Between 1958 and 2022, the Observatory of Memory and Conflict at the National Centre for Historical Memory recorded 14,380 women who were victims of sexual violence within the framework of the Colombian armed conflict. Of these, 87 % were Afro-Colombian. The figure is not an archival detail. In the first three months of 2026, the Ombudsman’s Office received 3,664 cases of sexual violence in the country, and more than half of the victims were girls and adolescents. Between these two numbers lie almost seventy years of war, a peace agreement and a special jurisdiction created to try these acts.
Bodies on a war territory
The Colombian war was fought, to a large extent, on women’s bodies. The Constitutional Court said so bluntly in Auto 092 of 2008. Sexual violence against women is a habitual, widespread and systematic practice within the armed conflict, carried out by guerrillas, paramilitaries and state agents. The court attributed this systematic character to historical conditions of discrimination, exclusion and marginalisation that struck hardest at indigenous and Afro-descendant women.
The reasons carry the name of territory. Black, raizal and palenquera communities, and indigenous peoples such as the Nasa, Awá, Wounaan, Tikuna and Wiwa, among others, inhabit strategic corridors for drug trafficking, illegal mining and military control, among them the Chocó Pacific coast, Cauca, Nariño, the Amazon and the rural Caribbean. Where there were resources and routes, there were armed actors. And where there were armed actors, the women of these communities carried a double burden, that of gender and that of race.
The violence took documented forms, forced carnal access, sexual slavery, forced prostitution, forced contraception and abortion, recruitment of girls through deceit followed by abuse within the ranks. Women of the Awá people told the Truth Commission they had witnessed the killing of leaders and indigenous authorities from their own community at the hands of the FARC and paramilitaries. Tikuna, Wounaan, Wiwa, Nasa and Embera women described forced recruitment from childhood. Between 1995 and 2011, more than 2,700,000 women were displaced by the conflict, according to UN Women figures, and 15.8 % of them reported having been victims of sexual violence. Of 3,445 documented killings of indigenous and Afro-Colombian people, 65.5 % of the victims were women.
Dejusticia, a legal and social studies centre based in Bogotá, gathered the testimony of Bibiana Peñaranda Sepúlveda, a member of the Red de Mariposas de Alas Nuevas, who described a long history of insults and degradation linked to forced recruitment, complaints that were often never filed out of fear. Researcher Diana Quigua, from the same organisation, documented that racial stereotypes inherited from the colonial era, the exoticisation and hypersexualisation of Black women, are not a cultural backdrop but a concrete driver of the armed violence committed against them.
The Observatory of Memory and Conflict at the National Centre for Historical Memory recorded 14,380 women victims of sexual violence in the Colombian armed conflict between 1958 and 2022. 87 % of them were Afro-Colombian.
The war that never stopped
The signing of the 2016 Peace Agreement did not close the conflict, it reconfigured it. According to the latest assessment from the Fundación Ideas para la Paz, the ELN, the Clan del Golfo, now self-styled as the Ejército Gaitanista de Colombia, and the various dissident FARC factions together number more than 27,000 members, a figure that returns the country to armed force levels similar to those of 2011, just before the peace process began. The difference is that there is no longer a single central enemy, but a mosaic of fragmented structures that compete, strike deals and split apart without end.
That fragmentation has meant no truce for women. The Ministry of Defence reported 32,985 sexual offences reported in the country during 2025. The Ombudsman’s Office, for its part, documented 296 cases of sexual violence directly linked to the armed conflict between January 2025 and April 2026, and processed the Single Declaration Form, the gateway to transitional justice, for 1,368 people over the same period. In the first three months of 2026, the same body issued 61 declarations for sexual violence, with girls and adolescents accounting for more than half the victims.
Human Rights Watch documented, in its 2025 review, that recent negotiation efforts with armed groups have failed to curb their territorial expansion, and that sexual violence continues to be used by groups fighting over territory as a form of social control. The United Nations agrees. In June 2023, the UN Secretary General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Pramila Patten, visited Bogotá and Cartagena and warned that sexual violence remains a feature of the Colombian conflict that disproportionately affects indigenous and Afro-descendant communities, LGBTIQ+ people and women social leaders. Patten expressed particular concern at the rise in human trafficking for sexual exploitation carried out by armed groups and criminal networks.
Macrocaso 11, justice arriving late
It took Colombia seven years to open, within its transitional justice system, a case dedicated exclusively to sexual violence. The Special Jurisdiction for Peace began its work in March 2018. Macrocaso 11, covering gender-based violence, sexual violence, reproductive violence and hate crimes, was formally opened in September 2023, after years of advocacy by women’s organisations grouped in the Cinco Claves alliance. Before that, sexual violence had been investigated transversally, diluted within other macrocasos.
