Here is some stuff in the news today...
[Content Note: Rape; war crimes] "The International Criminal Court broke new ground Monday by adding rape to a war crimes conviction, finding the former vice president of Congo guilty of abuses—including sexual crimes—in connection with a militia intervention in the neighboring Central African Republic. It was the first time the Netherlands-based court has convicted anyone of sexual violence since it was launched in 2002, raising the possibility of future prosecutions that include accusations of rape and related abuses as elements of war. 'The judgment sends a clear message that impunity for sexual violence as a tool of war will not be tolerated,' said Samira Daoud, Amnesty International deputy regional director for West and Central Africa." This is incredibly good and very important news.
[CN: War on agency] A must-read by Imani Gandy and Jessica Mason Pieklo on "The Right's Ongoing Battle Against the Birth Control Benefit: The Supreme Court will hear arguments this week in the second direct challenge to the birth control benefit in the Affordable Care Act. It's a fight that's been years in the making."
[CN: Guns] Good grief: "Supreme Court justices are nominated by the president and appointed with the advice and consent of the National Rifle Association, according to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). McConnell offered this unusual view of the confirmation process during an interview with Fox News Sunday. In response to a question from host Chris Wallace, who asked if Senate Republicans would consider the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court after the election if Hillary Clinton prevails, McConnell responded that he 'can't imagine that a Republican majority in the United States Senate would want to confirm, in a lame duck session, a nominee opposed by the National Rifle Association [and] the National Federation of Independent Businesses.'"
LOL DAMN: Senator Elizabeth Warren lets loose on Donald Trump: "Let's be honest—Donald Trump is a loser. Count all his failed businesses. See how he kept his father's empire afloat by cheating people with scams like Trump University and by using strategic corporate bankruptcy (excuse me, bankruptcies) to skip out on debt. Listen to the experts who've concluded he's so bad at business that he might have more money today if he'd put his entire inheritance into an index fund and just left it alone. Trump seems to know he's a loser. His embarrassing insecurities are on parade: petty bullying, attacks on women, cheap racism, and flagrant narcissism. But just because Trump is a loser everywhere else doesn't mean he'll lose this election. People have been underestimating his campaign for nearly a year—and it's time to wake up."
[CN: Climate change] Welp: "New polls indicate that concern for environmental issues has risen ahead of the 2016 presidential election. Americans are taking global warming more seriously now than at any period in the last eight years, according to Gallup's annual environment survey. Sixty-four percent of Americans said that they are either worried a 'great deal' or 'fair amount' about global warming. At this time in 2015, only 55 percent of Americans said they felt this way." I can't believe it's still only 64%, but at least we're moving in the right direction.
[CN: Misogyny] In women's tennis: "Before Sunday's finals at the BNP Paribas Open, current tournament director Raymond Moore told reporters that the women 'ride on the coattails of the men.' He later issued a written apology." I'm sure he's real sorry. Naturally, the "controversy" (as rank misogyny in sports is always euphemized) did not end there: "World number one Novak Djokovic says male tennis players should earn more money than their female counterparts because more people watch them play." He seems neat.
Cool: "There's something truly unique happening in the space around our planet this week as a pair of comets, which may be 'twin' space rocks that broke apart at some point, make two of the closest passes by Earth in modern history. To add a little to the cosmic drama, the larger of the twins is coming in much brighter than expected. So bright, in fact, that it may be possible to see it with the naked eye. ...Earth won't quite be hosting a family reunion, but the two comets will be passing by in pretty quick succession, especially on the galactic scale. First up is 252P/LINEAR, approximately 750 feet (230 meters) in size, flying by us on Monday at a distance of about 3.3 million miles (5.2 million kilometers). Then on Tuesday, the newly discovered comet P/2016 BA14 will pass us at a distance of about 2.2 million miles (3.5 million kilometers). This will be the third-closest flyby of a comet in recorded history."
