Love, death and violence against women in the DRC (and elsewhere): what are we missing?

Today is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, so expect a rash of stories about sexual violence in the DRC’s current conflict. Here Rachel Hastie, Oxfam’s protection adviser,  cautions against a simplistic ‘heart of darkness’ narrative, and argues for a more nuanced and human understanding of the phenomenon.

There’s a lovely photograph in the atrium of the Oxfam office. It shows Masumbuko, a 36 year old man, draping his arms around his wife, Grace’s, neck as she shyly looks to the camera. It was taken by fashion photographer Rankin for the exhibition ‘From Congo with Love’. Masumbuko says “I fell in love with my wife the first time I saw her. There was something about her – the way she was talking, the way she was walking, her nose, her ears…. I can’t go a day without looking at her.”

It’s sweet and lovely, and all the more so because they live in eastern Congo, which has been described as ‘the rape capital of the world’ – Rankin’s photo gives me a glance into the lives of these two people that jars with the protection reports and field assessments sitting on my desk just a few metres away.

Whether it be Bosnia, Liberia, Darfur, or DRC, sexual violence has been an aspect of many of the conflicts and humanitarian responses I’ve been involved in during my time with Oxfam. Rape and other forms of sexual violence are an appalling violation, devastating in their immediate and long term consequences for individuals and their families and communities.

In recent years there have been some significant gains in getting sexual violence in conflict onto the international agenda, largely won by the many women’s groups, organisation and individuals who have campaigned tirelessly in the face of hostility, indifference and derision. There is still a long way to go, as news reports from Syria, eastern DRC, and Mali illustrate, but who would have thought just 10 years ago that we would now have a Special Representative to the UN Secretary General on Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict – the formidable Zainab Hawa Bangura, a security council resolution with a ‘naming and shaming’ mechanism, and a sitting Head of State indicted by the ICC for rape as crime against humanity?

There has been a huge amount of public campaigning to make the extent of rape in war and its consequences more visible, to galvanize more concerted action from donors, policy makers, the international community and Governments around the world. Yet there is something that makes me very uneasy about the way the issue is being raised and what the long-term consequences of that might be.

Masumbuko and Grace

Just a couple of weeks ago The Guardian ran a story that one-third of Congolese men admit committing sexual violence. Can this be true? In a country of with an estimated population of more than 20 million men and boys aged 15+ are there really almost 7 million who admit to being rapists? Well, no it’s not true of course, of the 708 men interviewed in and around Goma, including in a military base in the conflict-affected east of the country, a third admitted to committing acts of sexual violence. This in itself is shocking, the levels of disclosure give an indication of the extent of acts of sexual violence, and how little sanction these men expect from their peers and community, but it does not equate to a third of all Congolese men being rapists. Similar headlines periodically appear from conflict zones around the world, and the aid agency assessment reports all too frequently portray conflict zones as populated by violent male rapists where women only exist as passive victims.

This news coverage has not done justice to the report of the International Men and Gender Equality Survey (IMAGES), from which the statistic was sourced. IMAGES has produced a very intelligent, and thoughtful report that deserves much more careful consideration. The researchers themselves highlight that sexual violence is a commonplace occurence and 9% of men and 22% of women they interviewed had experienced it during the conflict. Sexual violence isn’t experienced in isolation – killings, torture, lost homes, livelihoods and the death of family members are all part of people’s experience of conflict. Rigid gender roles create vulnerabilities for women and for men, and the report’s authors call for greater focus on the impact of disempowerment of men and how gender relations are affected by conflict in order that the root causes and drivers of such violence are addressed.  Three quarters of the men they spoke to said they felt ashamed to face their families because they can’t provide for their basic financial means.

There’s no shortage of similar analysis: a fascinating and comprehensive report from The Nordic Africa Institute provides a compelling study on how an aggressively militarised masculinity is promoted during times of conflict and of its impact on gender relations and violence against women, as well as against men who do not conform to that ideal. HEAL Africa’s research highlights the disparity between idealised masculinity and the reality of men’s lives, again making the link to male violence in conflict and the community.

