In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) there is no place where a woman feels safe. With an estimated 48 women being sexually assaulted every hour and at least 12% of the female population having been raped at least once (1), the DRC has more sexual crimes than any other country in the world.

Rape has been a problem in Africa’s second largest country since the conflict between the national army and the Rwandan armed forces began in 1998. It has been used with devastating efficiency to humiliate, silence and destroy the lives of many.

Victims are brutally violated in front of their families or kidnapped and held hostage for weeks, months or even years. One of them is Chiruku, who was abducted in 2009 while collecting firewood with her baby son.

After a three hour walk to the camp, she recalls how four soldiers began to intimidate her.

“They ended up raping me,” the 22-year-old recalls.

Chiruku only managed to escape with the help of the commander’s wife and was able to get back to her husband.

However, he was not relieved to see that his wife and child were alive or had escaped a horrific ordeal. Instead he disowned them both, calling Chiruku the “Interahamwe’s woman” (2).

Survivors of rape do not only suffer from physical and emotional pain, but they also need to cope with the rejection from their family, partners and community.

The stigma surrounding rape in the DRC is still so strong that many victims are ostracised by families and partners.

“They have to heal doubly“, explains Pascale Palmer, Senior Press Officer at Catholic Aid Agency CAFOD.

Chiruku's son tragically died and she later gave birth to a daughter, Grace, the product of the rape. Both have become socially marginalised.

“Some people are saying that I have AIDS, and my child will always be badly thought of by those people who know my story,” she explains.

Rape has become an epidemic in the DRC - and well beyond the areas of conflict.
It has become “part of the culture”, asserts Katie Harrison, Media Officer at Tearfund.

Emmanuel Baabo, evaluation officer at the HEAL Africa Centre, partly blames the dysfunctional justice system for allowing perpetrators to get away unpunished.

Nowadays soldiers and armed forces are not the only perpetrators. Husbands and civilians commit these heinous crimes as well.

Francoise**, a rape survivor, observes this frightening trend.

“[W]ith so many soldiers living in the community, getting away with rape, now civilian men are beginning to imitate them.”

In Baabo’s opinion, the proliferation of sexual violence cannot be separated from a deeply ingrained aspect of Congolese tradition and culture in which women are not respected.

The constitution stipulates gender equality, yet women are discriminated against and left powerless in many aspects, from their obligation to obey their husbands, to legal biases that essentially force them into a relationship of dependency and submission.

Nevertheless Chiruku has not forgotten about her husband. He was everything she had left after her family was killed in the war. She knows that he remarried, yet she says she would return to him if he took her back. In spite of her experience, Chiruku remains hopeful, dreaming of one day owning her own business, somewhere where nobody knows her story.

** Real names have been changed to protect the identity of the victims.
*Member of Hutu paramilitary organisation

Notes
(1) Figures according to a 2011 study by the International Food Policy Research Institute at Stony Brook University in New York, and the World Bank
(2) The Interahamwe are a Hutu paramilitary group operating in north-west Rwanda and the DRC