I remember someone saying, well, I think we only dealt with, we only took seriously, like severe rape cases. So this is to say that there was even like categories of rape and some were considered more serious than others. And it's usually cases that involved children that were considered very serious. So what from the documents from the Interviews, it was clear that there was violence against women, but there really wasn't a strong state response to it.
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And even though Liberia had been active internationally on issues of women's rights, there just wasn't much conversation around.
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Addressing gender based violence. Although there were women's groups and women's organizations that have been protesting violence against women during this time. And of course, it was during the civil war that violence against women became widespread. Physical violence, sexual violence became widespread, a lot of it committed by armed groups. And after the war ended, I spoke to activists and they said, well, one of the things that surprised us was we really thought that when the war ended, we would not be hearing about these horrifying cases of violence. And they said, but the war ended. They had signed a peace agreement, but we were hearing about gang rapes and people being raped and murdered. And so actually after the war, after the peace agreement was signed, there were large marches by women protesting this violence.
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And my argument, part of what I explained in the book, is that it is this kind of marches that contributed to the response that we saw from the Liberian government, including the transitional government.
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Where they said there was a speech by the transitional president. And I'm kind of paraphrasing it, but he said, we know these women and we know how strong they were during the war, and we know what they did to try to end the war, so we need to pay attention to what they are saying. And so there was one of the marches where the women marched to the office of the president and one of them delivered a speech talking about how the war had ended, but there was still so much rape and victimization of children. And so that kind of contributed to the response that we saw from the government, where.
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Even though, yes, there was international pressure, yes, the UN was playing a very key role in reforming the police force. But at the same time, the fact that the women's movement in Liberia was strong, had gained recognition during the war meant that when they spoke, people listened. So one of the things that I did in trying to compare the strength of the women's movement in Liberia and Cordoba was looking at how often they were mentioned in newspapers.
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And I found that the Liberian women's movement was mentioned much more, both in international newspapers and local newspapers. What that meant was that they were visible and that people paid attention when they spoke. And they could go to the president and make demands, and they could go to the UN and make demands in ways that I didn't see the women's movement.
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Making similar demands in Cote d' Ivoire, or at least not being given the audience because the women's movement was active in Cote d' Ivoire as well, but did not have the kind of.
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I guess, the status that would have allowed them to speak directly to the president and to make the kinds of demands that were being made, be made in Liberia. And so post conflict Liberia, violence against women remained a problem, especially sexual violence. And their response is one of the responses was the Women and Children's protection section that was created.
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And something that I think, and speaking to one UN official who said, even when Liberia did not have the resources, they made the effort. So often they did not have many. Many of the places did not have standalone buildings like Cote d' Ivoire, had standalone gender deaths. And often the gender based violence office within the police force in Liberia was just a small room. They did not even have the resources to set up a standalone building with an office. But as the UN officials said, the government was willing to give whatever space they had.
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To this unit to ensure that they could do the work that they needed to do. So that was what the response looked like.
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In Liberia. D' Ivoire during the war at least did not have sexual violence on the scale that Liberia had. But I'm always careful when discussing this because you just don't have comparative data. So much of it is based on maybe news reports and on interviews. But what seems to be the case or what seemed to have happened Cote d' Ivoire was there was sexual violence, but not on the scale. In fact, violence across the board was not on the scale as the same scale as it was in Liberia.
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And after the war.
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The kind of movement, the pressure that we saw in Liberia with women's movement was just not the same in Cote d'. Ivoire. And one of the things that I quickly found out when I spoke to women's rights activists was that they said, we don't want to be seen as political actors. We feel that if we make demands of the government, they might think that we are supporting the opposition. And so the civil society space was very politicized in Cote d' Ivoire in the way that it wasn't in Liberia. And I spoke to people working in NGOs in Cote d', Ivoire, activists who said, you know, instead of protesting, instead of lobbying the government, we've decided that we will provide services.
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We will provide health care for rape survivors, will provide counseling, will provide legal support. So there was almost this.
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People were trying not to be involved in politics and lobbying the government and protesting and basically Complaining about what was happening for many people, there was the fear that it will be seen as political and they will be seen as political actors, and they wanted to avoid this. And so, of course, that led to a different response in Cote d'. Ivoire. And something else that I think is also important I mentioned briefly was also, I think, the degree to which the UN was involved in Liberia. So the UN was.