The study’s author calls on humanitarians to recognise the interdependent and interactive nature of gender, but we do seem to prefer it simplistic: men as the perpetrators of evil, women as the pathetic victims, without looking at the root causes of violence and how we need to address them in order to have any positive impact. There’s also little space for the men and boys who are themselves victims of (largely) male violence, and those men who are working to promote greater gender equity and to care for and support women and girl survivors of violence. There’s something quite alarming about how comfortable we are in portraying African men and women in this way – reminiscent of a ‘heart of darkness’ narrative of African men as barbaric savages incapable of loving and caring for their wives, daughters and mothers.

All these reports give us a good insight into gender relations in conflict, the impact of militarised masculinity, the economic stresses that prevent men providing for their families, the underlying cultural and social relations, beliefs and assumptions that create startling gender inequalities and the link to violence against women and girls. So why don’t we use this knowledge to develop better understanding, cleverer programmes, and campaigning on the issue? In asking that question, I’ve encountered resistance and occasional hostility and aggression that has left me with some difficult questions to ponder.

Are the gains that have been made in women’s rights and on sexual violence in particular still so tenuous that we have to keep using shock statistics to get attention and action? Can we keep negating and colluding in the invisibility of the sexual and other violence targeted at men and boys in places like the DRC in order to make the violence against women and girls more visible?  And how does that impact on our understanding of gender relations and the root causes of such violence which lies at the heart of any effective work to tackle gender-based violence?

I’d like to take a more sophisticated approach to the understanding of gender in conflict, to really start taking on board some of the excellent research carried out in recent years. For all the horror stories, the rapists and the murderers, whose acts of violence are depicted in horrifying detail in the growing stack of reports on my desk, there are also thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of people like Masumbuko and Grace, who fall in love with each other, marry, have children, care for and love each other, and they need a place in this narrative too.

Commodities of War: What the people without guns say about life, death and fear in the DR Congo

I was supposed to be in the Democratic Republic of Congo this week, with today being devoted to visiting the Kanyaruchina camp (right) for ‘internally displaced people’ (IDPs) near Goma. Instead, the trip’s been cancelled, I am still in London and Kanyaruchina has been abandoned, as some 30,000 people have fled (again).

The reason is the sudden escalation in fighting between the M23 guerrilla group and the Congolese government, with the M23 advancing to the outskirts of Goma over the weekend.

A BBC report from the deserted camp gives a taste of the human impact of the fighting. It’s great television, but it’s still the standard format – local people providing the backdrop to the white reporter or researcher. An Oxfam report out today takes a different approach, ‘bearing witness’ through focus groups and interviews to collect the views of over 1,300 people in 32 conflict-affected communities (and then working with those communities to help them address their concerns).

The ‘protection assessment’ exposed alarming levels of abuse of men, women and children by armed groups, including through forced recruitment, forced labour and continuous illegal taxation in one of the world’s most under-reported and egregious human rights situations. In areas subject to attack by armed groups, people expressed fears about killings, looting and abductions. In areas largely controlled by the state, people reported exploitation, including extortion under threat of violence, by the very state services which are supposed to protect and support them.

This chaos has exacerbated a trend in which communities themselves have increasingly become ‘commodities of war’ (the title of the report), fought over by armed groups – both state and non-state – and by authorities seeking to control lucrative opportunities to extort their money and possessions.  In several areas, people have felt compelled to take security and justice into their own hands due to an abusive or absent state, adding to the growing numbers of new armed groups.

