![]() This “pandemic of sexual violence,” says Stephen Lewis, the former United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, is “obscene,” “insanely savage,” and can only be described as “femicide”. Recent escalation of fighting has fuelled international press reports of a country more lawless than perhaps anywhere else on earth and where women are frequently and systematically victimized. The toll of the ongoing conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is staggering: an estimated 5.5 million deaths, 1.5 million displaced people, and 500,000 victims of sexual violence since 1991. ![]() Mass rape has been documented for recent conflicts in Bangladesh, Burma, Columbia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Somalia. Following the genocide in Rwanda, where an estimated 500,000 women were raped in 1994, a landmark decision by the International Criminal Tribunal recognized rape as a crime of genocide under international law. įirst recognized as a problem internationally in the mid-1990s when “rape camps” that enslaved women and girls were discovered in the former Yugoslavia, systematic rape is now understood not as an unfortunate but inevitable by-product of war, but instead as a defining tactic of modern conflicts. Traumatized by the event, women are often unable to care for their children or households, fear leaving their homes, can become socially ostracized and isolated, and may be rejected by their husbands, families, or communities. Psychologically the effects are no less devastating. ![]() The brutality of war rape is evident in genital mutilation, forced captivity, gang rapes in public or in front of family members, and rape with objects such as glass, sticks, gun barrels, and machetes. The physical consequences can include unwanted pregnancies, sexually transmitted infections including HIV, and genital injury including fistula, all of which can leave women scarred, disabled, unable to conceive, and deemed unsuitable for marriage. Whether isolated or systematic, rape's effects are devastating to individuals and damaging to whole communities. Most of its victims are women and girls, but men and boys suffer too. Rape in war is by no means a new phenomenon, but its escalation as a deliberate, strategic, and political tactic is now undeniable.
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