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Date: November 25, 2024 Mon
Time: 8:20 pm
Time: 8:20 pm
Results for disappearanced
1 results foundAuthor: Guberek, Tamy Title: To Count the Uncounted: An Estimation of Lethal Violence in Casanare Summary: Casanare is a large, rural department in Colombia, with 19 municipalities and a population of almost 300,000 inhabitants located in the foothills of the Andes and on the eastern plains. Multiple armed actors in the Colombian conflict have operated there, including paramilitary groups, guerillas and the Colombian military. Many people of Casanare have suffered violent deaths and disappearances. But how many people have been killed or disappeared? For reasons of policy, accountability and historical clarification, this question deserves a valid answer. The Benetech Human Rights Program has used a statistical technique called Multiple Systems Estimation to estimate the total number of killings and disappearances in Casanare between 1998-2007. This report explains why it is often difficult to calculate an accurate accounting of the killed and missing, and why it is important to make sure these people are accounted for accurately. We then explain a methodology we have developed to estimate both the number of the known victims, and the number of victims who have never been counted. Any accounting of lethal violence will be incorrect if we assume that any one dataset or combination of datasets contains a comprehensive count of killings and disappearances. Registries of violent acts kept by governmental and non-governmental institutions contain some, but not all, of the records of lethal violence. Organizations collecting this data may only have access to certain subsets of a population or geographic areas. Some reports of violent acts may be easier to locate than others and the resulting datasets will be biased toward those cases. How can we overcome these difficulties? Correct answers about the number of killings and disappearances rely on statistical estimation to overcome the complex, incomplete patterns of reporting. Getting the numbers right is extremely important: appropriate estimates can help account for unnamed, unreported victims in the historical record and guide the development of policies to respond to past violence. Using biased or incomplete figures, on the other hand, risks losing all trace of the existence of some victims and generates ongoing trauma for society. Victims who remain undocumented by any dataset become invisible, removed not only from their lives and the lives of their loved ones, but from historical memory. Since we consider individual datasets to be incomplete, we prefer to use all available lists or datasets of killings and disappearances to generate statistical estimates. The estimation procedure used to calculate the magnitude of killings and disappearances for Casanare is called Multiple Systems Estimation (MSE). MSE requires analysts to carefully review all known incidents in multiple lists, in order to determine whether some cases, either within one list or across lists, refer to the same victim. Matching cases that appear on more than one list allows statisticians to model the process by which violent acts are reported and to estimate the number of uncounted cases. MSE then uses the number of unique observations on each list in combination with the number of overlaps to estimate the total number of victims. Using a scientifically rigorous, transparent method to “count the uncounted” means that the results are less vulnerable to claims of partiality or bias. The work presented in this paper builds on a previous study which estimated missing people in Casanare. We chose to continue our research in Casanare for three reasons: 1) The line between killings and disappearances is often indistinct. Some people who are disappeared are presumed to be dead. In order to understand the magnitude of lethal violence affecting Casanare, we decided to analyze killings and disappearances side by side. In all of the following analysis, we present results for killings and disappearances together so that readers can draw a comparison between the pattern and magnitude of the two lethal acts. 2) Since the release of our 2007 report on missing people in Casanare, we have made important methodological improvements to our implementation of MSE. These advances allow us to include all of the available datasets and capture more precisely the range of uncertainty in the estimates. 3) We are integrating into this analysis new data shared with the Benetech Human Rights Program since the 2007 report. In this study, we have used information about victims of killings and disappearances provided by 15 datasets. These 15 sources of data come from state agencies – including government, security, forensic and judicial bodies – and from civil society organizations. Using this data and our methodological developments, we estimate that there were between 3,944 and 9,983 killings in Casanare from 2000-2007. In the period from 1998-2005, we estimate that there were between 1,270 and 5,552 disappearances in Casanare. We present and discuss these estimates in more detail in Section 2. In Section 3, we describe the reported data and how it was processed for use in the analysis. We also show how descriptive summaries of individual datasets may be misleading. In Section 4, we draw some general conclusions. In Section 5, we outline areas where we plan to focus our future work. Lastly, we offer the methodological developments in technical detail in an appendix. Details: Palo Alto, CA: Benetech Human Rights Program, 2010. 31p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed May 17, 2011 at: http://www.hrdag.org/resources/publications/results-paper.pdf Year: 2010 Country: Colombia URL: http://www.hrdag.org/resources/publications/results-paper.pdf Shelf Number: 120640 Keywords: DisappearancedHomicidesViolenceViolent Crime (Colombia) |