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.
"A guy with a machete in a village can rape one woman. Two guys with a machine gun can rape the whole village." --Annie Matundu Mbambi, Democratic Republic of Congo
For the past three weeks, the United Nations has been the epicenter for all countries of the world to meet for the first-ever Diplomatic Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). This week, negotiations to limit the presently unregulated international arms trade are entering their final phase.
According to the United Nations News Centre, "Currently, 80 percent of the global trade in conventional weapons is dominated by a handful of countries, but with globalization, new producers are entering the market."
What does this mean? Arms proliferation is a changing and world-threatening issue with increasing magnitude, new players, and a greater thrust because of globalization. Yet, unregulated arms control has also changed modern warfare. In April,Elle Magazinequoted Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as saying, "In World War I, 90 percent of the casualties were soldiers, but in Africa's recent conflicts, 90 percent of casualties are civilians. So peacemaking and peacekeeping must change too."
Whether child soldiers or sustained gender-based violence in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, women and children are specific targets of war. In fact, a former UN Peacekeeping Commander Major General Patrick Cammaret once said, "It is now more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in modern conflict."
As such, the report Putting Women's Rights Into the Arms Treaty, cites one of the greatest reasons for the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) is "that war is affecting civilians, particularly women and children, at much higher percentages."
Enter discussions of gender-based violence and sexual violence. Kate Hughes, a British representative of Oxfam, has spent the past few weeks in New York City raising even greater awareness as to why gender-based violence (GBV) must be included within the treaty terms. In the early days of the conference, Kate helped orchestrate a media stunt picked up by CNN to highlight the current "body bag" approach to arms control, which she says, is that "we wait till body bags pile up before there is an arms embargo."
Think back to the quote beginning this article from a woman in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) comparing the damage done with a machete versus an AK47. In the DRC, rape statistics are beyond horrifying, with estimates of nearly two million women raped and a new rape every minute.
Hughes says, "The opening quote really sums up why the ATT has so much relevance to the issue of gender-based violence. GBV is instantly exacerbated when you add a gun to the equation. Countries with the highest instan[ces] of gender based violence, are by and large conflict countries; countries that are awash with weapons.
The Arms Trade Treaty presents an opportunity, but it is an opportunity that could be missed. Some states are resistant to the explicit reference of gender based armed violence; there are also states that are resistant to the treaty covering weapons like the AK47 for example. (It is the AK47 that is one the most prevalent weapons in DRC.)"
Yet, how vast are the effects of gender-based violence in conflict zones? The Women's Media Center's Women Under Siege has been working hard to document the new cases of GBV and sexual violence happening in Syria. If you look at their live crowd map, one gets the sense of sexual violence permeating war zones.
Hughes shares other conflict zones where that the case. "Gender-based violence has been reported to have been committed by armed groups including state security forces recently in Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea and Mali. It's been committed in the Democratic Republic of Congo, with reports of women - from young girls to elderly women - being tortured and violently raped as a tactic of armed groups to assert power and domination.
Communities also increasingly report sexual violence against men and boys. During Colombia's 50-year armed conflict, sexual violence has been used as a weapon of war, routinely practiced by all of the armed groups: state military forces, paramilitaries and guerrillas. Last week, Norway pointed to the prevalence of systematic rape in the recent war in the Balkans."
Just like every facet of war, profit often dictates rather than diplomatic intervention. A recent allafrica.com article cites how tense conversations have become in the ATT conference's final days.
The talks, which carried on throughout the weekend in New York, are now being dominated by sceptical governments including Iran, Syria and Cuba, intent on having a weak treaty - or no treaty at all. China and Russia are opposed to effective human rights and humanitarian rules in any deal whilst the US wants exclusions that could undermine the effectiveness of any treaty.
London and Paris, which until now have been key champions of a strong treaty, are now coming under intense pressure from Washington. There are concerns that they may trade-off strong international humanitarian and human rights protections to get China, Russia and the US to sign up to any final deal.
What are the desired outcomes of getting gender-based violence into the Arms Trade Treaty?
The report Putting Women's Rights Into the Arms Treatyshares, "To have real impact, a prospective Arms Trade Treaty must include legally binding criteria that prevent arms transfers to abusers of human rights or into situation where there is a substantial risk that they will undermine development or exacerbate armed violence. The Arms Trade Treaty also needs to refer to gender-based armed violence in both the treaty text and criteria."
Kate Hughes agrees, then adds:
The treaty must recognize that there is a gendered impact to armed violence and makes it a specific goal / objective of the treaty to address this. We are pushing to have a specific criteria that says that states "shall not" transfer weapons where there is a substantial risk of that these weapons will be used to commit GBV. It is not the case that the arms trade treaty will suddenly eliminate GBV, but it is a really important opportunity make sure that the international community upholds its commitments to women, peace, and security issues.
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.