And finally! "A nocturnal 'cat burglar' has been stealing dozens of socks and men's underwear in New Zealand. In two months, six-year-old Tonkinese cat Brigit from Hamilton city brought back 11 pairs of underpants and more than 50 socks. Her owner, Sarah Nathan, has documented her feline's strange obsession on a widely shared Facebook post. ...Ms Nathan told the BBC that the trouble first began when she started discovering 'odd pieces' of underwear among her washing. 'They didn't belong to anyone in the house and one day Brigit walked into our lounge carrying a sock like a kitten,' she said, adding that Brigit's unlucky victims were probably a nearby flat 'full of blokes.' ...'Brigit doesn't hunt birds or wildlife so it seems unnecessary and our neighbours have been very good natured about it. But we are moving to the country soon so hopefully she will run out of opportunity!" LOL. Oh cats.
In the News
In the News
Here is some stuff in the news today...
[Content Note: Violence] The teen who stabbed 20 classmates and a security guard at his high school yesterday will be charged as an adult and faces "four counts of attempted homicide and 21 counts of aggravated assault." His motive is still unclear.
[CN: Choice policing] Meanwhile, one of the students who was hurt, and who reportedly is the person who pulled the fire alarm thus potentially preventing additional victims, is being criticized for taking and sharing a selfie from the hospital following treatment for his stab wound. I can't even begin to say how contemptuous I am that anyone would criticize someone for documenting what happened to him, particularly since that's one way to process trauma, not to mention that posting a pic on social media amidst chaos is a way of letting lots of people know at once that you're okay. Some people have defended the teen, but with the qualification that "he wasn't doing it to seek fame." I don't give a fuck if he was. The only time I have a problem with someone taking a selfie is when it's done with the express purpose of causing harm, e.g. to mock a person in the background who doesn't know zie's being photographed.
Well done, Attorney Eric Holder for calling out the cavernous disrespect Republicans show members of the Obama administration.
Speaking of terrible Republicans: "Senate Republicans Filibuster Paycheck Fairness Act." Because of course they did.
In better news: "Senate Votes to Extend Unemployment Benefits." However, restoring unemployment benefits to the 2.4 million USians who have been out of work for at least six months still depends on the good will of the House and: "Speaker John Boehner has already expressed concern about the bill and has previously stated that the Republicans would be willing to extend unemployment benefits only if the bill included job creation provisions." By which he means hand-outs to corporations.
Relatedly: This is a good picture of what lots of older unemployed USians are facing when they get laid off, can't get hired, and are too young to retire. And it's important to remember that there are lots of people who, for various reasons of oppression and luck, never get the chance to have a career in the first place, and their entire employment histories look like this.
Mashable has a list of some major sites that have been affected by the Heartbleed bug, and whether you need to change your password, and whether it's safe to do so now.
[CN: Sexual violence] A new UN report details the breadth of rape as a weapon of war in Congo, and how it continues as a result of a failure of the government to take action: "More than 3,600 women, children and men were subjected to rape and other sexual violence in Congo over a four-year period by the country's defense and security forces or armed rebels, according to a U.N. report released Wednesday. The report by the U.N.'s human rights office in Congo said the period from 2010 through 2013 'has been characterized by the persistence of incidents of sexual violence that were extremely serious due to their scale, their systematic nature and the number of victims.' About half the 3,645 attacks were by rebel groups and half by government forces, though the percentages varied year by year, the report said. The victims ranged in age from 2 to 80 years old, and 73 percent were women, 25 percent were children and 2 percent were men, it said."
[CN: Guns; violence] I watched just a piece of the Pistorius trial yesterday, a clip of Oscar Pistorius' testimony, and he was so awful. As the prosecutor challenged him to take responsibility for killing Reeva Steenkamp, he just kept saying over and over, "I made a mistake." And the prosecutor is really just over this fucking guy.
All the blubs: "Dog Rescued from Face of Cliff Adopted by New Jersey Firefighter."
Angelina Jolie at the UN with a Giant Teaspoon
[Content Note: Descriptions of sexual violence.]
Yesterday, Angelina Jolie, a special envoy for the UN Refugee Agency, spoke before the UN Security Council, urging them to prioritize addressing war zone rape as she shared survivors' stories. Here is AP video of part of her testimony:
I will never forget the survivors I've met, or what they told me. The mother in Goma, whose five-year-old daughter had been raped outside a police station in plain view. Or the Syrian woman I met in Jordan last week, who asked I hide her name and face, because she knew that if she spoke out against the crimes against her, she would be attacked and possibly killed.Reuters: "After Jolie spoke—along with U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Ban's special envoy on sexual violence in conflict, Zainab Bangura—the 15-member Security Council unanimously adopted a resolution recognizing that rape can exacerbate conflicts and impeded the restoration of peace and security. The resolution 'encourages members states to include the full range of crimes of sexual violence in national penal legislation to enable prosecution for such acts.'"
