The Congo (Africa)

48 Women raped every hour in the Democratic Republic of Congo

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/12/48-women-raped-hour-congo

Tho Congo, deemed "the worst place on Earth to be a woman" has had a study of the incidents of rape, and the numbers are staggering. The report shows that 1,152 women are raped everyday. Even in non-conflict areas rape has become an all to common incident for women ages 15-49. And these reports come from the women who actually spoke up, studies have said that as many as 75% percent of women never come forward about their rapes. The United Nations calls the rape in the Congo "a weapon of war."

There have been reports of young women and elderly women being gang raped by armed militia. Women are often afraid to speak up for fear that they'll be abandoned by their husbands. 

UN has been investigating these reports but the problem still stands: "the important message remains: that rape and sexual slavery have become amazingly commonplace in this region of the DRC and have defined this conflict as a war against women". Other countries, among them the U.S, don't offer refugees from the Congo asylum because mass rape of women isn't defined as persecution. The sad truth is that these women who will have to deal with rape all their lives from an extremely young age, will most likely die in the Congo, never bettering themselves because they can't escape.

Rape victim in the Congo.

Thanks to donations and the resilience of the woman of the Congo however, a new center for women has been opened named City of Joy in Bukavu. It provides medical care for women that have been brutalized. The story of the creation of this center is one of tragedy, unspeakable cruelty, but ultimately hope.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/09/city-of-joy-congo-women-rape?intcmp=239

The women builders of City of Joy celebrating the opening of the center.

One of the women who advocated the building of the center was Jeanne, a native of the Congo. She as a young woman, was tied to a tree and and raped for weeks. She traveled and had paid for, and put her body through extensive surgery to repair the damage done by these militia men who brutalized her only to return home and be raped once again. During one of these attacks she had become pregnant. She was forced to give birth in front of the militia men, and the baby died. After she escaped to a hospital, she again went through extensive surgery to repair the damage. She may never have children again. She however, recounted her story in front of politicians of the Congo:

"When you look at me, what do you see? 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?" Hundreds of other survivors of sexual violence in the audience cheer wildly.

27 year old Jeanne

The gynecologists of the Center say that they have encountered injuries that were very hard to swallow. Young women, little girls, older women, who's reproductive organs have been destroyed by men, glass bottles, guns, and sticks. A civil rights activist Christine Schuler-Deschryver also helped involve women of the town to build the center. She recounts how she became an activist:

"When Dr Mukwege told me about these injuries, we were very afraid," she says. "And then, in 2000, I was in my office when a woman ran in with a baby girl, 18 months old, her legs both broken back – the baby had been raped. She died in my car on the way to Panzi hospital. I ran into the cathedral with the dead baby in my arms, shouting at God. And that 

was the day I became a radical fighter."

The Congo has been ravaged by civil war, and has a history of cruelty and death. King Leopold II of Belgium ran a genocidal regime to harvest its precious resources. Congo is rich in minerals such as Diamonds,rubber, gold, and avocados. But this has sadly led to exploitation by developed countries and after independence conflicts and civil war among the people themselves. Congo has 80% of Africa's mineral reserves and reserves of silicone which we use in American in our computers, cell phones, and other electronics in high demand. The rise in technology and violence in the Congo have grown exponentially, at the same rate. So think about how many women and men had been enslaved, and have been killed over the parts inside your precious cell phone. The conflict in the Congo has been instrumented by the people who participated in the Rwandan Genocide in the 1990's The FDLR a rebel militia group who implements child soldiers and young girls as sex slaves. Ultimately the UN has connected the fall of Congolese society and chaos to these mass rapes.  "If you destroy women, you destroy the Congo," Ensler says. "Raping women is the cheapest and most effective way to instil fear in and humiliate a community. It doesn't even cost a bullet."