PANEL 5 The impacts of accountability processes for sexual and gender-based violence Panel Five examined the impacts of prosecutions and investigations of sexual and gender-based crimes, and the ways in which these processes affect victims and survivors of sexual and gender-based violence. Panellists Ottilia Anna Maunganidze, Fanta Doumbia, and Jaqeline Mutere highlighted that gender-sensitivity gaps in criminal and other justice mechanisms mean that many victims and survivors often feel apprehensive about engaging with these processes, highlighting a need to develop gender sensitivity in available mechanisms for the redress of sexual and genderbased violence. The panel and discussions that followed looked at the ways in which victims, despite often being the rhetorical centre of criminal justice mechanisms, are often sidelined in actual justice processes. 5 OTTILIA ANNA MAUNGANIDZE Head of Special Projects, Institute for Security Studies An overview of prosecutions of sexual and gender-based violence and their global impacts Maunganidze’s presentation focused on gender sensitivity and what justice for sexual and gender-based violence entails. Maunganidze firstly offered a critique of current criminal justice processes, arguing that the often-adversarial process can often be damaging to victims of sexual violence crimes. She noted that criminal justice is, indeed, necessary, but that there is a need also to be sensitive and cognisant to the needs of the victim in this process. Maunganidze noted the continuities of sexual and gender-based violence in pre-conflict, conflict, and post-conflict situations. She argued that the battleground for war is often the bodies of women and children that are instrumentalised and often treated as tools, rather than as autonomous beings. This battle, Maunganidze argues, is the hardest to address. Thus, it is important that the adversarial process of criminal justice is careful not to perpetuate similar patterns of violence in the justice process. 20\ Accountability for conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence: Successes, challenges, narratives, and omissions