ABSTRACT
Juana entered secondary school in the 1990s. Juana's peers all had either experienced or witnessed significant domestic violence in some way, a phenomenon disturbingly common in recently post-colonial contexts. Juana and her cohort managed awful experiences of gender-based maltreatment through an ethnopsychology organized around self-care and self-protection. The culture of gender in Juana's community in the mid- to late 1990s was fundamental to the way Juana and her peers experienced and responded to sexual violence. Once sexual violence is a matter of 'will' and not 'nature', room for nonviolent masculinities can appear in the communal imagination. She says that enduring the "bad behavior" was worthwhile because it ultimately allowed her to achieve her educational, career, and life goals. Negative mental health effects were found not only for young women like Juana who experienced sexual violence, but also among the entire population of schoolgirls citing the possibility of sexual violence.