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I think, very, very important in reforming the police force in Liberia. And I spoke with UN officials who said, look, the police force did not even exist when we got there and they had to build this police force up and of course, wanting it to be better than what it was before the war. But what that meant was that the UN had access in Liberia in a way that it did not have in Cote d' Ivoire because the security sector remained.
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Quite strong.
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And hadn't been.
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I would say, devastated as it was in Liberia during the war.
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And for that reason, the UN did not have the same kind of access in Cote d'. Ivoire. But also the UN was seen as a political actor in Cote d' Ivoire as well in a way that it wasn't seen in Liberia. There were pockets or sections of the security sector that felt like the UN had.
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Backed different actors within the conflict in Cote d'. Ivoire. And so you'd have supporters of.
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Gbagbo who felt that, you know, the UN was against them and therefore, and some of them were in the security sector. And so there was almost this resistance. And I also spoke with some gendarmes in Cote d' Ivoire who said.
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We think this whole thing about gender based violence and specialized policing is because the UN is trying to weaken the gendarmerie. Right? And asking us to also include women in the gendarmerie is an attempt to weaken us.
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So this is the kind of discourse that was happening. Whereas you didn't see much of this in Liberia. People didn't think, oh, the UN is trying to destroy the police force by asking us to address gender based violence. So the UN itself was politicized in Cote d' Ivoire in a way that it wasn't politicized in Liberia. And I think that made it relatively easier for the UN to shape their response. But I do want to underline that it wasn't the case that the UN went in and said, liberia do this, and it happened within Liberia. There was strong support for addressing gender based violence, beginning with the women's movement, even within the police force. One of the things that happened was under President Sirleaf Johnson.
- [35:29]
For the first time, they were very senior women in the police force and they had a key role to play in shaping the different departments and units that were being created. And this is not to say that women always advance women's interests or that women always care about gender based violence, but in this case, the women that were put there were aware of the problem, thought it was important and wanted to address it.
- [35:57]
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- [37:08]
Peace Medea
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- [37:38]
Lamis Abdelahi
Thank you. So I wonder if we could talk more now about the institutionalization stage.
- [37:48]
Can you tell us more about what the establishment of these specialized units looked like in Liberia versus in Cote d'? Ivoire?
- [37:55]
Peace Medea
Yes. So in Liberia, the conversation around the creation of the units began quite early.
- [38:07]
And people, a lot of people tend to assume that it was because Liberia had a woman president. And I like to point out that actually a lot of important steps were taken before she became president, including the creation of the Women and Children's Protection Section.
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But so by 2005, the unit had been created.
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And within the span of three years, you have a Central Directorate in Monrovia. You have a great deal of training, first of all, recruitment of women into the police force, but training, specialized training around gender based violence.
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And having officials who worked exclusively on gender based violence, which meant that you went into the police station and even if it was not a separate building or a separate office, there were these officials who worked only on gender based violence.
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And when I spoke with them, it quickly became clear that they lacked the resources. And something as basic as, you know, having phone chips of phone cards to make phone calls, to follow up on cases was a problem. Police officers were sometimes paying for survivors medical care. Some of them were paying out of pocket to go to crime scenes, although often.
- [39:42]
The survivor's family would have to pay for all of these things. So what became clear was that the training had been done.
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I mean, the training could have been more.
- [39:59]
I guess, intensive, but there was training that had been given to every official within the Women and Children's Possession section.
- [40:10]
And they had the structures in place. Often the structures were far from what was needed was, but there was some structure in place. And they had done this in all counties of the country. And when I spoke with the police officers, both male and female, what was clear was that they understood, and this is when I talk about the norm being salient. They understood and agreed for the most part that rape was a very serious problem. And that while before the war, but also before the unit was created, after the war, they were more willing to hand over rape cases to the family. Now they understood that that was just not acceptable. It doesn't mean that it wasn't done. It means that they knew and very clearly and deeply that this was something that they should not do.
- [41:16]
And they had also kind of, I guess, mostly done away with the idea that there was serious and not serious rape, that some victims were more victims than others, that they were more deserving of justice than others. I found that these attitudes were just not as.
