Between 2008 and 2009, award-winning photojournalist Jean Chung traveled through the Democratic Republic of Congo to document sexual violence. In the resulting series, Tears in the Congo: Sexual Violence in the DRC, she captured the strength and bravery of women who gave birth after being raped.
In bold colors, Chung shared stories of women carrying their babies back home after treatment and fistula surgeries, reflecting the ravage of rape that has affected more than half a million women in the DRC.
Five years later, she returned to follow up on her earlier subjects. Chung's latest work Tears in the Congo: Unending War, Unending Tears documents the women and children who continue to fight for their safety and survival, even as rape as a weapon of war continues to proliferate their lives.
Yet now, in 2014, Chung's photos from Congo are in black-and-white. The photo at the top of this post caught my eye and mesmerized me. In the midst of life, zooming through the French countryside on TGV watching green earth pass by, sitting by the ocean looking at three swaths of blue, letting the sun warm my naked spine, I kept thinking, when Chung returned to Congo, all color was gone. Only black and white remained.
For months, I have been on a writing break since stumbling upon May San Alberto's Artemisiasin a gallery in Rome. Sometimes the break comes from still not knowing the answer: how to create safety for women and children in the DRC because they deserve it. As much as I do. As much as you do. As we all do.
Over these months, one thought kept surfacing: Our work as activists, as human beings, has to bring effective change. We all must live in safety, at least.
How can this shift occur? More advocacy. More policy and law. More outreach?
But until impunity arrives and behavior change occurs, Chung has it right. The facts are stark and they remain in black-and-white: For more than ten years, the DRC has been a war zone with death tolls exceeding 5.5 million people. More than 500,000 women and children have been raped.
Chung's photos also remind: As time passes for women and children in Congo, this means their lives remain just as they are. Just as they have been for more than ten years. In need of basic safety. In need of a better chance. In need of change.
Jean Chung is a Korean photojournalist who has won awards such as the CARE Humanitarian Reporting Award in 2007 and the 6th and 7th Days Japan International Photojournalism Award in 2010 and 2011.
On Saturday, March 8, women and men worldwide celebrated International Women's Day in support of advancing women's human rights and to acknowledge their continued struggles. Around the globe, women face myriad gender inequalities, one horrifying example is the use of rape as a weapon of war.
Spanish-artist May San Alberto explores gender inequalities in her exhibitions, Artemisias and Albores XXI. A state-registered nurse but also a fine artist, May traveled to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 2011 to volunteer for a month in Congo's capital city of Kinshasa. However, she also arrived with an artistic project to photograph Congolese women in a stunning series of portraits reinterpreting the works of Artemisia Gentileschi, a female Italian Baroque painter and rape victim known for depicting women in states of suffering.
In a recent interview with Her Blueprint, May shared, "Artemisias is a project that reinterprets some works of Artemisia Gentileschi in order to serve as a reflective metaphor about the strength of women to overcome daily [strife] in any civilization at any time. It talks about women as everyday heroines."
Study on Minerva
To date, the Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the most war-torn countries in Africa and is often referred to as the rape capital of the world. The size of Western Europe, the country has been at war since 1998 with a death toll of 5.8 million people. Rape as a weapon of war is rampant in the DRC. Women Under Siege cites that every four minutes, five women are raped in Congo.
May went to Congo with the Artemisias project in her backpack. She explains why she used 17 of Artemisia's paintings and the Congolese women as models.
Artemisia Gentileschi was raped in Rome by a painter working in her father’s workshop. She reported the abuse and won the trial, although to do so she suffered humiliation and torture and became marked by the conservative society of her time. In spite of this, she had workshops in Florence, Rome, Naples and at the English Royal Court, obtaining great success and recognition throughout her life. After her death, history and historians ostracized her by attributing most of her artworks to other artists –for example, her father, Oracio Gentilleschi, or Caravaggio. She is nowadays considered as one of the most accomplished painters of her time, as well as an icon of a fighter and independent woman and one of the first female painters who lived from her artistic work.
