Master's thesis shows resilience, individuality of survivors of rape in Bosnian War

When Western Washington University graduate student Francesca Leaf decided to devote her Anthropology master’s thesis to the stories of survivors of Bosnian rape camps, Associate Anthropology Professor Kathleen Young warned her that the atrocities were difficult to read about. “Once you learn about this,” Leaf said, “you can’t go back.” But Leaf, 24, of Bellingham, knew an important story about the women themselves remained untold in the thousands of pages of court testimony and personal accounts from Bosniak women who survived horrific, systematic sexual abuse during the genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina from 1992 to 1995. “The rape survivors shared their accounts at great risk – the risk of re-traumatization, the risk of having a stigmatized identity foisted upon them, the risk of retaliation by perpetrators, and in some cases, their own families,” Leaf wrote. “Yet, in spite of these factors, the actual accounts and experiences of individual survivors have rarely received the academic attention they deserve.” Previous academic and journalistic accounts of the survivors’ stories usually portrayed the women as “unidimensional,” identified only by their Bosnian-Muslim ethnicity and by their victimhood, Leaf said. But her analysis of the accounts of 26 survivors of the notorious rape camps of the Foča region of Bosnia-Herzegovina brought their individuality to light in the numerous ways they expressed defiance, resisted their attackers, pursued recovery and even described the circumstances of the attacks. Among the well-documented trauma, brutality and victimization, Leaf also found evidence of resilience, dignity and bravery. Seeing the individuality of the women who survived the rapes is a reminder that there is not just one way to support rape survivors, and that women’s responses to sexual assault and their needs in recovery are as individual as the women themselves, said Leaf, who is a volunteer for the Bellingham non-profit Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Services. “I love being able to go there and do something active,” she said. “It’s really a privilege to be able to provide our clients with support during their healing process.” The use of rape as a tactic of war during the Balkan war is also the subject of a new film, “In the Land of Blood and Honey,” written and directed by Angelina Jolie. Leaf, who earned her associate’s degree from Whatcom Community College, graduated from Western in 2009 with a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology as well as minors in Women Studies and Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL). She earned her master’s degree in Anthropology in December 2011. She focused her graduate research on survivors from the Foča municipality, one of the first regions in Bosnia-Herzegovina subjected to ethnic cleansing. Throughout the war, an estimated 20,000 to 50,000 women and girls were raped, the majority of them Bosniak women and girls who were systematically raped by Serbian and Bosnian Serb soldiers and ultra-nationalists as well as by Montenegrin paramilitaries. Sixteen rape survivors from the Foča municipality later testified at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia during the world’s first international criminal trial that dealt strictly with rape during wartime. “I really think the Foča testimony changed the world,” said Kathleen Young, Leaf’s advisor and a scholar of the Bosnian war. “It certainly changed international criminal law to where rape is now an international war crime. It hadn’t been before. But as much as that’s the case, no one had ever chronicled the actual testimony of the women in the depth that Francesca did. She found, again and again, this resilience in the personalities of the women and the differences within them.” Leaf found several examples of resistance in the women’s accounts of their ordeal, from physically attacking the perpetrators – at substantial personal risk – to hiding themselves or others from the rapists. She also found examples of resistance in survivors’ determination to survive the ordeal – to maintain their dignity, support their children, or bear witness to the atrocities. Some found ways to cope by identifying the attacks as an act of genocide to “make sense of an extremely inexplicable act,” Leaf wrote. Some coped by wishing to exact revenge on their attackers, while others felt the soldiers who attacked them would themselves suffer their whole lives under the weight of their own actions. “The survivors are really incredible and very courageous,” Leaf said. “I felt honored to read their experiences and try my best to understand their perspectives.” Leaf now hopes to spend a year teaching English abroad. After that, she would like to continue to work with survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault.