Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo (The)

Since the late 1990s, more people have died in war-torn Congo than in any conflict since World War II. In addition to the dead, hundreds of thousands of woman and girls have been raped. Rape, explains a British colonel, is a weapon of war, part of a destabilization covering the theft of valuable minerals. Rape victims are traumatized, injured, abandoned by husbands, pregnant, and ravaged by disease. Lisa Jackson, herself a sexual-assault victim, travels into the bush to interview soldiers who rape seemingly routinely; she asks them why. In Bakuva (east Congo), we meet women and children, a doctor, a policewoman, and a government minister. They comment. There is no end in sight.

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