By Laura Gifford
Chin trudged wearily along the wilderness trail. She was hungry, cold and terribly alone. Chin thought she had experienced the worst when the white settlers came and took her family’s home. Chin, her husband, and her three young children had set off from Georgia with many other Cherokee families, bound for a foreign land beyond the Mississippi. First, her husband had died. Then her two older children had faded away, weakened by hunger and the long march. Finally, her baby died. Just that morning, Chin had hacked away at the frozen ground with a knife to create a small grave for her infant.
Two decades earlier and an ocean away, an unnamed woman—we’ll call her Maria— cowered in a church in the Spanish city of Zaragoza as French troops hammered the heavy doors with battering rams. Soon Maria, her family, and a host of other civilians would fall prey to Napoleon’s soldiers.
Almost 200 years later, Duaa bravely resists government oppression during Sudan’s most recent civil war. Such bravery comes at a price. She had a baby, then had to flee her home when militia-backed looters took “everything we have.” Her steadfast commitment to her people has led her to help run emergency response rooms around Khartoum that respond to humanitarian crisis, including the needs of women experiencing gender-based violence.
The raw-edged fabric of war
When we think of war and conflict, we usually think of battles and soldiers. In all times and places, however, women and children experience some of the harshest and least visible impacts of war. While there have always been exceptions (Jael in the Bible, Joan of Arc, beloved daughters in our own congregations), women and children suffer distinctively as non-combatants. Other women have often played vital military roles in support of their people, without receiving the credit they deserve. Like Chin, Maria and Duaa, their stories reflect troubling patterns of war.
Stephanie Mitchell, a history professor at Carthage College, an ELCA-affiliated school in Kenosha, Wisconsin, is an expert on women and conflict in Mexico and Central America, where women have played vital roles. Any war requires both soldadas (soldiers) and soldadera (commissaries who supply food, laundry and other services). Soldaderas might be related to the soldiers or serve as contract laborers. No army could survive without them, and yet these women’s efforts would disappear from public memory as soon as the war ended. As a result, women who sought military pensions were almost never granted compensation for their service.
History books tell of war in terms that make it seem very important which army is which. Oral histories of women who lived through the Mexican Revolution and subsequent uprisings, however, demonstrate that for most rural women, the specific identity of a given army made no difference. All armies helped themselves to these women’s food supplies, causing famines. All armies perpetrated violence, and especially sexual violence. Years ago, Mitchell spoke with a woman who had lived through the Revolution and two subsequent uprisings and couldn’t tell the three conflicts apart. All ran together in her memory because all produced the same, dire consequences.
Childrens’ lives unravel
In 2023, one in six children around the world lived in areas marked by armed conflict. While hunger and resource scarcity impact humans of all ages, children suffer distinctive damage. Like Chin’s children, contemporary children also experience starvation. In Yemen alone, 85,000 children died from hunger between April 2015 and October 2018. In the first months of 2024, the current war in Gaza has left 90 percent of children under age two and 95 percent of pregnant women facing extreme food poverty. Even children who survive malnutrition experience lifelong consequences. Threequarters of the 150 million children worldwide who suffer from stunted growth live in war zones. Children who fail to receive adequate nutrition in their first two to three years will suffer irreversible impacts to their physical and cognitive health.
Displacement has myriad impacts, uprooting children’s lives, damaging mental wellbeing, disrupting education and more. As of February 2024, children made up half of the 1.7 million people displaced by war in the Gaza Strip.
Meanwhile, since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, children in frontline areas have spent the equivalent of four to seven months sheltering underground during air raids, with harrowing impacts on mental health. Forty percent of children in Ukraine cannot access regular schooling.
Sexual violence is a persistent theme in wartime. In Sudan, combatants target women based on their ethnic backgrounds. At the same time, militia members eager to consolidate support may try to win over children and needy families with gifts of toys and food. “People are afraid to not take it,” Duaa says. Children, too, experience sexual violence. In addition to forcing 730,000 Rohingya—more than half of whom were children—out of Myanmar starting in 2017, government troops targeted children for sexual violence.
