Women in the Congo: Imagine This Is Your Life

America’s Secy of State Hillary Clinton is in DR Congo today, pleading for Congolese women, trapped in hellish lives beyond anything we Western women can imagine.

Women in the Congo: Imagine This Is Your Life

The sexual atrocities committed against women in South Kivu extend beyond rape, into sexual slavery, forced incest and cannibalism. These atrocities come at the hands of rebel groups, often those who fled to Congo after taking part in the Twandan genocide of the 1990s.

After being raped, women are sometimes shot or stabbed in their genital organs and forced to eat excrement or the human flesh of murdered relatives.

As reported in our first post on women in Congo, rape is now institutionalized as a tactic of war. In the report released on March 7, 2009 by Human Rights Watch, combatants on both sides of the civil war are committing atrocities.

Having been raped these women are frequently and “justifiably” abandoned by their husbands. Bearing the stench of incontinence, they are often ostracized by their villages. Unable to bear children, they lose their primary value as mother or wife. Keep in mind that a woman who admits to being raped bears the stigma of it for the rest of her life. She exposes herself and her children to abandonment by her husband. If she is unmarried, admitting lost virginity makes it nearly impossible to find a husband, which is essentially the only way to make a place for herself in Congolese society.

The Congolese Family Code requires women to obey their husbands who are recognized as the head of the household, even when the women are a major, if not sole source of support, for the family. Women and girls are also subordinate by custom and practice. A woman’s status depends on being married and girls tend to marry at a young age.

Women are humiliated with rape in the Congo, typically shunned socially after the incident.I will never browbeat the readers of Anne of Carversville on caring about these international crises in women’s rights. Although I’ve followed these issues my entire life, I honestly had no idea that the situation is this bad, in places like DR Congo. There is nothing more for me to say. The atrocities against women speak for themselves.

My only promise is to better educate us on the state of women’s lives around the world. Caring for others was a core element in the second wave of feminism. Perhaps the sisterhood has seriously dropped the ball on keeping these issues alive.

As a woman responsible for not raising her voice until now, I am profoundly sorry. Anne

I’ve edited narrative from the Mwamba Family Foundation website, in our ongoing Anne of Carversville Initiative to support international women’s rights.