Rape is a tool of war. It is an act of aggression and a crime against humanity. The numbers are so vast, and the numbers so painful, that we often have to stop to remember that, behind each number is someone with a name, a personality, a story, and dreams no different from ours and those of our children.
I understand that there are many things that are difficult for the UN Security Council to agree on, but sexual violence in conflict should not be one of them. That it is a crime to rape young children is not something I imagine anyone in this room would not be able to agree on.
The rights and wrongs of this issue are straightforward, and the actions that need to be taken have been identified. What is needed is political will. And that is what is being asked of your countries today: To act on the knowledge of what is right and what is unjust, and to show the determination to do something about it.
This is an important start in addressing a vast and difficult problem.
Quote of the Day
[Content Note: War; sexual violence; colonialism.]
"Skills training is really important because one of the things that women have talked to me about is that their education is cut short. So they want the opportunity to finish school. If not, they want to train as taxi drivers or hairdressers or tailors. Those are very concrete things that change people's lives. I'd also put money into national justice systems and local customary justice systems. They tend to have a much more effective deterrent impact on communities because they resonate with the local communities in a much more direct way. So long as we continue to control the agenda for 'democratising' or community 'development' or whatever our model of justice is, there is still going to be resentment. There is still not going to be ownership over the outcomes. So if I had a whole bunch of money, I'd give it away."—Annie Bunting, associate professor of law and society at Canada's York University, on the importance of funding and supporting local solutions for women who survive sexual violence as a war strategy.
Bunting, with her research partner, Godeliève Mukasarasi, is conducting a three-year research project on forced marriage and sex enslavement in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.
I encourage you to read the entire Q&A with Bunting.
Academic Epidemic
[Trigger warning for sexual violence.]
This article in The Atlantic on the rape epidemic in DR Congo is...odd.
On the one hand, I am incredibly interested in and supportive of rigorous study of sexual violence, because good solutions are indeed rooted in a comprehensive and accurate understanding of the culture of sexual violence.
On the other hand, the way the information is presented here ultimately reads as a weird discouragement against activism.
"This research matters because an inaccurate or incomplete understanding of the nature and causes of the rape crisis in the DRC will lead to inappropriate and ineffective policy responses," writes author Laura Seay, which is right on, but then she immediately follows that observation with: "'Sensitizing' soldiers about the criminal nature of rape won't do much to stop civilians from raping their neighbors, or husbands from committing marital rape against their wives."
Well, sure, engaging soldiers with rape prevention isn't a direct solution to civilian rape, but reducing institutionally-sanctioned rape has a reverberating effect within any culture. (And I trust that Seay doesn't actually imagine "soldiers" and "husbands" to be mutually exclusive groups.) Suggesting that there is little value to the civilian population in directing rape prevention efforts at soldiers does not come across as supportive of comprehensive rape prevention, but rather the very opposite.
There also seems to be some straw-building here: I read and write about the rape epidemic in DR Congo quite a bit, and rarely do I find activists advocating singular solutions at the expense of comprehensive rape prevention, e.g. awareness-raising with soldiers but not civilians. Seay makes a good point about the disparity in state and NGO resource allocation, but it does raise the question about who the "we" actually is in the headline "Do We Have the Congo Rape Crisis All Wrong?"
And, again, the good point about disproportionately allocated resources—"the overwhelming international focus on rape also means that other services are shortchanged"—gets immediately undermined by a strangely discouraging sentiment: "As Baaz and Stern note, the focus on rape and the subsequent burst of humanitarian focus on the crisis creates perverse incentives for women to falsely present themselves as rape victims in order to access health care."
That does not read as an exhortation for the international community to increase the scope of its outreach to include additional attention on healthcare access, but as an admonishment to stop paying so much darn attention to sexual violence.
