Bush Wives and Girl Soldiers: Women's lives through war and peace in Sierra Leone
基于对塞拉利昂北部被绑架女性的田野调查，本书聚焦她们在叛军营地中作为“妻子”或女兵的经历，揭示性暴力与生存策略，适合关注冲突中女性处境的研究者。
This well-written account of the experiences of abducted women in the north of Sierra Leone during armed conflict is based on Chris Coulter's 2006 doctoral dissertation, Being a Bush Wife: Young women's lives through war and peace in northern Sierra Leone. It hits all the right notes on key – contextualization of women's war experiences in the history of Sierra Leone and the specific background to the conflict that began in 1991 and ended in 2002; attention to the post-modern problematics of revisiting events that took place years before and are likely to have been told and retold, giving a nearly uniform narrative structure to stories that were often shaped by NGOs (for their own public relations and fund-raising purposes); and sincere sensitivity and respect for the women interviewed. Coulter conducted fifteen months of fieldwork over the period 1998 to 2004, mainly in Koinadugu, a northern district bordering on Guinea that did not possess the major diamond and gold mines that attracted rebels elsewhere. First attacked in 1994, Koinadugu was repeatedly overrun by RUF (Revolutionary United Front) guerrillas. A rebel camp was based in Koinadugu village where many of the women Coulter interviewed lived. Their experiences of camp life form the central focus of the book; the women tell of serving in the RUF forces or, more commonly, working in camps as unfree domestic workers. Rape and sexual abuse were inescapable. Irony of ironies, to be picked as a ‘wife’ by one of the commanders meant one was ‘protected’ from repeated gang rape and spared the hardest chores; but a ‘wife’ must be available for sex ‘several times a day. … If you refuse you will be killed’ (p. 107).