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FOR IMMEDIATE
RELEASE
November 22, 2002
CONTACT: Lisa Lacher, (515) 271-3119
DRAKE INSTRUCTOR RECEIVES MACARTHUR FOUNDATION GRANT
R. Charli Carpenter,
instructor of politics and international relations at Drake University, has received
a $73,000 research grant from the MacArthur Foundation to study children born
of war rape in the Balkans.
Carpenter's project is titled "Children of the Enemy? Forced Pregnancy, Humanitarian
Assistance and Children's Rights in the Balkans."
"After the Balkan wars of the early 1990s, hundreds of children conceived
in mass rape campaigns were born to mothers who did not want them," Carpenter
said. "Like thousands of other children of forced pregnancy worldwide, war-rape
orphans in the Balkans are often viewed as children 'of the enemy.' This has the
potential to severely impact their rights to education, identity, family, and
security. Yet despite volumes on the topic of mass rape and forced pregnancy as
a women's issue, there is almost no attention to forced pregnancy as a children's
issue.”
Carpenter has been trying to generate such attention for years, writing and speaking
at conferences. She has published articles on children of rape in Human Rights
Quarterly and the Journal of Genocide Research, and was invited as a specialist
on the topic to the International Conference on War-Affected Children held in
Winnipeg, Canada, in 2000. Her paper at the conference concluded with three recommendations:
The United Nations
Report on the Effects of Armed Conflict On Children, written by Graca Machel in
1996, also calls for a study tracking children of rape. But the international
human rights community has not responded with a campaign or a research effort
that would place the rights of these children on the international agenda, Carpenter
said.
That may be changing, Carpenter added. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation, which is “dedicated to fostering lasting improvement in the
human condition,” has agreed to fund such a study beginning next year. “I
got tired of waiting for Human Rights Watch or the U.N. to do the footwork,”
Carpenter said.
She plans to research the location, status and fate of war-rape orphans conceived
in the Balkans. She also will assess the humanitarian assistance they have received
by interviewing relief workers and government officials working with refugees
in Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia.
According to Carpenter, who is currently conducting research on the protection
of civilians in the former Yugoslavia, the humanitarian assistance community is
the first line of defense in protecting the human rights of vulnerable populations
in war time. “Who gets defined as having special needs is crucial in determining
who gets resources from the international community,” she said. “Ten
years ago, there was no funding for rape counseling or reproductive health because
these issues hadn’t yet been placed on the agenda. The needs of war-rape
orphans represent another gap in our thinking.”
Carpenter believes empirical research on assistance strategies is required to
properly assess whether or not there is a gap in policy as well, and what can
be done to protect these youngest victims of ethnic conflict in future. She plans
to write a book about her findings, which she hopes will help place the issue
of war-rape children decisively on the international agenda, as has been the case
with child soldiering and land mines in the last decade.
Funding for the project will be provided through the MacArthur Foundation’s
Global Security and Sustainability Program, which focuses on international peace
and security, sustainable development, population and reproductive health and
human rights.