Surely, that was not Seay's intention, but that's why I find the entire article so odd, and so frustrating. Especially as it ends on this note:
Another problem with the overwhelming humanitarian focus on rape is that it, as journalist Howard French pointed out out, feeds into some of the worst popular stereotypes about Africa. It makes it easier for policy makers to dismiss the Congolese crisis as savagery rather than as the product of a political crisis in the midst of state failure. It is only by adapting a more balanced understanding of the Congo's political, economic, and humanitarian challenges that we can be in a position to undertake a far more daunting, and more important, challenge than studying DRC sexual violence: doing something to stop it.
I mean, there's so much whatthefuckery there, I don't even know where to begin. Suffice it to say that talking about the need for "adapting a more balanced understanding" of DR Congo, immediately after tacitly suggesting dimming the spotlight on rape in DR Congo because of stereotypes of savagery that exist due to our own unwillingness to be honest about the ubiquity of rape in Western culture, is tremendously unfortunate, to put it politely.
Then there is this: The article makes no serious mention of strategies that empower Congolese survivors and potential victims of sexual violence. It's all from a perspective of intervention, rather than alliance and support. That's not incidental: That's a problem in and of itself, for reasons of efficacy and of agency. Addressing a rape crisis from a colonialist perspective that subverts agency is as bitterly ironic as it is unhelpful.
And I guess that underlines what the real problem with this article is: The biggest challenge is not really our understanding of DR Congo and its rape crisis, but our own cultural attitudes toward sexual violence, prevention, and empowerment. And toward the people of DR Congo.
Number of the Day
[Trigger warning for sexual violence.]
More than 1,100: The number of women raped every day in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Every. Day.
A new study published in the American Journal of Public Health yesterday found that "more than 400,000 women and girls between the ages of 15 to 49 were raped in the war-ravaged country in central Africa during a 12-month period in 2006 and 2007," which "is 26 times more than the 15,000 women that the United Nations has reported were raped there during the same 12 months."
As bad as those of us watching this epidemic of sexual violence rage on, unconstrained, for years, thought this problem was, it is actually 26 times worse.
And these numbers still do not even include the sexual violence done to girls younger than 15, women older than 49, or any boys or men.
"Our results confirm that previous estimates of rape and sexual violence are severe underestimates of the true prevalence of sexual violence occurring in the DRC," Amber Peterman, lead author of the study, said.I quite genuinely cannot begin to put into words the furious rage and the howling sadness I feel.
"Even these new, much higher figures still represent a conservative estimate of the true prevalence of sexual violence because of chronic underreporting due to stigma, shame, perceived impunity, and exclusion of younger and older age groups as well as men," she said.
..."Although the burden of sexual violence among these groups is uncertain, a review of the records of 4,133 women attending Panzi Hospital in Sud Kivu showed that six per cent were younger than 16 years and 10 per cent were older than 65 years," the study said.
"In addition, Human Rights Watch reported that sexual violence in 2009 doubled in comparison with 2008. If this assessment is accurate, then the current prevalence of sexual violence is likely to be even higher than our estimates suggest."
Please, I beg you, lift a teaspoon on behalf of the survivors and potential victims of sexual violence in DR Congo.
USians, contact the State Department and ask Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to direct attention and resources to this devastating epidemic. My sample letter is below, which you are free to borrow.
Dear Secretary Clinton:Also contact your Senators and Representative and make your voice heard: Tell them you are thinking about the women in DR Congo and want them to be thinking about the women in DR Congo, too.
As you are almost certainly aware, the American Journal of Public Health published a study this week detailing the unfathomable scope of sexual violence being done primarily to women and girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo. More than 1,000 acts of rape, and possibly as many as double that number, are committed every single day.
I am aware of and resoundingly support your dedication to addressing the issue of sexual violence worldwide, and I am hopeful that you will commit as much attention and as many resources as possible to the survivors and potential victims of sexual violence in DR Congo.
Although I recognize the US State Department cannot fix every problem with its finite time and resources, I strongly encourage you to take decisive and effective action to support UN efforts to address what can only rightly be recognized as a national terror campaign against the women and girls of DR Congo.
Sincerely,
Melissa McEwan
Indiana
(If you're not in the US, please feel welcome to leave links for contacting MPs or other government officials in other countries in comments.)
