WUNRN
Also Via Sexual Violence Research
Initiative-SVRI
CONGO - 48 WOMEN RAPED EVERY HOUR -
RESEARCH STUDY
DAKAR, Senegal (AP) — The African nation of Congo
has been called the worst place on earth to be a woman. A new study shows that
it's even worse than previously thought: 1,152 women are raped every day, a
rate equal to 48 per hour.
That
rate is 26 times more than the previous estimate of 16,000 rapes reported in
one year by the United Nations.
Michelle
Hindin, an associate professor at Johns
Hopkins' Bloomberg
School of Public Health who specializes in gender-based violence, said the
rate could be even higher. The source of the data, she noted, is a survey that
was conducted through face-to-face interviews, and people are not always
forthcoming about the violence they have suffered when talking to strangers.
"The
numbers are astounding," she said.
Congo,
a nation of 70 million people that is equal in size to Western Europe, has been
plagued by decades of war. Its vast forests are rife with militias that have
systematically used rape to destroy communities.
The
analysis, which will be published in the American
Journal of Public Health in June, shows that more than 400,000 women had
been raped in Congo during a 12-month period between 2006 and 2007.
On
average 29 Congolese women out of every 1,000 had been raped nationwide. That
means that even in the parts of Congo that are not affected by the war, a woman
is 58 times more likely to be raped than a woman in the United States, where
the annual rate is 0.5 per 1,000 women.
Previous
estimates of the number of rapes were derived from police and health center
reports in the nation's troubled east where the conflict is concentrated. The
authors of the study used figures from a government health survey and pooled
data from across the country.
The
highest frequency of rape was found in North Kivu, the province most affected
by the conflict, where 67 women per 1,000 had been raped at least once.
"The
message is important and clear: Rape in (Congo) has metastasized amid a climate
of impunity, and has emerged as one of the great human crises of our
time," said Michael
VanRooyen, the director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative.
Margot
Wallstrom, the U.N.
special representative for sexual violence in conflict, welcomed
the study.
"Conflict-related
sexual violence is one of the major obstacles to peace in the DRC," she
said in statement, using the initials for Congo. "Unchecked it could
disrupt the entire social fabric of the country."
Wallstrom
said the figures in the study are higher than the U.N.'s because it covers all
sexual violence — including domestic and intimate partner violence — not just
from military actors.
U.N.
figures tend to be conservative because they must be verified by the
organization itself, she said.
Wallstrom
said she consistently stresses that "the number of reported violations are
just the tip of the iceberg of actual incidents."