By Lindsay Cortwright
Jeanne was attacked by 10 militia members in her home, in a village, just outside of Burnia, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). They raped her, one after the other while her child cried in the background. When her husband found out about the attack, he abandoned her, leaving Jeanne physically and psychologically wounded and barely able to care for her child. The damage done to her vagina during the attack still causes her pain and urinary problems. She has no money, faces the daily threat of homelessness, and tells journalist Lauren Wolfe that she has no possibilities. Still, she doesn’t mind telling her story and reliving the pain – she says that she hopes to help find a solution to the violence and get help financially.
Stories like Jeanne’s draw attention to the fact that wartime rape is no longer just an expected side effect of war; it is being used as a weapon to decimate families, villages, communities, and ethnicities: to instill terror, exterminate, and intimidate the other side. While the DRC has recently captured the world’s attention for its ever-increasing violence, rape has been used as a weapon in other recent conflicts in Bangladesh, Yugoslavia, Armenia, and Rwanda. Still, the attention the problem is beginning to receive does absolutely nothing to help the women who are victimized and brutalized in these violent conflicts and it certainly doesn’t prevent it from happening.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the rate of civilian rape has increased 17-fold since the beginning of the conflict in 1998. You could argue that this is the direct result of years of war, trauma, and violence. You could argue that the men growing up in the war have been so traumatized by violence that they become the perpetrators of violence. You could argue that the chaos caused by the war has led to an increase in civilian crime. Yet, none of these reasons sufficiently explain the predicament of the Congolese women. As the increasing numbers of both victims and perpetrators in the Congo suggest, rape is not just a side effect of war: it is a side effect of culture.
The extent of the brutality women of the DRC face on a daily basis defies shallow explanations. In the Congo, gang rape is the most common form of sexual violence, with the number of perpetrators averaging 4.5 men per victim. Women are raped with sticks, bayonets, and other tools, causing severe injury and trauma. After raping the women, some of the perpetrators are shooting the women in the vagina, sewing the vagina together with thorns, or padlocking their vaginas shut. There is no minimum age requirement for rape victims and children as young as 6 months old are being attacked.
The women who survive the initial violence face trauma, depression, anxiety, insomnia and nightmares, memory loss, HIV/AIDS, STDs severe injury, and pregnancy in addition to shame, victim-blaming, self-loathing, divorce, beating, and social ostracism. They become victims of the military, of their police officers, of the UN Peacekeepers, and of their own husbands or neighbors. Most of these women have nowhere to turn. Congolese women are thought to be opportunistic and unreliable. Men are considered by both society and the law to be the “masters” of their wives and women cannot open a bank account, get a job, or buy and sell property without their husband’s permission. Women have extremely low literacy and education rates, no political status, and exist only to produce and care for children and work for the community. The problem is not the war; it is the community’s perception of women.
Foreign aid has always been the American way but what can we do to help give these women a life when they don’t have the right to establish one? Foreign aid tends to target issues in a convenient way rather than according to the country’s needs. One military leader in the DRC told researchers, “It is inhumane to sell another’s pain.” Another pointed out that it was easy for us to send our doctors, medicines, blankets, and food while the same countries that offer help continue to provide the weapons that allow the conflict to continue, long after the war was supposedly ended.
What the DRC needs is community leaders to rise up and advocate for the rights and education of women. Practically, they need condoms, birth control, sex education, and HIV/AIDS education and prevention. They need foreign countries to stop providing them with weapons. Women need a safe place to recover, receive health care – physical and psychological, learn how to read and write, and learn skills they need to survive on their own. The community needs mental health education and treatment, programs that teach men that masculinity does not equal dominance and violence, and the community needs to learn how to help themselves. Foreign aid is temporary, raising community leaders and giving them the skills they need to carry on is a long-term solution.
One Congolese woman spoke up at the opening ceremony of City of Joy – a safe house designed to address the trauma and psychological aftermath of rape – about the plight of women in the DRC: “Do you see me as an animal? Because you are letting animals treat me like one. You, the government, if it was your children, would you stop it? You, you white people: if this violence was happening in your country, would you end it?” What will we do to end it?
Lindsay Cortwright is a double major in anthropology major and english and awomen’s studies minor attending East Carolina University.