Study Judith and Her Maid
More than 10 million people live in Kinshasa, yet May searched up until the last days she was to depart Congo for the women she photographed in Artemisias.
The women in the photographs are adults with a hard lifetime behind them, May says. Their country, for 25 years, [has been] the battleground of the deadliest war in modern African history. In this context, sexual abuse was largely used as a weapon of war and, still today, gender-based violence continues to be extremely worrying all over the country. Nevertheless, these are Congolese women who despite the armed conflicts, suffering humiliation and poverty are strong enough to look to the future and face the challenge of learning and teaching. All of them, except for the three teachers, are illiterate.
The single photo session lasted two hours, on September 28, 2011, and used only the clothing and furniture available in the school at that moment.
Study on Self Portrait As a Martyr
Empowering women who are abused and highlighting gender disparity run strong themes in May's work. Part of Albores XXI, both Lagrimas Negras and Airing Inequality also focus on gender equality. May shares that her work is taking on these subject matters to further the dialogue about women's roles and the built-in disparity created from gender alone.
Airing Inequality
She says, "Both in Albores XXI and in Artemisias, I wanted to talk about the situation of inequality women suffer in any country on our planet but without emphasizing the suffering but the power, knowledge and security that we will achieve equality. We are strong even though we are thought of as the weaker sex, we are free although we are badly treated, we are intelligent even if we haven't been to school, we are beautiful at any age, we look after our families, we work hard and enjoy life. We look to the future with optimism despite the inequalities and struggle hard every day for a better world."
Recently, Artmesias won the Celeste Prize and the Laguna Art Prize. It has also received prizes in the International Present Art Festival and has been exhibited in Shanghai and Rome. In 2014, some of the Artemisias' works will be exhibited in Venice and also in Milan.
Note:The artist would like to extend her thanks "to the women who took part in the Artemisias Project. It is thanks to the beauty, dignity and innate ability to perform of the women and men who participated in the photo shoot that this art project exists. It is also thanks to the school sisters, who opened the door of their home, their educational project and their life stories to me. I am kindly and sincerely grateful to all of them for their positivity in life and their generous engagement.
Furthermore, to generally thank all the women who have helped me to do my artistic projects and…to thank the men too. They all know who they are."
[Editor's Note: This post was written by IMOW Her Blueprint's Senior Editor Kate Stence along with Maura Farrell, a co-editor of the Debating Human Rights blog. The original post appeared onDebating Human Rights.]
In recent weeks, global mainstream media has covered persistent and widespread violence against women in a range of countries.
In India, the gang-rape of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student on December 16, 2012 resulted in public condemnation and outcry from both India’s strengthening middle class and international organizations such as UN Women. Raped and mutilated with an iron bar at the hands of a group of six men while aboard a moving bus, the anonymous victim finally succumbed to massive internal injuries on December 29, after battling for her life for thirteen days in a Singapore hospital.
Rape and rape-related deaths are a national problem in India.
In 2011, India was ranked 134th by UNDP’s gender equality index, highlighting the plight of Indian women and girls, who are under-fed and under-educated relative to males. Dowry violence, marital and in-law abuse, and reproductive sex selection are examples of the pervasive hardships for Indian women created from extreme gender inequalities. Sexual violence in Indian villages is so common that it keeps women indoors after dark, and the migration of rural Indian men to overcrowded slums means that the growing predation goes unchecked. Low persecution and even lower conviction rates for rape and other crimes against women exacerbate the violence.
While urbanization and societal tension may partly explain India’s violence against women, The Economist recently argued that it is India’s growing middle class, united in outrage against the horrible events of December 16, that could provide impetus for the changes needed to bring about an end to violence against women in India. This particular woman’s rape and death provoked such extreme public outcry throughout India because she was part of India’s emerging middle class. Too close to home for many members of India’s middle class to tolerate, this crime resulted in unprecedented galvanization which could be a major turning point with emancipatory potential for India’s women.