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Common as they seem to have been before the war and immediately after the war. So to me, that.
- [41:49]
Was evidence of.
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This norm being internalized. That even if they did not have the resources to always follow up on the case, at least there was the understanding that this is what we should be doing. We know we should be doing this. We are not doing this maybe because we don't have the resources, but we know we should be doing it. And if we had the resources, we would be doing it. So that is what institutionalization looked like. Cote d' Ivoire gender focal points were assigned to some police stations.
- [42:29]
During the conflict. After the conflict in 2014, the gender desk was created with funding from the UN and the European Union. And I think something that was great about Cote d' Ivoire was the funding ensured that buildings, you know, buildings separate such that survivors would come in and not have to walk through.
- [42:54]
Different rooms full of different people coming from for a variety of reasons. But survivors would go to a designated area and speak to police officers who would have had some training.
- [43:10]
Not all of them had the required training. And the way in which Liberia had a specialized course that all of the women and children's protection police officers took, it wasn't the same thing in Cote d'. Ivoire. Often someone would have gone to some course, some organization had a short course, the UN had a short course, maybe the police force had a short course, and then, you know, they took that course and then they became the person who dealt with gender issues.
- [43:45]
But even three years after the the gender desk had been created, many parts of the country did not have gender desks. But also the officials the police officers assigned to gender deaths often worked on other issues.
- [44:07]
And to me, that was a very strong indication of the degree to which gender based violence was prioritized within the police force.
- [44:22]
And when I did speak with the police officers in Cote d', Ivoire, I think there was more, slightly more willingness to say, well, maybe there are other ways of dealing with rape that doesn't or that don't involve the police. Whereas police officers in Liberia were less likely to say this. And I like to point out that not because they weren't doing it, but just because it was thoroughly understood that this was wrong and should not be done.
- [44:58]
Lamis Abdelahi
Thank you. So we've kind of already gotten a little bit into street level implementation or the performance of street level officers. But can you tell us more about what the situation looked like at the street level in these two countries?
- [45:13]
Peace Medea
Yes. So what I saw in, in Liberia was that when police or when survivors would report cases, they would be recorded and based on whatever information had been gathered, evidence gathered would be passed on to the prosecutor. And something that was less likely to happen was the police deciding that we would make the decision and not the prosecutor. So of course, not all cases went to court, not all cases went to trial. But the police were not serving as judges in the police station. They were forwarding these cases to the Prosecutor to make the decision. And so it meant that in comparison to the pre conflict period, immediately after the conflict, survivors were more likely to meet officials who would take the case seriously, record it, forward it to the prosecutor. And I mean, that was a major, a major improvement. Something that they were also more aware of in both countries was the issue of re victimization.
- [46:34]
So I spoke about how it wasn't at all strange that a survivor will be questioned.
- [46:43]
In public in front of everyone and asked, well, what were you wearing? Why were you wearing that and where did you go? Why did you go there? So in both of these countries, the police officers told me that they were more aware and that they had stopped some of these things. A practice that was particularly concerning, among many other concerning practices in Cote d' Ivoire was they will sit the survivor across from the accused and basically ask them to almost argue it out. And I think the thinking behind that was that the person who won the argument was more likely to be telling the truth. But I mean, the trauma that will result from being placed in front of your attacker and ask and like having some form of a debate to prove that you were right. I mean, how, how terrible was that? And so they told me that these were things that they had learned. Even the people who had not, who were not assigned to gender based violence kind of had an understanding that we can't be doing these things anymore. However, and I should also say when I spoke with survivors and I spoke with activists and counselors, they did say that there was some improvement. So there was some facts in what the police were saying. And women's rights activists spoke up in both Liberia and Cote d', Ivoire, said that policing had improved. But at the same time, I found that there were many, many, many problems in both countries. I spoke, for example, I spoke to a survivor who went to the police station in Cote d'. Ivoire. It was in Abidjan, I believe, and she had reported. And she told me how the police kept the accused family. I think they were very wealthy people. And she said the policeman in charge of the case kept asking her, are you sure you want to do this? Do you understand how this is going to affect his life? And that is something that we hear all the time in many countries. He has a bright future ahead of him. Do you really want to do this to him?