Our teaspoons have to be our weapon of war against rape.
[H/T to @Daniel_Moyer. Previously on the DR Congo Rape Epidemic: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten, Eleven.]
Weapon of War
[Trigger warning for sexual violence on a mass scale.]
One of the most heinous expressions of a rape culture is the use of rape as a weapon of war—and, as has been previously discussed here, the prevalence and intensity of ongoing, endemic sexual violence against women in Congo has been described as the worst in the world. Hundreds of thousands of women have reportedly been raped in Congo, with sexual violence so widespread that Doctors Without Borders has said "that 75% of all the rape cases it deals with worldwide are in eastern Congo."
In August, a mass rape was reported in the town of Luvungi, during which hundreds of women were raped by rebels over the course of four days.
And now it has happened again: "Dozens of women were raped in a coordinated attack in the Democratic Republic of Congo on New Year's Day, Doctors Without Borders said Thursday."
The humanitarian agency said 33 women were raped in Fizi, South Kivu, in the eastern part of the war-torn country.5,600 survivors of rape.
"Women had been restrained with ropes or beaten unconscious with the butt of a gun before being attacked, some in front of their children," said Annemarie Loof, an official with the agency, commonly known by its French name, Medecins Sans Frontieres.
..."MSF is extremely concerned about the current situation in and around Fizi," Loof said Thursday. "People are fleeing the area fearing further violent attacks."
The agency provided medical and psychosocial care for 5,600 rape victims in North and South Kivu in 2009, it said.
Once again, I will advocate donating to Doctors Without Borders, who are doing such good and necessary work in places where rape is devastating entire populations of women and children.
Over the past few days, there have been an alarming number of stories about birds falling out of the sky and fish dying in large numbers, and I am seeing references to these stories everywhere. And that's understandable; I don't mean to suggest it isn't, because I'm interested in those stories, too.
But women are being raped in mass numbers in Haiti and DR Congo, day after day after day after goddamned day, and that has somehow failed to capture the interest of the global community in the way dead birds and fish has.
Which troubles me.
To put it mildly.
I'm not suggesting it has to be an either-or situation; I believe humans are capable of holding multiple thoughts in their heads, of caring about multiple issues simultaneously. We are multitaskers, we humans. Built that way.
I'm just saying I would like the women of Haiti and DR Congo to get at least as much attention, fuck, even half the amount of alarm, that dead birds and fish are getting.
These women matter. Their lives matter. Their health and safety and right to live a life free from the constant threat of brutal rape as the daily business of war matter.
Contact the State Department. Contact your Senators. Contact your Representative. (If you're not in the US, please feel welcome to leave links for contacting MPs or other government officials in other countries in comments.) Make your voice heard. Tell them you are thinking about the women in Haiti and DR Congo. Tell everyone you can that these women matter. Mattering is the only way they will ever be safe. Our teaspoons have to be our weapon of war against rape.[Previously on the DR Congo Rape Epidemic: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten.]
Quote of the Day
[Trigger warning for sexual violence.]
"We must fight against impunity, so that the perpetrators of violence are punished, to allow women can regain their dignity. Despite what they endure, Congolese women are strong and able to stand up again."—Dr. Nene Rukunghu, a doctor at a hospital in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo, which treats many survivors of rape. Blub.
DR Congo has one of the highest rates of sexual violence in the world. This weekend, Dr. Rukunghu, along with thousands of other Congolese women, marched to demonstrate against sexual violence: "The atmosphere of the march was colourful and peaceful, and many demonstrators carried banners with slogans such as 'No to sexual terrorism'."
[H/T to Echidne. Previously on the DR Congo Rape Epidemic: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine.]
Today in Rape Culture
[Trigger warning for sexual violence on a mass scale.]
One of the most heinous expressions of a rape culture is the use of rape as a weapon of war—and, as has been previously discussed here, the prevalence and intensity of ongoing, endemic sexual violence against women in Congo has been described as the worst in the world. Hundreds of thousands of women have reportedly been raped in Congo, with sexual violence so widespread that Doctors Without Borders has said "that 75% of all the rape cases it deals with worldwide are in eastern Congo."