In Guatemala, 707 women were murdered in 2012. On January 16, 2013, one month after the gang-rape incident in Delhi, the bodies of two girls, aged six and twelve, were found brutally slain on a street in Guatemala City. That same day, the bodies of two more women were discovered in separate locations.
Amnesty International describes the situation in Guatemala as a “war on women.” “Authorities in Guatemala are putting the lives of women at risk by systematically failing to protect them and ensure those responsible for the hundreds of killings that take place each year face justice.” Although the Guatemalan congress passed a law establishing special tribunals and sentencing guidelines directed specifically at reducing violence against women, this has failed to change the staggering number of killings of women and children reported each month in Guatemala.
Tireless fighting for justice on the parts of family members of women and girls whose murders remain unsolved and insufficiently investigated, and never prosecuted has made the issue one of national scandal for Guatemala.
In Somalia, Nura Hirsi, a young widow living in an internationally displaced persons (IDP) encampment in Mogadishu, claims she was raped by seven government soldiers who forced into her home on December 29, 2012.
Al Jazerra, reporting on the continued vulnerability of women in Mogadishu, maintained that in the wake of two decades of protracted conflict in Somalia, “there’s now a sense of relative calm and security in Somalia,” but that not everyone enjoys these new feelings of freedom. Violence and insecurity are still persistent problems affecting women in IDP encampments. Explaining why the police did nothing and seemed not to care about what happened to Nura Hirsi, she explained: “People get killed in Mogadishu; I didn't die. To them rape isn't so serious. Nobody is ever arrested.”
Posting in New York Times Nicholas Kristof’s blog On the Ground, Lisa Shannon recently urged Secretary Clinton to stand up for rape victims during her first official meeting with the new Somali president, Hassan Sheik Mohamud. Shannon argues that since the Somali government has reportedly harassed advocates thought to be aiding Hirsi, this could undo tireless efforts to shift the stigma toward rape and urge rape victims to come forward. According to Fartun Abdisalan Adan, who co-founded the sexual violence crisis center Sister Somalia with Shannon, “This sets us so far back.”
Shannon writes, “In this fragile moment, the US and other donor nations have a choice: Communicate a zero tolerance policy for this behavior. Or, like Congo, shrug off this crisis as inevitable, leaving sexual violence to fester into a pandemic. Will we again write big checks, while we sacrifice women on the altar of international diplomacy?”
In her remarks on January 16, Secretary Clinton indeed expressed concern about violence against women in Somalia to President Hassan Sheik. “We have particular concerns” she said, “about the dangers facing displaced people, especially women, who continue to be vulnerable to violence, rape, and exploitation.”
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, renewed high-level conflict has resulted in a death toll that is the highest loss of life since World War II, with 5.4 million lives lost in over a decade of war. The prevalence of rape as a weapon of war and intimate partner sexual violence is astronomical. As such, the DRC is often referred to as the “the rape capital of the world.”
In 2011, the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) released a study confirming widespread rapes throughout the Democratic Republic of Congo. “Approximately 1.69 to 1.80 million women reported having been raped in their lifetime and approximately 3.07 to 3.37 million women reported experiencing intimate partner sexual violence.” Even higher levels of rape were reported within the area of North Kivu, where two months ago the offices of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) said the situation was worsening for vulnerable populations due to recent fighting.
These already harrowing statistics may in fact be conservative estimates. A Guardian article quotes Michelle Hindin, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a specialist on gender-based violence, as saying, “because the figures were collected during face-to-face interviews – where women could be less forthcoming – the figures could be much higher.”
In 2012, a more comprehensive study released by two organizations, Sonke Gender Justice Network and Promundo, confirmed that rape in Congo has essentially become “a cultural norm throughout the entire country” and is part of daily life.
