Rutaja Nadgauda
Research Mentor: Esmeralda Lopez
Mentor Department: Political Science, LSA
Author(s): Not Available
Session: Session 7 (4:00 PM – 4:50 PM)
Presentation Type: Poster 74
Abstract
This ongoing study investigates how conflict-related sexual violence and other gender violence are reported to better understand how these issues are addressed by policymakers at the institutional level. Despite growing efforts to address conflict-related sexual violence and its impacts on the community, gender-based violence remains a pervasive issue. For this project, we looked at statements related to gender-based violence from human rights reports for 196 countries from 1999 to 2016. Data is then sorted via hand-coding, utilizing a thematic analysis approach to identify recurring patterns. While the project is ongoing, it appears that most statements about gender-based violence focus on violence against women and children. There is little information within human rights reports and literature about violence against men or members of sexual and gender minorities, such as transgender people. The hand-coded statements will be used to train machine learning models and build a larger dataset about how states discuss gender based violence.