This morning, the AP reports that as many as 200 women, and possibly more, were gang-raped by rebels near a United Nations peacekeepers' base in Congo over the course of four days. International aid workers report that Rwandan Hutu FDLR insurgents and Mai Mai militia took over Luvungi on July 30, and occupied the town until August 3, at which point the rebels withdrew voluntarily. A spokesperson for the International Medical Corps says their organization has already treated 179 women.
In Reuters' story on the attack, the spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs is quoted as saying the rebels "raped several women," only to follow that with: "International Medical Corps (IMC) reported that FDLR systematically raped the population during its four-day stay in Luvungi and surrounding areas. A total of 179 cases of sexual violence were reported."
I'm not sure anything more pointedly, and painfully, underlines the scope of what's happening in Congo than a UN worker calling 179 women "several women." Lest one misunderstand that as callousness on the part of the UN, by way of perspective:
Accurate figures for sexual violence are hard to come by as many rapes are unreported but the United Nations said at least 5,400 women reported being raped in neighbouring South Kivu in the first nine months of 2009 alone.Unfortunately, the UN is currently withdrawing peacekeeping troops from Congo, at the request of the Congo government.
Margot Wallstrom, the U.N. special representative on sexual violence in conflict, said in April the withdrawal of U.N. peacekeepers from the country would make the struggle against endemic rape "a lot more difficult".I quite honestly don't know what I can say that I haven't already said before, in a hundred different ways, about the catastrophic devastation to survivors, and to entire nations, when rape is used as a weapon of war, forever changing entire populations of women and girls. Nothing makes me feel more helpless than this.
If you want to help, donate to International Medical Corps here. Donate to International Rescue Committee here. Both groups are working to end sexual violence in Congo and provide much-needed aftercare to survivors of sexual violence, too.
Quote of the Day
[Trigger warning.]
"The Mugunga Internally Displaced Persons Camp sits in a land of volcanoes and great lakes on the edge of Goma, a provincial capital in the eastern Congo. The camp is now home to 18,000 people seeking refuge from a cycle of violent conflict that has left 5.4 million dead since 1998. … Women and girls in particular have been victimized on an unimaginable scale, as sexual and gender-based violence has become a tactic of war and has reached epidemic proportions. Some 1,100 rapes are reported each month, with an average of 36 women and girls raped every day. … I came to Goma to send a clear message: The United States condemns these attacks and all those who commit them and abet them. They are crimes against humanity. These acts don't just harm a single individual, or a single family, or village, or group. They shred the fabric that weaves us together as human beings. Such atrocities have no place in any society."—Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a piece for People magazine (!) called "What I Saw in Goma."
Crimes of sexual violence against women and girls are crimes against humanity.
I don't believe I've ever heard any US official ever say that.*
I can't stop blubbing.
---------------------------------
* And do you know why that simple thing is never spoken? Because there are people who whine that it leaves room to infer that the perpetrators of sexual violence aren't human, and it's more important to indulge the delicate sensibilities of rapists and their apologists than it is to acknowledge the humanity of women.
Quote of the Day
"We believe there should be no impunity for the sexual and gender based violence, and there must be arrests and punishment because that runs counter to peace."—Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in Congo today, where she "unveiled a $17 million plan on Tuesday to fight the widespread sexual violence in eastern Congo, a problem she said was 'evil in its basest form'."
The idea that impunity for sexual violence is an impediment to peace is one that touches me so deeply and intimately, I don't know if I can sufficiently convey how profoundly meaningful it is to hear my Secretary of State say it. Endemic and epidemic sexual violence without justice is, in its broadest sense, an obstacle to national peace—and then there is this: Surviving sexual assault without justice is not a peaceful life. It decimates all the elements of a peaceful life—one's sense of security, one's peace of mind, one's contentment within one's own skin. I have never again felt the kind of peace I knew before sexual violence without justice.
Thank you, Secretary Clinton, for acknowledging the reality of unpunished sexual violence on a national level, and a personal level, for Congolese women. Thank you.
Silence Is the Enemy
[Trigger warning.]