Lauren Wolfe, an award winning journalist and the Director of Women Under Siege, an independent initiative investigating how rape and other forms of sexualized violence are used as tools in genocide and modern-day conflict, is known for documenting vulnerable women’s voices who are often silenced by war and rarely exist within mainstream media. The organization argues that the nexus of war and sexual violence for women in Congo is one of the worst that has ever existed. Last year, the DRC ranked last—absolutely last—on UNDP’s Human Development Index, which is essentially a state of reverse development.
In Pakistan, 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai, a well-known activist for girl’s education, was on a bus returning home from a day at school on October 9, 2012, when armed members of the Taliban stopped the vehicle and shot her in the head and chest.
The teenager was treated for extensive injuries as the bullets entered above her left eye, ran along her jaw line, and grazed her brain. Her survival is an act of heroism in and of itself, but Malala has lived heroically for years. In 2009, the Taliban routinely destroyed girl’s schools and attacked women with acid to dissuade them from attending school and attaining an education. Malala posted her diary on the BBC’s Web site, exposing the Taliban’s myriad acts of violence against women. In 2011, she was nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize and in 2012 was the runner-up for Time Magazine's Person of the Year.
Last week, Malala completed her last round of surgery and will continue rehabilitation at home.
Unlike so many other women and girls who face gender-based violence, Malala won. Her story both brings hope and highlights injustices. Malala’s survival means she will continue to live in a world where a 23-year-old woman risks her life in India by riding a bus.
Success in eradicating violence against women would mean not only a world that no longer accepts rape, gender-based violence, or rampant inequalities as a fact of life, but laws that prosecute those who participate in these crimes. This requires sanctioned and implemented laws, community-based programs, and increased activism.
In 1999, a study released on violence against women found that, around the world at least one woman in every three, or up to one billion women, has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime. In the almost fifteen years since that study, after reading these stories, can we honestly say that eliminating violence against women is not one of our world’s greatest priorities?
Today is V-day, a global activist movement to end violence against women and girls spanning over 167 countries. One Billion Rising is their most ambitious campaign to date. Their web site says, “One in three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in her lifetime. One billion women violated is an atrocity. One billion women dancing is a revolution.”
This Valentine's Day rise up against pervasive violence against females. The time to eradicate gender-based violence is now.
Kate is pictured here visiting the Grassroots Reconciliation Group in Uganda.
Since last November, the over decade-long conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo has once again surged. The latest outbreaks are forcing displacement of hundreds of thousands of Congolese people, escalating already rampant sexual violence, and creating larger death tolls. Since 1998, the conflict in Congo has resulted in the death of 5.4 million people. Cumulatively, this is a higher death count than the total number of lives lost throughout all of World War II.
The United Nations recently expanded its peacekeeping mission in the DRC. Yet, it is the work of NGOs, individuals, and those passionate to make lasting change in Congo who also lead the way for urgent change. In this new series, Her Blueprint talks with people who have chosen to take on Congo as advocates. Their lives are entwined with the DRC, showing that no matter where or who we are, we share our world.
Kate Tickel is co-founder of Congo-Sourced, Conflict-Free, a model, mother of a young son, and a human rights advocate based in Los Angeles. Last year, she was nominated for the Trust Women Hero Award, announced at the Trust Woman Conference in London. Kate recently answered some questions about why she is so dedicated to advocating for Congolese women and for conflict-free minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Her Blueprint: Can you share a bit of your journey to how Congo in particular has come to be your focus and your current activities surrounding advocacy? As mentioned, I believe you started your own organization and are working with the Nobel Women's Initiative?
