Understanding Sexual Violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo
After reports surfaced last week about recent rapes in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a UN spokesman announced that the UN Organization Stabilization Mission in the DRC (MONUSCO) would send a team to investigate.
MONUSCO, as well as various other UN bodies, including the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), and its predecessor, the UN Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), have been engaged in monitoring and reporting activities in the DRC for decades. Last year, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights published a mapping report documenting violations of human rights and international humanitarian law committed on DRC territory from 1993 to 2003. Yet a full understanding of why such violence occurs remains elusive.
Two papers published in the past year offer a glimpse into the complexities of understanding and contextualizing the subject. The Complexity of Violence, written by Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern and published by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) in cooperation with Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, argues that examining sexual violence in isolation from other forms of violence hinders the ability to develop effective policy responses. The paper also argues for looking beyond the “rape as a weapon of war” narrative, for as the authors note, “high levels of SGBV [sexual and gender based violence] have also existed in contexts and times of relative peace.”
In a different vein, Increasing Security in DR Congo: Gender-Responsive Strategies for Combating Sexual Violence, written by Rosan Smits and Serena Cruz and published earlier this month by the Clingendael Conflict Research Unit, asserts that policymakers can better understand sexual violence by more holistically examining the role gender plays in society. The paper argues:
Sexual violence in the DRC is gendered. Not only is this violence gendered in how it is performed, but also in how it can be fought against. Prevailing over gender related violence means dismantling the ongoing tensions between men and women related to prescribed gender norms, roles, and identities. In doing so, it is possible to achieve a win-win environment. This means working towards methods that not only counter these tensions, but also support the development of beneficial gender norms, roles, and identities of men and women in a (post-) war DRC.
The “gender” lens is made more complex by the fact that some perpetrators are women and some victims are men (as Dustin Lewis noted in an earlier post). For more information on policy response challenges, see an earlier “IHL in Action” post on the UN Listing Mechanism, a PBS podcast on the subject, analyses in the recent issue of the International Review of the Red Cross focusing on gender and armed conflict, and resources at the “Sexual Violence in Conflict Settings” webpage of the Sexual Violence Research Initiative of the Global Forum for Health Research.