- [49:12]
And she held her ground. But then she said, he started asking very, very.
- [49:19]
Sensitive questions. And he said, well, how did he rape you? Was he standing up and were your legs in the air? And she said, after That I was like, I can't do this, I don't want to do this. But the only reason she stayed was that she called a counselor at a local NGO and the counselor came and stood with her and she said, you know, this person stood by me and that was the only reason that I was able to go through with the case.
- [49:52]
So yes, improvement. But at the same time, these practices persist. Not as widely as they were, but these practices persist. So this is why it was important for me to not speak to only the police officers. Because not a single police officer said, oh yes, I accept bribes and oh yes, I side with the accused. No, but when you speak to the survivors and you speak to the counselors and the social workers, then you get a better picture of what was happening.
- [50:24]
Lamis Abdelahi
Certainly. And you know, as I was reading the book and as I'm hearing you speak now, I can't help but think about commonalities with, you know, stories that we hear in the United States and in other countries as well.
- [50:37]
So I can't let you leave without asking you what are the policy implications of this study?
- [50:46]
Peace Medea
Yeah, so.
- [50:49]
I think one important finding was that.
- [50:55]
Specialized policing makes a difference.
- [50:59]
And with sufficient training, monitoring and resources, they can actually.
- [51:10]
Greatly improve survivors experiences of the criminal justice system and they can ensure that more people get access to justice.
- [51:23]
I was really encouraged to see that because when the police in Africa, the policing literature tells us that the police was not the police force in many African countries was not created to serve the people, but rather to serve colonial interests. And we've also, it's also been shown that male police officers tend not to.
- [51:52]
Prioritize issues like gender based violence. But I was very encouraged to see that police officers, even in situations where they lack the resources, were committed and they wanted to work and they want, a lot of them wanted to do the right thing. And for me that is, that is very encouraging. So even though in both Cote d' Ivoire and Liberia it is, the police force is far, far from where you want it to be in terms of specialized policing, it is definitely better than what existed before the conflict and it is better than what existed after the conflict, before these specialized units were created.
- [52:38]
I like to, I guess, celebrate incremental changes, recognize them, because I think we can learn a lot from these tiny changes. It's far from perfect, it's far from what we want for survivors, but it's an improvement. And so I think the first thing is that specialized policing matters, it makes a difference and that we need to get both states and international actors to commit to it. One of the problems I saw in.
- [53:13]
Liberia, in Cote d' Ivoire as well, is that to some people the specialized units were almost seen as belonging to the un. And for me that is very concerning because at that time the UN was beginning to pull out of both countries. So if it's not seen, if there isn't this domestic ownership, if the government doesn't see it as a key part of what they're supposed to be doing, what happens when the UN withdraws its personnel and the funding or greatly reduces funding? So I think that there needs to be domestic ownership. And also important is that women's movements are extremely important actor because they really, they maintain the pressure and they do their best to make sure that this gender based violence is seen as important.
- [54:14]
That the structures are in place to address the problem. In Liberia, they had set up an entire network such that if a person reported rape, you know, there was, they will immediately refer you to a legal advisor, to a health, health specialist, to the police. And then there will be, there will be people following up to make sure that the police were doing what they were supposed to be doing. So the women's movement were important from the, from the creation stage to institutionalization to the daily performance. And I think this is important in terms of ir, because when we think about implementation.
- [54:55]
I think we don't really recognize the importance that actors like women's movements play in the implementation of domestic norms. And what my work shows is that they're extremely important and that in fact they are also shaping the norm. And I'd like to make the point that they are not just recipients of an international norm, that they are key actors in shaping how we implement the norm. And you will see that based on what has been done in countries like Liberia, even Rwanda, Rwanda has a much lauded specialized unit that has fed into how specialized policing is being done. And so I want to give credit to women's organizations, activists in these countries that through the pressure, through the supports they provide, a lot of free services they provide, they are also shaping how we implement this norms. Something else that I think is important from a policy perspective is that there's a need for a very holistic approach to addressing gender based violence. I think that from the international level there's a lot of focus and a lot being relative on.
- [56:10]
Policing.
- [56:13]
And.