Kate: My journey into advocacy has been very personal, and so informed by my own experiences as a woman and a mother. I was always a little in love with Africa. I read Gorillas in the Mist, about Dian Fossey and the silverback gorillas in Rwanda, as a girl. I fell in love with the entirety of that story: with Dian, with gorillas (I was and still am an enormous animal lover), with the descriptions of Rwanda and the mists and mountains. I was from rural Tennessee and there was something in my bones that understood eastern Africa intuitively, that mix of beauty and poverty. Then I read Philip Gourevitch's book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed Our Families. It was an impossible story to recover from; it set a seed for activism. I had joined Amnesty International by the time I was ten or so. While I was still a teenager, I moved to Los Angeles to model, and started to travel constantly. I always had one foot in activism; I was always the girl in the makeup chair talking about Zaire. But there was no particular focus except the next job; I had such a peripatetic, gypsy lifestyle. And then motherhood happened, impossibly, at a young age, (I'd been told that because of a medical condition motherhood could never happen). I didn't necessarily feel a connection to other mothers, but for the first time I felt a strong connection to womanhood and to other women, this shared experience of being female. I noticed myself becoming fiercely protective of other women.
And then about three years ago I saw the headline for an blog post, "Does Your Cell Phone Contribute to Rape?," and I clicked on it. It was a brief article detailing what was happening in the Democratic Republic of Congo, how five and a half million people had been killed in the conflict there, about how gender violence was being used as a weapon of war, and about how the minerals being looted by the armed gangs there were in just about every piece of electronics on the market. It was an epiphany; I don't know how often in life we know the moment when our life has just changed, but I knew it to be that moment. All the air went out of the room. Who would ever look at their laptop and say, "I wonder how many girls were raped in the manufacturing of this laptop?" My first reaction was that fierce protectiveness over those women and girls; I couldn't sleep that first night, thinking of them. Thinking, "These women are so much more than the worst thing that has happened to them."
It took a few months of immersing myself in every lecture, every conference, every white paper, every book on not just Congo but the nature of conflict, gender violence and genocide; my education is still constantly ongoing. In the meantime I was talking to everyone I knew about Congo, and about "conflict minerals" (also known as the 3TGs: tin, tungsten, tantalum and gold). Groups like the Enough Project and Human Rights Watch had been instrumental in passing Section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires companies to disclose if the minerals in their products are sourced from Congo. Companies were citing overwhelm at the prospect of having to audit their supply chain, there were several regulatory agencies whose criterion had to be met to certify the minerals as clean, and confusion about the auditing process. In the meantime, there were concerns about the possibility of a de facto embargo happening in the Kivu provenances of eastern Congo, which is the most conflicted area; companies might just wash their hands of the whole issue and stop buying from Congo altogether, which would hurt the mine workers already the most vulnerable. So I worked with a risk management company to develop an audit process that would integrate all the regulatory agency supply chain templates, while building in a provision that encourages companies to source from Congo, and that's how Congo-Sourced, Conflict-Free happened.
Along the way, I became aware of a group called Stop Rape in Conflict, which addresses gender violence and rape as a weapon of war. They were hosting a panel in New York with the Nobel Women's Initiative, and I was able to meet Jody Williams, and Dr. Denis Mukwenge, who runs the Panzi hospital in Congo. That was a huge moment. The two groups are working together on a United Nations initiative, The International Campaign to Stop Rape and Gender Violence in Conflict. If you've never met Jody Williams, you don't know how impossible she is to decline; when she says "You need to come work on this campaign," you go work on the campaign. It's incredibly inspiring to be working with so many strong women, the activists and Peace Laureates who came before you.
Her Blueprint: I know you recently visited DRC. Can you share one experience there that elucidates why you are so committed to advocating for a conflict-free Congo?
Kate: The Democratic Republic of Congo is one of the most beautiful places in the world. There is one piece of folklore that posits that Eden was there, and when you see the waterfalls and complete verdancy, the constant petrichor, the elephants and gorillas, you believe that Congo could be heaven on earth. How is this haven the rape capitol of the world? How can these beautiful jungles harbor such violent militias? When I was first in Goma my driver and I got on very well. He and his wife had just had their first child, a little girl, and he wanted me to meet his family, so I went to their home. My son is French-speaking, as are the Congolese, and when I walked into the house the first thing I heard was the humming of the same French lullabye, "Bonsoir Bon Nuit," that I had sung to my little one when he was a baby. I started singing it too. The world is so small. We sing the same lullabyes. We all live in the same house.
