Human Security Report Project (HSRP)/Simon Fraser University (SFU)
The Human Security Report 2012
challenges a number of widely held assumptions about the nature of
sexual violence during war and the effect of conflict on education
systems. Both analyses are part of the Human Security Report Project’s
ongoing investigation of the human costs of war.
Part I: Sexual Violence, Education, and War first reviews the
fragmentary data on sexual violence against adults and children in
wartime. It finds, among other things, that the mainstream narrative
exaggerates the prevalence of combatant-perpetrated sexual violence,
while largely ignoring the far more pervasive domestic sexual violence
perpetrated in wartime by family members and acquaintances. This bias
has unfortunate implications for policy.
Turning to the impact of war on education, the Report shows that—surprisingly—education outcomes actually improve on
average during wartime. It confirms that conflict-affected countries
generally have substantially lower educational outcomes than nonconflict
countries, but it challenges the widely held notion that this is because of
war. It points out that educational outcomes were also low—or lower—
during the prior periods of peace. They could not, therefore, have been
caused by warfare. The Report offers the first explanation for the apparent paradox of education outcomes that improve in wartime.
Part II of the Report reviews
global and regional trends in the incidence and severity of organized
violence. It highlights new research on the deadliness of external
military intervention in civil wars, challenges the notion that
conflicts are becoming more persistent, and shows that even “failed”
peace agreements save lives.
