Three years ago Henriette Nyota said she was gang raped as her husband and four children were forced to watch. The men in uniform then disemboweled her husband and continued raping her and her two oldest daughters, 10 and 8. The assault went on for three days.  “I wish they’d killed me right there with my husband,” she said, “What use am I now? Why did those animals leave me to suffer like this?”

A couple of days ago I posted an overview of an article found in this month’s Forced Migration Review on the lack of reproductive health needs in Darfur and how rape is being used as a tool of war. The quoted text is from an article in CNN today by Jeff Koinange on the situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (photo is from MSF). There aren’t enough medical professional or resources to treat women who have been sexually violated.

I want to excerpt part of the article which is an interview with Dr. Denis Mukwege Mukengere, the only physician in a hospital in eastern Congo where ten women who have been sexually-assaulted a day are treated and with financial resources earmarked for these women expected to run out by the end of June.

“Some of them have knives and other sharp objects inserted in them after they’ve been raped, while others have pistols shoved into their vaginas and the triggers pulled back,” said Dr. Denis Mukwege Mukengere. “It’s a kind of barbarity that only savages are capable of.” He added that “these perpetrators cannot be human beings.”

I didn’t include this passage to shock or upset, but to engage readers and force us to become more pro-active. We have to work to change policies overseas and look at normative approaches to dealing with sexual violence against women in an armed conflict.

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