Nicholas Kristof: Silence Is the Enemy
On my last trip to Congo, I was interviewing a rape victim and tried to give her a little privacy by stepping off and sitting under a tree with her. Then pretty soon a crowd of women came near, and I grew irritated at their voyeurism and asked them to leave. "We're all rape victims," the woman in front said. "We're all here to tell our stories."Tara C. Smith: Silence Is the Enemy
What to do about this? That's what's kept me from writing more about this, I suppose--the sheer magnitude of what is happening, and the helplessness one feels when reading about it. With infectious diseases, though some of them are equally overwhelming, at least there is the hope of prevention via relatively simple devices (bed nets for malaria; condoms for HIV; isolation and medical treatment of TB, and of course the hope for vaccines, etc.) With systematic rape, there is no drug or vaccination to look for in the future. What is needed instead are shifts in attitude: more respect toward women; societal intolerance of such crimes by men; empowerment of women and girls; an understanding by family members of those who were raped; cessation of femicide. These are overwhelmingly difficult things to ask for, especially in countries fragmented by years of war and violence. How does one help to accomplish these things in far-off countries, when it's hard enough to be respected as a woman right here in the U.S.?Sheril Kirshenbaum: Silence Is the Enemy
Today begins a very important initiative called Silence Is The Enemy to help a generation of young women half a world away. Why? Because they are our sisters and children–the victims of sexual abuse who don't have the means to ask for help. We have power in our words and influence. Along with our audience, we're able to speak [with] them. I'm asking all of you–bloggers, writers, teachers, and concerned citizens–to use whatever platform you have to call for an end to the rape and abuse of women and girls in Liberia and around the world.Previously at Shakesville: Corrective Rape in South Africa, Congo Rape Epidemic I, Congo Rape Epidemic II, More, Please, Rape in the Ivory Coast, Rape "Integral" Weapon in Darfur; We Yawn.
[H/T Shaker SamanthaB]
Blog in Solidarity: Congo Rape Epidemic
Inspired in large part by Lisa Jackson's film, The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, which is airing this month on HBO, SheCodes at Black Women Vote (via Elle, Marcella, and Anxious Black Woman) exhorted other bloggers to participate in a blogswarm "to raise awareness by blogging about this issue on April 13th."
The prevalence of rape in the Congo has been described as the worst in the world:
The prevalence and intensity of sexual violence against women in eastern Congo are "almost unimaginable," the top U.N. humanitarian official said Saturday after visiting the country's most fragile region, where militia groups have preyed on the civilian population for years.Hundreds of thousands of women have reportedly been raped in the Congo, with sexual violence "so widespread that the medical aid charity, Médecins sans Frontières, [said in November] that 75% of all the rape cases it deals with worldwide are in eastern Congo."
John Holmes, who coordinates U.N. emergency relief operations, said 4,500 cases of sexual violence have been reported in just one eastern province since January, though the actual number is surely much higher. Rape has become "almost a cultural phenomenon," he said.
"Violence and rape at the hands of these armed groups has become all too common," said Holmes, who spent four days in eastern Congo. "The intensity and frequency is worse than anywhere else in the world."
One woman who sought treatment at the hospital tells how she hasn't dared sleep in her own home for months.I quite honestly don't know what I can say that I haven't already said a thousand times about the brutal, life-altering horror of rape or the catastrophic devastation to nations when rape is used as a weapon of war, forever changing entire populations of women and girls. I have no words; I beg you to listen to "this very moving and upsetting interview with Zawadi Mongane, a woman from the Democratic Republic of Congo who suffered appalling violence by the Interahamwe who killed her family, gang raped her, and forced her to kill her own baby" (and read the follow-up).
"Every woman in the village leaves at night to sleep in the bush because of the raping. They still loot but if they can't find us they can't rape us," she said.
..."People live in fear so they live in the bush. They expose themselves to diseases: malaria, gastro-enteritis. It's cold at night. All of this claims lives," [Augustin Augier, the MSF administrator at Rutshuru hospital] said.
I know it's horrible. I know it's the last fucking thing in the world you want to hear. And I beg you to listen, anyway, and expose yourself to that pain, and then go to CARE or Amnesty International and find a way, some way, any way, to try to make a difference. It might be small; it might just be putting your name on a petition. But if thousands of people took time today to put their names on petitions, if thousands of people donated just a dollar, or five, and if each of those thousands of people in turn begged people they know and love to do the same, and so on, it will matter.
Grab your teaspoon.
