Ambassador-at-large for global women’s issues at the U.S. Department of State, Melanna Verveer said, “Gender-based violence (GBV) as a tool of war is in no way limited to the DRC and Sudan, or in Africa. We’ve seen this in Bosnia, Burma, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and elsewhere. The underlying problems gender inequality and the dehumanization of women are often the same, and our assessment of needs and recommendations would be similar across regions.”

Chouchou Namegabe Nabintu, founder of the South Kivu Women’s Media Association in the DRC, shared stories of Congolese women from her radio programs. She questioned:

The women ask, ‘WHY?’ Why such atrocities? Why do they fight their war on women’s bodies? It is because there is a plan to put fear into the community through the woman, because she is the heart of the community. When she is pushed down, the whole community follows. We also ask, Why the silence of the developed countries? When a gorilla is killed in the mountains, there is an outcry, and people mobilize great resources to protect the animals. Yet more than five hundred thousand women have been raped, and there is silence. After all of this you will make memorials and say ‘Never Again.’ But we don’t need commemorations; we want you to act now.

In suggesting a way to move forward, co-founder of the Enough project to end genocide and crimes against humanity, John Prendergast said:

Measures to deal with rape as a weapon of war in isolation will fail and fail miserably. If we truly want to end this scourge we must move from managing conflict symptoms to ending the conflicts themselves. Yet rather than trying to end the conflicts in Congo and Sudan, most international efforts deal with symptoms. We spend billions of dollars a year on humanitarian efforts and peacekeeping, while the root causes of the violence remain inadequately addressed…Why can’t we focus our policy on ending these wars rather than simply dealing with their consequences?

Source: Women’s Policy, Inc.