Many Somalis have been exposed to various forms of extreme violence over decades. Torture, rape and killings were used to curb opposition.
The rest of Somalia plunged into a brutal civil war which today is not over. Even in Somaliland, which in May seceded unilaterally from Somalia, warring continued until the mids. The driving questions are: How does the life of those Somali women look, who experienced sexual or other forms of violence?
What happened to all the Somali men who were socialised with brutal violence as active guerrilla fighters or otherwise? In the following, I outline two vignettes which illustrate some long-term effects of violence ordinary Somalis experienced. The stories are dramatic. But one should realise that these kind of experiences have been made by thousands Somali men and women over the past four decades and they actually have a wider social relevance, particularly if one accepts that trauma can be transmitted over generations Argenti and Schramm Mariam was around eight or nine years old when the Somali government collapsed in January When Hawiye militias took over Mogadishu and started hunting patrilineal relatives of the late President Mohamed Siyad Barre, Mariam and her relatives fled first to Kismayo, then to the north.
Her parents were divorced. The father died of natural causes in Djibouti around When Mariam came with her paternal aunty to the north, she soon was given to her mother. A half -brother of Mariam was involved in the fighting. This was the first time Mariam was abused. Her elder half- siblings and her mother recognised what had happened, but in an attempt to cover up the shame, remained silent. The rapist half-brother was soon afterwards killed in the inter-clan fighting.
This was seen as punishment for his sins by the family. Obviously, however, Mariam had been substantially derailed by what had happened to her. Soon she fell out with her mother and moved in with her paternal family further east. Her new place of residence was also insecure, but less because of inter-clan fighting than because of the activities of local gangsters. Around , one of the gangsters abducted Mariam and some nine months later, at around 15 years old, she gave birth to her first child.