The case is divided into three sub-cases, acts committed by the former FARC-EP against civilians, acts committed by the Public Force against civilians, and internal violence committed within both structures against their own members. The universe documented by the JEP, covering the period 1957 to 2016, amounts to 35,178 victims of sexual violence and other gender-based violence; 89.2 % are women, and at least 35 % were girls at the time of the acts. By the end of 2025, the JEP had accredited more than 700 victims across the three sub-cases, and that same year collectively recognised 104 men as additional victims, without this altering the centrality of women and girls in the investigation.
In April 2025, the JEP’s Appeals Section issued Auto TP-SA 1958, allowing the same victim to take part simultaneously in more than one macrocaso when their case intersects with patterns being investigated elsewhere, for example when sexual violence was accompanied by unlawful deprivation of liberty or violence against ethnic communities. The Comisión Colombiana de Juristas, which monitors the JEP, described the decision as a step toward a victim-centred approach, while warning that its methodology still needs refining and its gender-differentiated analysis strengthening.
Even so, the Cinco Claves alliance, made up of Corporación Humanas, the Red Nacional de Mujeres, Sisma Mujer, Women’s Link Worldwide and Colombia Diversa, warned in 2025 that Macrocaso 11 has less time than the other ten cases opened by the JEP, whose legal mandate runs fifteen years, of which more than seven have already passed.
The second wound
The most cited case in Colombia on institutional revictimisation has a name. Jineth Bedoya, a journalist and activist, victim of sexual violence by paramilitaries in 2000, publicly denounced having had to recount what happened at least twelve times in the course of the judicial investigation into her own case. Her complaint gave rise, in 2014, to the National Day for the Dignity of Women Victims of Sexual Violence in the Armed Conflict, marked every 25 May.
The JEP itself recognises this risk as structural. The Observatory on the Jurisdiction run by the Comisión Colombiana de Juristas documents that victims of sexual violence face particular barriers to accessing justice, among them fear of not being believed, shame, social stigma and the risk of being blamed. That is why the Jurisdiction invokes, at least on paper, a principle of non-revictimisation intended to prevent women from having to repeat their testimony across multiple proceedings, something that, the same Observatory warns, can worsen emotional suffering and weaken trust in the justice system.
Colombia Diversa documented that this fear is not abstract. Many victims, particularly LGBTI people, prefer to stay silent rather than testify before a state entity or engage with organisational processes that require recounting what happened. A study on conflict victims in Norte de Santander further found concrete failures in the care pathway, between 2012 and 2013 several victims of conflict-related sexual violence were referred to the Centro de Atención Integral a Víctimas de Abuso Sexual, a prosecutorial unit designed for ordinary sexual abuse cases, not for acts arising from the war.
According to Corporación Sisma Mujer, more than 90 % of sexual violence cases reported between January 2020 and March 2025 remain unpunished. The monitoring body for Constitutional Court autos 092 of 2008, 009 of 2015 and 515 of 2018 documented that barely 2 % of cases end in conviction, and that in 82.6 % of investigations those responsible are never identified. Only 18 % of victims file a complaint.
Of 12,062 women victims of sexual violence included in the Single Victims Registry between January 2020 and March 2025, only 110 have received compensation, according to Corporación Sisma Mujer.
The international mirror
Colombia is not an isolated case, even though its war has been spoken of for decades as if it were. According to the UN Secretary General’s annual report presented in 2026, verified cases of conflict-related sexual violence worldwide rose from fewer than 5,000 in 2024 to 9,788 in 2025, more than double in a single year, the highest level ever recorded. The report documents 21 conflict situations worldwide, and Colombia is among them. Around 90 % of victims identified globally are women and girls. The UN’s special representative, Pramila Patten, was explicit before the Security Council, these crimes are not collateral damage, but deliberate strategies to displace populations, punish communities and consolidate territorial control. Less than 1 % of global humanitarian aid is directed at addressing conflict-related sexual violence.
That deterioration has, according to the United Nations, a broader structural cause. In March 2026, UN Women presented a report concluding that no country in the world has achieved full legal equality between women and men. On average, women enjoy only 64 % of the legal rights men have. In 54 % of countries, rape is still not legally defined on the basis of consent. In nearly three out of four countries worldwide, the law still permits forced child marriage. UN Women’s policy director, Sarah Hendriks, summed it up this way, global democratic backsliding comes hand in hand with an increasingly organised rejection of gender equality, and justice systems are not immune to those pressures, they reflect them.
The same report documented that, in 2024, 676 million women and girls lived within 50 kilometres of a deadly conflict, the highest figure since the 1990s. Colombia has been contributing to that figure since 1958, with its 14,380 women recorded by the internal war, and since 2025, with its 296 documented cases in just fifteen months.
A.B.
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