UNICEF campaign launches US tour to highlight DR Congo rape crisis

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is kicking off a five-city tour of the United States aimed at highlighting the horrors faced by thousands of Congolese rape victims, while calling for an end to impunity for the perpetrators of the worst kinds of sexual violence.

Simple everyday tasks, such as gathering wood and fetching water, expose thousands of girls and women to vicious abuses in the conflict-ridden eastern region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), “where rape is used as a weapon of war,” said UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman.

Ms. Veneman recalled a trip she made to eastern DRC which included conversations with victims brutally raped by multiple men, including an unforgettable meeting with a 12-year old who had been raped by four men.

“That’s what we are talking about: these women, these girls, these children who have been subject to the worst, worst kinds of sexual violence, often left in the forest to be left to die,” she told journalists at the launch of the joint UNICEF and V-Day campaign, Stop Raping our Greatest Resource: Power to Women and Girls of the DRC.

The campaign begins with a tour of New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Washington, DC aiming to highlight the horrors faced by victims, and calling for measures to end impunity for the perpetrators of abuses against women, as well as greater economic and social independence for women and girls so that they can take the lead in the prevention of sexual violence.

The tour will be spearheaded by Eve Ensler, the award-winning playwright of “The Vagina Monologues” and founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls, along with Denis Mukwege, founder of the PANZI Hospital where survivors of rape in the DRC are treated.

During conversations with Ms. Ensler, Mr. Mukwege will expose femicide and the sexual torture of women in the DRC by relaying the stories of women survivors on the ground who have come together to break the silence, describe his experiences performing life-saving surgery on thousands of Congolese women and girls destroyed by rape and mutilation.

“I don’t think I ever believed I would live to hear stories that were this atrocious and this horrendous and with the complete indifference – to be honest – of the world community,” said Ms. Ensler.

“We’ve allowed these atrocities to go on between 10 and 12 years. We’ve seen close to 200,000 and 300,000 women being raped,” she said. “We have blood on our hands essentially.”

Ms. Ensler expressed the hope to “wake up America to what is going on in the DRC, and with that wake up our governments, wake up the UN, [and] wake up all the structures that have the power to impact the situation.”