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Soldiers systematically raid villages suspected of supporting other factions. In the process, they rape and sexually assault the women and girls who live there. Many of these raped girls end up at the HEAL Africa hospital in Goma. Denise, a fourteen-year-old girl living at the hospital, was raped, strangled, and left for dead by the militia occupying her village after her father refused to allow the militia leader to marry her. And that was only the beginning. After the rape, the leader ordered his men to set fi re to the house where Denise’s extended family had gathered for a wedding. The fi re killed her grandmother, along with several aunts and uncles.

Félicité, another girl living at the hospital who is only twelve years old and orphaned, had been living in her village with a foster family. A soldier from the militia occupying the village asked to marry Félicité, but her foster family refused, arguing that she was too young. In response, three soldiers from the militia brutally gang-raped her. The three men then returned to Félicité’s house every day to torment her, asking which of them she planned to choose as her husband. On a trip to Félicité’s village, a counselor from the hospital heard her story and arranged to take her back to Goma. At some point during her multiple rapes, Félicité was infected with HIV. She now lives at the hospital.

According to Human Rights Watch estimates, soldiers have raped or sexually assaulted tens of thousands of women and girls in Congo over the past decade. Almost none of the soldiers have been prosecuted. Until 2005, when the government passed a new constitution, rape was not even considered a crime in Congo.

The country’s cultural attitudes towards gender and sexuality make rape a particularly potent weapon in Congo’s civil war. In a 2004 report on sexual violence, the Human Rights Watch noted that “before confl ict broke out in [Congo], women and girls were [already] second-class citizens.” Besides social norms, national law defi nes “the role of women and girls as subordinate to men.” Family codes state explicitly that women must obey their husbands, who are the recognized heads of household.

The conception that women are the physical property of their husbands and fathers makes rape virtually impossible to prosecute. In the rare cases where the rapist is actually identifi ed, the accused is much more likely to offer compensation to the husband or father of his victim than to actually stand trial. In other cases, the Human Rights Watch reports, “male household heads ‘resolve’ rape cases involving their daughters or sisters… by arranging to have the perpetrator marry the victim, thus underscoring the notion that the rape was a crime against the perceived ‘owner’ of the victim.” Often, husbands and families ostracize women who have been raped. “Some women don’t want to go home,” explains Judy Anderson of HEAL Africa. “They say their husbands have kicked them out and their families don’t want anything to do with them.”

The HIV infection rate among government and rebel soldiers is signifi cantly higher than that of the general population in Congo. As a result, women, many of whom are raped by multiple soldiers, run a high risk of contracting the virus. Perhaps even more devastating than HIV is physical trauma. The kind of rape that occurs during political confl ict can be extremely violent. Sometimes, a group of soldiers will rape a woman for extended periods of time, even inserting foreign objects such as guns, knives, and pieces of wood into her vagina.

As a result of such violent attacks, many women suffer from injuries known as fi stulas. The general term “fi stula” describes a connection between body cavities or organs that should not exist. For women in Congo who have been victims of violent rape, this abnormal connection usually exists between the vagina and either the bladder, the rectum, or both. Because their organs effectively have holes in them, most women with fi stulas constantly leak pus, blood, and excrement. These internal wounds do not heal, and the affl icted women cease to be functioning members of their communities. Families that might not have rejected a woman simply because she was raped become disgusted by her stench, see her physical condition as a burden, and reject her anyway.