ABSTRACT
When formerly abducted women returned to their home communities in northern Uganda, they relied on their families as entry points to access and reintegrate into society. They re-established social relations via family reunification to regain access to existing kinship networks and assets. Over time, they engaged in marriage as a strategy to induce social inclusion and expand their reintegration space and essential means to assimilate into mainstream society. However, as this chapter argues, their communities have continued to see them inherently as having lost social status or as possessing a lower status than ‘a worthy woman’. While marriage confers opportunities and respectability in their communities, culture and tradition dictate that they are ‘stained’ and therefore ‘unacceptable’ and, ultimately, ‘unmarriageable’. This experience promotes their exclusion from mainstream society. The challenges and frustrations confronting their marriage aspirations are beyond their direct war participation, emerging from a normative framework that constrained and excluded women in Acoli society. This in turn constrains formerly abducted women’s access to social and economic opportunities which facilitate post-war recovery and reintegration.
