Rape in the Congo.

A report was recently released about rape in the DRC suggesting that over 400,000 women are raped there every year, a much higher number than was previously thought. That's 1 an hour. This high rate of rape, along with other forms of armed violence along with the exploitation of Natural Resources continues to be ignored by the international community.

I thought I might take this as an opportunity to share some of the research I did for my thesis and the results. You can find the section entitled "Rape" below. Note I've taken out the foot notes for simplicity but the intext notations are still there.


Rape was by far the most commonly reported form of armed violence reported by research participants. Annie Desilets, a humanitarian worker with Doctors Without Borders,245 indicated that there were a very high number of rape cases at the clinic where she worked in Kitchanga. She indicated that women were at a significantly higher risk of being civilian victims than men as a result of such high rates of sexual violence.246
Odéline, a graduate student from Lubumbashi, spoke about the ways in which women experienced sexual violence in her community. She said: "When we are raped, no one can help you. You can't continue to live. I saw it myself, in towns where the soldiers come and rape women, when they are done, they kill hem. Therewas one woman who was pregnant and they took out her baby and tore it up. After you experience something like this you don't want to live anymore.247
Both Sandra Oder248 and Nelson Alusala, who are senior researchers at the ISS, linked the high rates of rape in Congo with the proliferation of small arms and 79
in Northern Uganda, she has worked extensively on ISS initiatives in the DRC alongside Henri Boshoff particularly relating to gender-based violence light weapons. Oder links gender-based violence in the DRC to SALW proliferation. As she points out, "the issues of small arms proliferation has come out as something that has exasperated the situation of women. For example, look at the use of small arms to commit rape."249
A joint report by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and Oxfam International indicates that "girls as you as five and women as old as were reportedly shot in the vagina or mutilated with knives or razor blades."250 This is reflected in Alusala‟s assertion indicating that "in most cases the perpetrator uses a gun to subdue the victim, and in many occasions the victim‟s private parts are mauled out or badly bruised after the incident."251 This observation is consistent with documentation from Médicins Sans Frontières between August 2004 and January 2005 which indicates that of the 807 rapes that occurred in Bunia during this period, seventy-eight percent involved armed combatants and eighty percent involved weapons.252
Kyf, from Kisangani, reported that her cousin had been a victim of the type of attack described by Alusala. She said that her cousin "was at home and one day soldiers came and raped her. T here were four of them and they all took turns and they also used their weapons to sexually assault her.253"
In a presentation given at the Institute for Security Studies in Pretoria, Anneke van Woudenberg, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, spoke extensively on the subject of sexual violence in the DRC. She indicated that rape had increased two to three fold in recent years and that more than 200,000 women and girls had been raped. She indicated that many attacks occur at military road blocks and that the majority of victims are under the age of eighteen. Finally, she said that when men stand up for their wives, sisters or daughters, they are often killed in response and that such murders represent a disproportionate amount of civilian deaths.254
Van Woudenberg also focused on the role of government soldiers in rape. Two participants also discussed the role of soldiers during their interviews. Francis said that "there was an army that came to start war and it was they who raped. They would come with their weapons, during the time of trouble, and take women and girls by force and they would walk with them. It never took place in the home."255 Furthermore, G-6, a former government agent with the Congolese Immigration and Border Control, indicated that all parties involved in the conflict were responsible for rape. He indicated that "everyone in the East rapes. Women are the most vulnerable and children. Soldiers with the military rape, soldiers with MONUC rape,256 the rebels and foreign forces rape women, they‟ll do anything."257
Instances of MONUC being involved in sexual assault cases are particularly unsettling. Rackley observes that "Consensual or not, in their abuse of power and sexual conduct with minors, UN troops have repeated the horrible precedent of sexual violence set by local armed groups."258 This inappropriate conduct only served to worsen the already vulnerable position of Congolese civilians and has been a significant source of criticism against MONUC, complicating its relationship with the Congolese community.
There has also been a high incidence of rape outside of the context of the conflict. The most horrific report of rape was detailed by a female participant who was a victim of the Rwandan genocide. Nicole was only four years old in 1994 when her entire family was killed in the genocide, and she and her brother sought refuge in the DRC. In 1996, when the first war began in the DRC, there was a surge of violence against both Rwandan and Congolese Tutsis in which her brother was killed. The family that had taken her in told her to go back to Rwanda where it would be safer for her. Once she returned to Rwanda, with nowhere else to go, Nicole was taken in by two prostitutes who began to groom her to become a child prostitute. She said that she was left alone for the most part due to her small size but after a couple of years a man from the Congo purchased her and returned with her to the Eastern DRC, where he kept her as a sex slave until his family found out. He then fled with her, first to a different location in Congo, and then to South Africa where the abuse continued until she gave birth to a daughter in 2005. At that point, Nicole sought intervention by the police to stop the abuse of herself and her child.259
Finally, it is also worth noting that some NGOs have reported incidences of men being raped in attacks. However, none of the participants in this study specifically discussed this topic, likely due to its sensitive nature.
Twenty-six out of the thirty-one respondents to the arms demand questionnaire indicated that rape was a problem in their community. In addition, twenty-three felt that rape was being used as a weapon of war. While the proliferation and misuse of SALW does not always directly result in rape, they can have a central role in facilitating rape and as discussed are sometimes used to commit sexual assault.