This week, millions of people in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a war-ravaged African country, voted in their second ever presidential and parliamentary election.
With a population of over 70 million and one of the highest occurrences of rape in the world, the New York Times reported fear of violent outbreaks due to Congo’s elections because of fraudulent politics and, essentially, DRC's reverse development. “This year the United Nations ranked it dead last of the 187 countries on the Human Development Index.”
The Democratic Republic of Congo is also known to be one of the worst places on earth to be a woman.
In mid-May, a study in the American Journal of Public Health, found that 400,000 females aged 15-49 were raped over a 12-month period in 2006 and 2007. The greatest numbers of rapes were found in DRC's North Kivu. There an average of 67 women out of 1,000 have been raped. At least once. That’s 48 women an hour.
Imagine. Having to go into a forest. The only place. To find food. For your children. Imagine. Emerging raped. Not once. Not twice. Every time. Any time. Whenever. Imagine. Returning home. And being raped. By your partner.
According to the Christan Science Monitor, this is daily life for Congolese women. “Rape is becoming part of the culture,” said Michael Van Rooyen, the director of Harvard’s Humanitarian Initiative and an expert on rape in the Congo.
One Man’s Journey for Congolese Women For two years, Londoner Chris Jackson has lived in absolute dedication to sport, not just as a human rights advocate but also as an athlete and spokesperson for Congolese rape victims. He’s completed myriad heroic athletic acts to raise awareness of the horror women in Congo live every single day of their lives. Rampant and repeated sexual violence. Rape as a weapon of war.
Kamila, a resident of South Kordofan, fled the state’s capital of Kadugli after heavy fighting erupted in the afternoon of Sunday, June 5, in Um Dorain--a former stronghold of the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) that lies some 35 kilometres southeast of Kadugli. Kamila and other residents became concerned after a large number of soldiers from the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) arrived in the capital, and rumours began to spread that members of the SPLA had requested more soldiers be dispatched to the area.
“The security situation is very bad. Residents of Kadugli town fled their homes with nowhere to run, there’s no movement of people on the streets, the market has become a battleground and basic necessities like food, water and fuel for transporting civilians has run out,” explains Kamila in an interview with Her Blueprint.
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is said to be the most dangerous place to be a woman. Every week over 150 Congolese women are raped as a weapon of war. In fact, hundreds of thousands of Congolese women have been raped for the past 15 years because conflict has enveloped the region. Death tolls range between three to five million people.
The reason? The NY Times says the DRC's conflict is exceptionally stunning in its complexity, which, frankly, it is. In consequence, enter the creation of Congo NOW!, a coalition of NGO’s and grassroots organizations ranging from Oxfam International to Save the Children that are joining together in order to campaign for the safety of Congolese women and children.
The International Rescue Committee, a member of the coalition, recently sent out a field report about the Congo emergency and highlighted "typical" rape victims' experiences.
I was out in the field farming when several soldiers approached me. I was dragged out of the field against my will. I was held captive and raped repeatedly for days. When I was released, I had nowhere to go to get medical care for my injuries. My family and friends shunned me as a disgraced woman.
How many Congolese women and children have to be victimized before there is a solution to stop mass rape?
1. Stop natural resources fueling the conflict. 2. Address the devastating causes and consequences of the conflict and sexual violence particularly for women and children 3. Protect civilians from violence. 4. Promote nonmilitary and regional solutions to the conflict.
"We have launched the campaign," Kate says, "by starting with an action focused on sexual violence. The action is an e-action targeting Lynne Featherstone, International Violence Against Women champion."
