Characterizing Sexual Violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Profiles of Violence, Community Responses, and Implications for the Protection of Women

Saturday, August 1, 2009
Africa
Central Africa
Congo (Kinshasa)

Although the second Congo war officially ended in 2002, there are indications that sexual violence has increased steadily over the past five years. In fact, a drastic increase in violence and rape in North and South Kivu has been widely documented since the beginning of 2009, making research on the violence in DRC more urgent than ever. Results from this report show the sexual violence perpetrated by armed actors in the DRC has features that indicate rape may be being used as a weapon of war: rape of the very young and very old; forced incest; gang rape; abduction; rape in public; and rape with foreign objects. The issue of stigmatization of rape survivors was an overarching and dominant finding: one in three women reported being rejected by their husbands and one in 15 women reported being rejected by their communities after rape. Women state that the stigma they face as survivors of sexual violence can be as traumatic as the attack itself. Results also show that certain groups of women are especially vulnerable to social isolation, including women with children born of rape, women who have been gang raped, women with fistula as a consequence of rape, and women testing positive for HIV. Women who were widowed or abandoned by their husbands were much more likely than married women to report feelings of general isolation. Conversely, when husbands chose to support their wives after rape, this connection acted as a strong protective force against rejection by others. The violence in DRC embodies a new kind of war emerging in the 21st century – one that occurs in villages more than battlefields and affects more civilians than armed combatants.

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Characterizing Sexual Violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: Profiles of Violence, Community Responses, and Implications for the Protection of Women