The hidden currency in PNG’s arms economy

You can pay for a mercenary with three things in parts of the Papua New Guinea Upper Highlands. Cash. Pigs. Or your daughter.

The Upper Highlands arms economy is usually discussed in terms of guns, ammunition, hired gunmen, and more recently, the politicians and businessmen who finance all of these components.When women and girls are discussed, it is usually as victims and casualties of the violence.

What is generally not acknowledged is the systematic way in which women's bodies and their sexual exploitation have become an intrinsic component of this economy.

So, how does this actually work in practice?

Paying for a hireman or a gun

A “hireman” is a mercenary. He brings an AK-47 or an M16 – often leaked from a police or defence-force armoury – and the tactical knowledge to use it. The greater their reputation for violence, the higher price they can command. Some move across provincial borders, fighting for one clan one week and another the next. Sometimes they arrive alone, sometimes with an entourage of associates. Once they are in your fight, they often run it.

As a person in Enga explained:

“They have their own demands. Most probably 10,000, 5,000 kina for one week or one month. If they kill a man, then the other demands will come over it. They will say, ‘So, I killed that one, so you give me a pig, you buy me beer, you give me your girl, your daughter’ – everything they will demand.”

A clan with a successful trade store and kin in Port Moresby can pay the cash side. A clan that has just lost a number of men and most of its houses and gardens cannot. The pressure on community members to contribute to fund the hireman and his needs is intense, and those who do not do so risk social exclusion and loss of right to their land. So, pigs are sold. And then, when the pigs are gone, daughters and wives are offered as part of the payment.

This does not happen everywhere. Most accounts we have read or heard locate it in Hela and Enga. Nor is it a new phenomenon, although it is clearly linked to the expansion of the use of guns in warfare in the upper Highlands over the last 15 years or so.If you look hard, you can see clues to its existence in a trail of academic papers and reports over the past two decades. One of us wrote back in 2004, “Young women have become a form of currency for paying mercenaries and purchasing guns.” In 2010, anthropologist Polly Wiessner, wrote that “Rambos” were hired “in exchange for money, pigs and sexual access to women.” In 2021, Amnesty International observed that in tribal fighting, women were “sometimes sold in exchange for guns or offered in return for the services of hired gunmen.”

Our working theory is that these practices have become more normalised and systematically integrated into the arms economy in recent years – although we lack the empirical evidence to know how widespread it is.

The man with the gun runs the village

During a fight, the hireman exercises total control over the community he is fighting for. If he rapes a girl, or decides to take a woman as his “wife”, it is very difficult for anyone to intervene. As one person explained:

“The hireman say, ‘Hey, I give you a service, so this is what I get paid. You shout at me, I’ll fire a gun, put a bullet in your head.’ So men and boys, then, they cannot do anything to help.”

This is an outsider armed with a high-powered weapon, in someone else’s village, who has been told that fighting for the clan entitles him to certain “privileges”. Sexual access is one of those privileges. He sets the terms. One informant told us that if he arrives with cash on his gun, he is signalling he wants cash. If he comes with a woman’s bra wrapped around his gun, he is signalling he wants a woman.

This is not all coercion

If we stopped here, we would be telling only half the story. Some women in Upper Highlands communities choose to align themselves with hiremen, and enter these relationships voluntarily. A relationship with a powerful gunman provides protection – for herself, her brothers and her clan’s land. Such a partnership was described by one person we interviewed as “a great and positive contribution from the tribe to the hireman”. Sometimes the hireman takes his new wife – and children if there are any – back to his village when he leaves and cares for them there. Sometimes he will build a separate house for his wife and be responsible for her and their children’s welfare in her own village.

Voluntary union and coerced exchange therefore coexist in the same villages, sometimes in the same households. Distinguishing between the two can be difficult but recognising that both are present is necessary.

But the structural fact does not budge. In the most violent provinces of PNG, women’s bodies are part of the payment system that keeps the arms economy moving.

The displaced are not safer

A similar combination of vulnerability and sexual exploitation operates at the displaced end of the cycle. According to IDMC's Global Report on Internal Displacement 2025, around 84,000 people live in displacement across the country as result of conflict and violence, and most have been doing so for long periods. Women and girls in displaced communities are often at risk of opportunistic abduction and sexual violence – a vulnerability that follows from the destruction of the kin networks that would otherwise protect them. The clan structures that constrain men’s behaviour at home have no purchase in a host community a hundred kilometres away. One interviewee from Hela said “the husbands and brothers of the victims find themselves powerless to protest or to challenge the perpetrators”. He also noted how the victims lack security and resources to access justice. Another person from Enga stated:

“I have seen a lot of these experiences in the recent fight in Wapenamanda. Wives being raped, girls been taken as wives by the hosting tribes.”

Sometimes, young girls are married off early in order to “keep them away” from perpetrators.Sometimes the transaction is even more brutal: one interviewee said, “their daughters are given in marriage for exchange of the land where they stay or the resources they use.”

This pattern is not a secret, but it is not publicly spoken about either. Victims and their families can neither resist it nor talk about it, unless someone is badly assaulted or killed. While international agencies have well-established gender-based violence programming for responding to emergencies, this specific phenomenon is rarely identified explicitly. The closest reference we could find was an Oxfam observation from 2014 about the experience of displaced women in Hela province, noting that “their dependence on their hosts … added to risks of displaced women being subjected to violence and abuse by their hosts.” Without naming what is happening, responses – where they occur – will remain reactive rather than preventative.

Just as with the use of women to pay for guns and mercenaries, quantitative evidence about the extent of these abuses is lacking. But it is something that needs to be spoken about and urgently addressed.

Three things should follow. Women should be acknowledged and included as real and meaningful parties to peace agreements, not as mere observers. The need to protect against sexual exploitation should be recognised as a fundamental component of displacement programming that responds to conflict. And primary fieldwork should be commissioned to measure how widespread these practices are and what effective mechanisms can prevent them.