The Foreign Service Journal, April 2011

A P R I L 2 0 1 1 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 23 I had been invited by the local organization I was ob- serving, along with two individuals from the Ministry of Health, on a field trip fromGoma to Mweso. We stopped at local health clinics along the way to discuss the issues of rape and sexual violence and how to recognize and treat cases that would need to be referred to the local hospital in Goma. Our hosts also provided these clinics with rape kits from the United Nations Population Fund. After an hourlong presentation by two of my Congolese companions, the local nurse for the Burungé health clinic piped up (in French, so I could understand): “We see this all of the time here. It happened just over in those hills two weeks ago.” A young girl, around 8 years old, had been raped by a local shepherd. When the girl told her parents, they took the issue to the shepherd’s employer, who happened to be the local military official. Not wanting to lose his shep- herd, the military official offered compensation to the fam- ily: a goat. As the family did not have much in the way of income or assets and this livestock would feed them for a long time, they accepted the offer. From that point on, there were no charges. Nor did the girl seek treatment. The issue was to end there. The staff from the Burungé clinic (one nurse and two as- sistants) said saw these symptoms quite frequently in this village health clinic. However, women rarely reported they were raped or sexually abused. According to the nurse’s as- sistant, the stigma was too great. “They will be rejected by their husbands and family if they say they have been raped.” The village nurse said that when women did speak of their rapes, 90 percent indicated the perpetrators were armed soldiers in the village. Where does a Congolese woman turn when she finds herself a survivor of gender- based violence? What does she do when her attacker is part of the local authorities and she risks grave social stigma by reporting the incident? Rape As a Weapon of War Stories of rape in war exist throughout history and around the world: the practice is as old as war itself. More recently, rape was a frequent occurrence on both sides in the Vietnam War. In Bosnia in the mid-1990s, an esti- mated 60,000 Bosnian women from various ethnic groups were raped, many of them becoming pregnant. Between a quarter-million and a half-million Tutsi women were raped during the Rwandan genocide, and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda reported that 24 percent of the survivors are now HIV-positive. In Kashmir, Indian soldiers raped “to punish and hu- miliate the entire community,” according to numerous ac- ademics, calculating that local custom would hold the women responsible and disorient the community. Shamed women would be reluctant to give evidence in public courts. Academics report that the rapes did not occur in prisons or detention camps (as happened in Bosnia) but during house-to-house searches and reprisal attacks. Military- and police-perpetrated rape in Central Amer- ica, Haiti, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Liberia, Peru, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Uganda, the DRC and elsewhere has been documented extensively by Amnesty Interna- tional, Human Rights Watch, the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board and other organizations. According to the United Nations Interagency Standing Committee’s “Guidelines for Gender-Based Violence In- terventions in Humanitarian Settings,” the term “gender- based violence” is a blanket expression for any harmful acts carried out against a person’s will that are based on socially recognized (gender) differences between males and fe- males. Though the term points to the relationship between fe- males’ subordinate status in society and their increased vul- nerability to violence, men and boys may also be victims of gender-based violence, especially sexual violence. Statis- tically, however, such acts have a greater impact on women and girls than on men and boys. For this reason, GBV is often used interchangeably with the term “violence against women.” F O C U S Maggie Fleming is the Africa advocacy officer for the In- ternational Rescue Committee, based inWashington, D.C. Her work focuses on humanitarian issues and policies across the continent of Africa, on which she works as a li- aison with the U.S. government. She also serves as co-chair for both the Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo working groups of Interaction. Previously, Ms. Fleming covered human rights, hu- manitarian aid, global health, trafficking, and religious freedom issues on Capitol Hill in the office of Senator Sam Brownback, R-Kan. She also worked overseas with the Swiss-based nongovernmental organizationMedair in Ori- entale Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (2006-2007) and with two other NGOs in Arusha, Tanza- nia (2003-2004). Prior to that, she served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Akaba, Togo (2002-2003).