War’s ripple effect
War impacts women directly and indirectly. The Guatemalan civil war was precipitated by a U.S.-backed coup in 1954, burst into full conflict in 1960, and did not end until 1996, Mitchell says. When government forces charged with eradicating communism failed to find communists, they often turned their attention toward other, invented enemies. New targets included women whose behavior was considered outside “typical” gender roles— students, activists, even women wearing blue jeans. Women and children kidnapped by the military were tortured in front of each other. Men and women alike were subjected to gender-specific humiliation.
War’s indirect results can be just as damaging. Mitchell relates the story of a friend whose large family lived on a farm in rural, northern Guatemala. With civil society in tatters, when a neighboring farmer wanted the family’s land, there was no one to stop him. He killed her friend’s father and expelled her mother, who had just birthed twins. The grieving family fled to the city, where they were forced to beg for food.
“Was that related to conflict?” Mitchell asks. “Yes and no. It was related to the collapse of effective institutions.”
Warlike conflict doesn’t always come with a formal declaration. In Central America, for example, the structures that would normally maintain order have been corrupted by international criminal organizations. After decades of Cold War conflict, government and civil society in the region were so fundamentally weakened that they were easily overrun. A country such as Guatemala or Honduras may not be “at war,” but its citizens are experiencing violence on par with “official” wars. The gangs that control these nations operate internationally, with diversified interests— including human smuggling.
Meanwhile, asylum systems in countries such as the United States are predicated on World War II-era models of conflict in which governments were the oppressors. If a young woman in Honduras needs to break up with her abusive boyfriend, but the man’s cousin is in a gang, that woman’s choices are stark. By freeing herself from a dangerous relationship, she may put her entire family at risk of deadly retaliation. Escaping that relationship will require her family to flee. However, because the gang isn’t a “government,” the family probably won’t be granted asylum in the
U.S. patterns of hope
Amid the calamities of war that women and children experience, another more hopeful pattern emerges. The very women who have suffered so greatly are often at the forefront of peace and reconciliation efforts. Leymah Gbowee, for example, was just 17 when her home country of Liberia erupted into civil war. The war turned the young Lutheran “from a child into an adult in a matter of hours.” With the help of a scholarship from the ELCA International Leaders program, Gbowee trained as a social worker and trauma counselor to work with ex-child soldiers. She became a founding member and Liberia Coordinator of the Women in Peacebuilding Network of the West Africa Network for Peacebuilding. Gbowee also collaborated with a Muslim colleague to form Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace. Gbowee’s efforts earned her the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011.
Gbowee and many other women are beacons of hope amid the destructive patterns of war. We too can become bearers of hope—even those of us who are insulated from the terrors of active conflict. How?
First, we start to recognize the patterns. Women and children experience: displacement; sexual violence; hunger and malnutrition; gendered treatment in military support roles; the indirect impacts of failed civil institutions; and barriers caused by outdated or ineffective policies. Recognizing patterns is the key to establishing new habits.
Second, we listen. Many of the stories that have exposed these patterns of war took place behind or under the official narrative of a conflict. Knowing the shared impacts of war on women and children around the globe, we can learn to hear beyond the noise of official narratives.
Mitchell, the Carthage College historian, is also an ELCA member. “There is a way to solve this,” she reminds us. Too often, “at the end of the day, we think Jesus is impractical,” she says. She adds that the love to which Jesus calls us is the gift that truly will make a difference. Through love, we hear women’s stories. Through love, we see the needs of children. Through love, we gain strength to look hard things in the face, proclaim that there is a better way and advocate for change.
When humans think about war, we tend to think in terms of winners and losers. Yet as the apostle Paul reminds us, we are called to a different way of being. “Do not be conformed to this age,” he writes, “but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God” (Romans 12:2 NRSVue).
Winning may feel good in a game, but winning is not transformation. As Christians, we can live into God’s promise that the will of God is for the transformative justice that brings peace to all nations—especially the most vulnerable people.
Laura Gifford is an ELCA deacon and holds a Ph.D. in American history. She is editor-in-chief of Fortress Press. Laura lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband, daughter and cats and is a member of Resurrection Lutheran Church, Portland.
This article appeared in the May/June 2024 issue of Gather. To read more like it, subscribe to Gather.