Understanding Sexual Violence in the Colombian Armed Conflict: Victim Characteristics, Spatial Clustering, and Temporal Contagion
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Background
Sexual violence has been identified as one of the most serious forms of civilian victimisation in the Colombian armed conflict. Despite its importance, population-scale analysis of conflict-related sexual violence patterns has been limited, something essential for informing public health responses and prevention strategies.
Methods
We analysed two national databases of armed-conflict-related data from Colombia: the statutory Register of Victims (over 8 million registered individuals) and the National Centre for Historical Memory database of armed conflict events. We profiled victim demographics and used log-Gaussian Cox process modelling to identify geospatial clustering and Hawkes process modelling to test for temporal contagion. Analyses were conducted for data from the entire conflict period 1964-2024 and, more recently, 2014-2024.
Results
Victims were predominantly female (90.1-90.5%) and disproportionately from ethnic minorities. Sexual violence showed significant geographic clustering with a spatial range of 2.4km for the entire conflict period, reducing to 1.7km after controlling for population density. In 2014-2024, baseline intensity decreased but spatial clustering extended over a wider area (range = 2.5km unadjusted; 1.9km adjusted). Comparison of Hawkes process models revealed temporal contagion was largely driven by broader conflict dynamics. For the entire conflict, the unadjusted model indicated near-critical temporal dependency (branching ratio = 0.99) with multi-day temporal contagion (half-life = 3.7 days). The model adjusted for changes in background rates revealed little evidence for temporal contagion independent of changes in background rates. For 2014-2024, the unadjusted model similarly showed near-critical branching (branching ratio = 1.00) with extended decay (half-life = 10.04 days), whereas background rate-adjusted models indicated little evidence for temporal contagion beyond background rate changes.
Conclusions
Sexual violence in the Colombian armed conflict has shifted from concentrated, high-intensity incidents to more dispersed patterns increasingly shaped by structural and contextual influences rather than incident-specific characteristics.
