Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo -- I have been back in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), for two weeks now meeting with leaders, activists, social workers, therapists, recent survivors, business owners, UN officials. There is good news and bad news. The bad news is that the situation on the ground remains the same if not worse. Just a few weeks ago more than 600 women were raped on the Congo-Angola border, and more than 15,000 women have been raped in Eastern Congo this year. The massacres and recruiting of child soldiers continue. The indiscriminate and random killings rage on.
The good news is that there is palpable change in the women. Just last month, the Women's World March brought out thousands of Congolese women who vocally and proudly stood up for their rights. The women of Congo have broken the silence and are claiming their voices and vision. They are resilient and brilliant. They have huge dreams and ambitions (even if they are often muted by the massive trauma and violence). They are outspoken leaders and visionaries and they could and should lead Congo out of her misery. They are indeed building a movement. There is AFEM, a network of women journalists, run by Congolese women reporting on the war and daily news throughout the region. There are the Green Mamas, a collective of survivors who have planted fields of vegetables, and who are not only surviving off the profits, but bringing more and more women into the process. There are hundreds of local women's groups creating businesses, building leadership, fighting for judicial reform, developing healthcare and education, and there is V-Day's City of Joy, a revolutionary community for survivors of gender violence where women will turn their pain to power. It opens Feb. 4, and it is owned and run by the Congolese.
It is very clear now that those of us supporting from the outside need to listen and take direction from women on the ground. We need to be very careful that in our well-intended rush to help end sexual violence we don't institutionalize victimization or create a self-sustaining and self-perpetuating business of rape. We need to keep the focus razor sharp on the root causes of the war, and not only on the consequences.
There are so many questions.
Why, when so many war criminals have been identified, have the vast majority of them not been arrested or held accountable? Why, after 13 years, are there still weekly massacres and thousands of rapes and former child soldiers being brought back into the militias when the world knows exactly what is going on? Who is invested in keeping it this way? Why is the UN spending $3 million a day on peacekeepers who are there to supposedly protect the women, but whose main contribution seems to be taking photographs of the devastated women after they've been raped? Why isn't $1 million a day of that money going for training, paying, and feeding a Congolese army that in a very short time could be capable of purging the FDLR and protecting the borders of the Congo? Why are the failed (as the ICG recently stated) military strategies Kimia 2 and Amani Leo still being implemented by the Security Counsel and the Congolese government? Where is President Obama, who as a senator shepherded a piece of legislation, SB 2125, the Obama Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act of 2006? There, he seemed to understand that "both the real and perceived presence of armed groups hostile to the governments of Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi continue to serve as a major source of regional instability and an apparent pretext for continued interference in the Democratic Republic of the Congo by its neighbors [Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi]." Why has he suddenly gone silent? Who changed his thinking? Why, when it is known that the war in Congo is an economic war fought over the mines and minerals, isn't there monitoring in place of the flow of gold, copper and coltain by now? Why continue to do very expensive, elaborate and time-consuming UN reports without any follow up or enforcement of law? Why are we still arguing over the definition of genocide and femicide and spending fortunes counting the numbers of raped women rather than stopping the atrocities?
Here and now we actually need to end the rape. We need to say NO MORE. No more millions spent counting the raped and studying the raped. No more gratuitous rape interviews. (I think the Congolese women should declare a story strike.) No more gawking. No more tragic photographs of nameless black women. No more pity. No more feigning ignorance about the situation. No more minerals stolen out from under the people. No more raped and re-raped and re-re-raped. No more children born of rape. No more fistula. No more stigmatization. No more destroyed vaginas. No more brutalized wombs and bladders and colons. No more dead raped nine-month-old babies or 80-year-old mamas. No more money being spent on or made on rape. NO MORE RAPE.
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I've always been amazed at feminists, the Friedans and Greers.They are great preaching their middle class ideology to middle class people, but when have you ever heard of a feminist lecturing Arabs about how to treat women. On the other hand, liberals have developed a love affair with the Palestinians, their prized underdog...yet you don't hear the Harvard Union talking about female repression, honor killings, mutilation, etc. things that are common in Palestine.
read www.hard-truths.blogspot.com
Party A will declare something a huge problem that MUST be acted on NOW or CALAMITY WILL BEFALL US!
Party B calls party A delusional and insists everything is hunky dory here or, if anything, we should do a bit of the exact opposite of what party A wants.
This goes both ways. Both parties are advocating massive changes to society ( it is a joke to call either conservative ). So one party is wailing to the moon that we must "reform" social security or it'll go bankrupt while the other thinks it is basically fine. One party prophesies doom, DOOM, if we don't take control of our eco-sphere/climate RIGHT NOW while the other insists that this is beyond our power so we shouldn't worry about it. Abortion, industry regulation, social safety nets ...
Topic after topic you have the same thing. A call to action on one side and an insistence that there is no problem on the other. People get conditioned to this utter lack of nuanced debate.
We are America the Exceptional. We CAN solve any problem and therefor MUST solve them. So no, you aren't allowed to care about their suffering or express compassion because then we'd be monsters for not doing something about it.
Also there are some racists and misogynist running around. Just ignore them.
Millions of children go to bed hungry in the US. What a load of baloney.
Sorry for the reality check.
Think it through.
write which is; "Political correctness is the worst kind of lie, because it masks the truth." - Lightfoot - 1990. We do not talk about or condemn what is happening to women in Darfur, under Islam or the sex slave trade across our own borders because it involves so-called protected classes of people that receive special treatment by our public education system and our own legal system. We can not protect women all around the world, all the time. However, we could do a much better job as private citizens and as a Nation than we do. First we have to drop the pretense that only the white christian male is evil and only he can commit evil acts.
The first major problem you would face, if you had the money say three hundred billion in a bank at eight percent to pay for this undertaking is to motivate US citizens into the military. So, ask your self, to start, Would you be willing to join the military to fight and kill to make the women safe. Then do you have a few, twenty to thirty thousand would be a starter force of trained individuals to do the same, willing to give up your entire life for this. That is what you are asking. Are you willing to be the first?
I, we, live in the real world where systematically women are denied access to justice and judicial organizations created to assist victims of violence.
I live in a world where a victim's personal information is bought and sold to the attackers and others who purchase for stalking and continued violence, where investigations are often minimized, evidence destroyed (not collected) justice purchased.
I live in a world where sexual assaults victims (men & women) are marginalized by the system. I live in the United States where victims at the rate of 5000 per state per year commit suicide as a result of a sexual assault at some point in their life.
That statistic does not include victims who are murdered in the execution of the crime or other horrendous circumstances that lead to their death during the commission of the crime. These are men & women who suffered childhood trauma or sexual assault at some point and through the emergence of childhood memories or the inability to cope with the trauma of sexual violence and a lack of concern by the judiciary, commit suicide.
The CDC classifies violence at an epidemic level with no cure, vaccine or high profile interest on the horizon. It is the responsibility of the local, state and federal governments to combat this epidemic with the same tenacity that it addresses any pandemic.
I agree NO MORE RAPES. PROSECUTE
I agree that rapists must be prosecuted, but where did you get these numbers? According to a quick Google search, the US by no means has a suicide rate this high. Please advise, this is a topic in which I'm quite interested.
That can't be a true statistic, since Montana, Wyoming, and Alaska have populations below a million, and it would be a huge percentage of the population. We actually had 202 suicides in MT in 2008...you need to brush up on your statistics...that could be a nationwide average, but that wouldn't extrapolate to every state.
I like the rest of your statements, but when you misrepresent stats like that, it makes you look like you don't know what you're talking about.