Faculty Publications

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

June 2019

Publication Title

Peace Review

Volume

31

Issue Number

1

First Page

39

Last Page

45

DOI

10.1080/10402659.2019.1613594

Disciplines

Medicine and Health Sciences

Abstract

I first started thinking about anger and its role in the experiences of people who have fought in wars when I was in Sierra Leone, about a year after the cease-fire ended the civil war. I was working as a research assistant on a study with girls who had been child soldiers and who had given birth to children during the war. We were living in a community in the west, on the border with Guinea. At first, we met only a few young women. We listened to their stories—about the war, and about what life had been like for them and their children since the end of hostilities.As days passed, word got around in this rural community that women had come to listen to the experiences of young mothers who had been child soldiers. Girls and young women living in small huts in the jungle surrounding the town, or sharing a house on the edge, began to come with their babies and introduce themselves and tell us their stories. Amid the grief and despair, the worry about how they would have enough food for the next day, I could hear a simmering rage from many young women: anger at not just what had occurred during the war, but how they had been treated when they returned.

Comments

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Peace Review on 25th June 2019, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/10402659.2019.1613594.
SJSU users: Use the following link to login and access the article via SJSU databases.

COinS