The annual report, (the sixth since 2007) “identified the following protection themes emerging over the past year:

• The civilian population has increasingly become a commodity of war, as those who are fighting vie for the right to extort money and goods from people in areas they control. Abuse of power is pervasive in state-controlled as well as rebel-controlled areas, and violent extortion and coercion are rife.
• Violent attacks on civilians continue, including inter-ethnic revenge killings.
• Coping mechanisms are strained. People report increasing vulnerability and their livelihoods seriously threatened as they lack safe access to their fields and local markets.
• Men, women, and children experience insecurity differently. For example, girls expressed fears about sexual exploitation and violence, while boys talked of the risk of violence associated with killings, arbitrary arrests and illegal detentions, forced labour, and fear of forced recruitment. For women such experiences come on top of their ongoing challenge to ascertain their rights, which is linked to cultural custom and limited access to justice;
• The security situation is worse in areas that frequently change hands between government and rebel control. Most people preferred a FARDC presence to the lack of it.
• In the absence of an effective state authority, many people reported feeling abandoned by central government. In some cases, the lack of a state presence, or abuses perpetrated by the state, prompted people to take justice into their own hands.
• Many areas that have seen increasing stability over recent years have become more insecure since early 2012 as armed groups have moved into areas vacated by the army.”

I’m always reluctant to talk about ‘innocent civilians caught between two fires’ as people usually have strong views of their own on what political change might improve their lot. But in this case, reality may well approach the journalistic cliché. It will be one of the things I try and get to the bottom of when I finally get to Eastern DRC (hopefully in January).

Rape is not the only story in the Congo

Emma Fanning is Oxfam’s protection manager in the DRC

If you’ve been following the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) recently – and given its unchanging, grim headlines, it’s not surprising if you haven’t – the story has probably been about rape. Large scale, brutal, dehumanising rape. The Congo has been dubbed the « rape capital » ; in just one attack in Walikale, a mining district in North Kivu, over 300 women were raped in August ; almost 7,700 rapes were reported between January and June this year, over half in North and South Kivu; programme staff look knowingly around the room and say «every Congolese man is a potential rapist ».

For most international visitors rape remains the only story: in September, after the Walikale rapes, the stream was steady, asking assemblies of women to raise their hands if they’d been raped. We once had a journalist ask us if we could find a rape victim who was herself born of rape for them to interview. Edward Behr’s famous book on the life of the foreign correspondent, ‘Anybody here been raped and speaks English’ takes its title from a question shouted across a crowd of survivors from a massacre in Stanleyville, now Kisangani (Eastern DRC) in 1964. Clearly for the international media, little has changed in Congo.  Most visitors stop for an obligatory visit at the big hospitals in Bukavu and Goma that do an excellent job, not just of ensuring medical treatment to women, but supporting their rehabilitation from trauma.

However, it becomes hard to move beyond these terrible facts – both for media and for programmes. Allocating money to sexual violence projects is a good way to feel we are doing something about DRC. But very few projects address the other forms of violence that communities experience (protection projects), or violence against children (child protection): while the whole sector is under-funded, most of the money goes to mitigating Sexual and Gender Based Violence (SGBV).

Sexual violence is indeed a terrible problem, but is it the only one, or even the most important? It depends who you talk to. If you go to the hospitals, or projects for victims, of course the story is sexual violence, and almost always, its effects on women – with the unspoken corollary of the evil of congolese men. On the other hand, if you talk to most communities, sexual violence is but one problem among many: and it’s one that worries both men and women.

· One community we talked to told us how at the beginning of the year they were looted on average once a month.
· In many communities people are regularly imprisoned without reason, women are raped by armed men and civilians, and girls are enticed into prostitution.
· Women tell us that on the way to market they have to pass through so many check points lined by the various authorities, each taking their cut, that often they make no profit on their sales.
· In one area a former rebel group integrated into the national army, recently went to schools demanding lists of children who had been demobilized: the same group forces boys to take their ammunition to the battle front, and stands over them as they fire.
· Displaced people have to pay renegade soldiers to pass to safety as they flee rebel attacks.

Funding actions to prevent and respond to sexual violence is important. But too much focus on sexual violence as the latest hot topic ignores the problems as communities actually experience them and the far reaching political change needed to stop all forms of violence. We need to listen to communities describe their experience of violence and engage accordingly. We need governments, both DRC and donor countries to engage politically. And then, maybe, we will see the lives of men and women, old and young, start to improve.

Update: talk of the devil, or in this case, the Economist. This week’s magazine has a three page feature on Rape and War.