“The Cannon’s Meat”: Narrating Victimhood of Sexual Violence in the Colombian Armed Conflict

The Colombian armed conflict (1964-2016) has sowed devastation throughout the country in a decades-long war. This struggle for power between the national government, paramilitaries, guerilla groups, and crime syndicates has enabled the assembly of crimes perpetrated by all the involved actors. Among the performed harms is conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), an abuse by which over 40,000 Colombians have been victimized. My thesis investigates this crime to understand what constitutes a CRSV victim. Unlike previous studies that offer conceptions of victimhood defined by the researcher, my work focuses on exhibiting how the very victims of CRSV contextualize their experiences and make sense of their conditions as victims. I approach this research through a transdisciplinary feminist framework, organizing an assessment that ultimately narrates identities, resiliency, collectiveness, and punishment-amid other factors-as the constitutive elements of CRSV victimhood in the Colombian armed conflict.