- [56:15]
I will speak briefly about how appropriate is policing. But there's a lot of focus on policing. But we know that so much happens before you ever get to the police station. And I think that there needs to be a focus on prevention, on changing norms and practices that lead to violence. But I also, when violence happens, policing, yes, is important, but also we want to make sure that.
- [56:46]
Survivors have health care that. So I spoke to, for example, survivors in Cote d' Ivoire and one of the biggest things they wanted was people just wanted help to get on their feet after they had been victimized. I spoke to women who said, I want to leave where I live and move elsewhere. Because now, and I will never forget this, a young woman who said, nobody knows my name anymore. I'm now the girl who was raped. That's now my name. And when I walk through the community, people point at me and say, that is the girl who was raped. And my friends are now known as the friends of the girl who was raped. And she says, I just want to leave this place, but I have no money and I have nowhere to go. And that really underlines the need for a holistic approach to addressing gender based violence. Because arresting and even prosecuting and imprisoning incarceration is not enough for most survivors. People need much more than that. The final thing I'd like to say in terms of policies, because we are in a very interesting time. I mean, maybe more in the US than in countries like Liberia, but there's, there's an important conversation around the police, this conversation around defunding the police. And even within African countries, you ask, how can an institution that was never created to, to protect the people be expected to serve the people? So I, I realized that there is a serious tension there. And as in expecting the police to do this job and do it well. But apart from the improvements that I saw in policing, yes, small improvements, but also very important improvements. Every survivor that I spoke with.
- [58:40]
Wanted their attacker arrested and prosecuted and taken off the streets.
- [58:49]
And to me, that is very important.
- [58:53]
I've heard people say, oh, because of certain.
- [58:59]
I guess, societal.
- [59:03]
Arrangements or societal norms, people in many African societies do not want the state involved. They don't want arrest and prosecution. They want families to deal with these issues. They want their chiefs to deal with this issue. But I will say this. Not a single person I spoke with said, I want my family to deal with this or I want my chief to deal with this. Every single person whose family had intervened, that person was dissatisfied. And that person said, people told me, I regret it. I wish I, you know, I wish I trusted the police enough to go or I wish I had known to go to the police. I am not happy, I'm not happy that this person did this very horrible thing to me and all they had to do was pay a fine. And I see them walking around the community. The fact that they can go on and do it to other people is something that upsets me. So I did not, my research did not provide support for this idea that victims, at least of sexual violence, do not want their prosecutor, their, the perpetrators of this act to be brought to justice. This was not supported by my research.
- [60:27]
Lamis Abdelahi
I'm so glad you brought up all of these points piece, because I agree, I think the book has a host of implications that people can learn from again, within certainly African countries, but also beyond that continent as well. Well, and the book has, I think, wide relevance to international relations scholars, even those who don't specialize in Africa. You know, anyone who's interested in gender, certainly, but also people who are interested more broadly in norms ought to pick up this book. So we've taken up a lot of your time. I just want to ask you one final question. The book has been out in the world for a little while now. So what are you working on?
- [61:09]
Peace Medea
Yes, so I am now at the tail end of data collection for a project, a collaborative project on women traditional leaders, which kind of came out of this work.
- [61:22]
Because part of what I did, especially in Cote d', Ivoire, was going into communities to find out who was dealing with rape cases. And in many communities it was chiefs and other traditional leaders, but almost always male traditional leaders. Which got me thinking, where are the women traditional leaders and do they behave differently? Do they address these and other problems differently? So my current project is a comparative study of Ghana, Liberia, Botswana and South Africa of women traditional leaders in these countries and how they address problems like gender based violence, but also how.
- [62:06]
Their roles, the work that they do, how it's changed over time, and how they work with the state, how they work with the police. So it's. Yeah, it's a comparative project of women traditional leaders and the work that they do.
- [62:25]
Lamis Abdelahi
That sounds fascinating. Well, Peace, I really enjoyed our conversation. Thank you so much for being on the show today.
- [62:32]
Peace Medea
Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Lamees.
- [62:35]
Lamis Abdelahi
The book is Peace Media's Global Norms and Local the Campaigns to End Violence Against Women in Africa, published by Oxford University Press in 2020.
- [62:46]
Peace Medea
Thank you for listening.