Congo rape: what should we do now?
The US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is the latest person to condemn the mass rape near Walikale in the Congo.
“This horrific attack is yet another example of how sexual violence undermines efforts to achieve and maintain stability in areas torn by conflict but striving for peace,” she said.
Last August Mrs Clinton visited Heal Africa, one of the aid agencies which helps rape victims in the DRC, and which is counselling and treating the women affected by this latest horror.
Two senior UN officials are en route to the DRC to investigate how the assaults occurred so near a UN peacekeeping base, and the UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has expressed his outrage.
The outcry makes me wonder why we (whoever ‘we’ is) have failed to stop the epidemic of rape which has infected Central Africa for the past 15 years.
At a lunch organised by an aid agency I attended a few months back, a well-known pop star talked about the issue. She was horrified, as well she might be, and determined that ‘something should be done’.
I felt a wave of impotence. This is not an ‘untold story’. One of many documentaries on the subject won a Sundance Prize in 2008.
Channel 4′s Dispatches and Unreported World have told the story several times, as have we at Channel 4 News.
The popular NBC series Law and Order has featured the issue, and Ted Koppel, one of the most influential US anchormen, has reported first hand from Shabunda, one of the worst-affected areas.
It’s a fashionable cause, and aid agencies pay more attention to it than to other problems in the DRC.
And yet, it never seems to get any better.
This most recent incident appears to be systematic rather than opportunistic. Clearly it’s a failure of peace-keeping, and of politics – the men who govern the DRC do not see stopping rape as a priority. But how can ‘we’ stop it?
Journalists have reported it, activists have campaigned, politicians have expressed outrage – but what, realistically, can be done now to make a difference?
There are 5 comments on this post
So much of it has to do with culture. Even in the west, women are often blamed for being raped. Imagine how thin the moral boundaries are in small rural communities, where infrastructure and the ability for women (or anyone) to gain employment (ie: raise their status) has been decimated by war.
Rape is one of the first lines of attack for desperate fighters. It is a terror weapon, it works, and it makes them feel powerful.
As with so many appalling violations of the rights of women, the answer comes not simply in rebuilding, but boosting education, the local economy and increasing women’s status.
None of which is going to happen in a hurry, and if the country is on a war setting, then all bets are off.
(I’d have to do the research on this but what’s the record on troops raping women in Europe during the Second World War? Or the Bosnian War? Systematised rape is a global weapon of war, is it not?)
By pestering the Head of Government again and again . Central Africa needs to know rape is a crime.It seems that the men there think it is their right to abuse..it must filter down centrally.
Better communication by peacekeepers with communities would help. When they talk regularly people say they feel much safer. Hopefully the UN will now invest more in things like civilian liaison staff, mobile phones and early warning centres.
But peacekeepers are only a short term solution. The international community needs to prioritise much more support for reforming the Congo army and police. Often it is responsible for abuses – in this case it was in the area but couldn’t protect people. But soldiers and police often go without pay or housing for months –creating more professional and disciplined security forces is a vital step to make people feel safer.
More resources also need to be provided for helping victims – there are many local groups doing great work trying to change people’s attitudes and stigma to rape survivors and ensure that they are supported. The kind of expert medical care that IMC gave in this attack is rare – there are only 2 permanent centres offering specialist care in the whole of the Kivu region. Rural women often have nothing.
Instead the international community has been supporting military offensives that have made the situation…
For more on this topic, i wrote a blog post about a documentary of this topic:
http://taschahalliburton.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-greatest-silence-rape-in-congo.html