WUNRN
UN SPECIAL REPRESENTATIVE ON SEXUAL
VIOLENCE IN CONFLICT SAYS: "FOR ME, ONE RAPE IS TOO MANY !"
In a file photo, displaced
Sudanese girls, aged 13 and 11, who were both raped by unidentified armed men,
sit inside a shelter at a camp for internally displaced persons in southern
Interview by
Lisa Andersons, Reuters - February 27, 2014
Whether the victim is a
3-month-old baby in
Since her appointment to
the post in September 2012, Bangura - a former foreign minister and minister of
health and sanitation in her native
“You just have to visit
each and every community,” said Bangura, an energetic 54-year-old who speaks
firmly and with passion.
“You meet 260 children in
the DRC (
The problems in
post-conflict zones are often as troubling as those in current crises, she
said.
“You meet a woman in
CHILDREN, VICTIMS OR BORN
OF RAPE
Because the problem of
sexual violence in conflict is so huge, she has identified eight priority
countries:
Her office recently
implemented the Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Arrangement (MARA), mandated
by the U.N. in late 2010, which will provide data about the extent of rape in
conflict zones. The first training session took place in
Two emerging issues that
she feels have not yet been addressed are men and boys raped in conflict -
particularly during detention, as a means of intimidation - as well as children
who are the product or victims of rape.
With NGOs focused on the
needs of women, she said, “Nobody asks the men.” Given their reluctance to come
forward out of embarrassment or fear of being prosecuted for homosexuality in
some countries, providing services for them is a challenge, she said.
Children who are either the
product or victims of rape in conflict zones include Bosnian children, now
teenagers, who now are ostracised from society and suffering from an identity
crisis.
They also include children
in the DRC, the products of rape, who are abandoned by their mothers and called
snakes.
“In the African culture,
snakes are evil. They call them snakes because these are evil children,
conceived by the enemy, so we don’t want them,” Bangura said, recalling her
meeting with a mother who was gang-raped by five men in the DRC and wants to
strangle her child.
And then, she said, there are
the children who are raped. During her visit to the DRC last year, she found 11
babies raped between the ages of 6 months and 12 months, 59 between the ages of
1 and 3 years, and 180 between the ages of 5 and 15 years.
In
Asked why this happens, she
said, “When you’re degraded to that level in the conflict, it brings out the
worst in you, so you just want to do whatever the lion can do when it gets hold
of the lamb.”
On June 11-13, UK Foreign
Secretary William Hague will host a landmark Global Summit in
Bangura aims to achieve
three goals at that summit.
“One is to continue to
break the silence surrounding this crime. I think the conference, being the
first-ever global summit, with a huge participation of 1,500, will really give
visibility to this problem.”
Her second goal - now that
a global legal framework is in place and 139 countries have signed on to the “Declaration
of Commitment to end Sexual Violence in Conflict” - is to get countries to
agree to take steps to implement the resolutions they have signed.
“This is the operational
aspect of it: What are we going to do? How are you going to do it? When are you
going to do it? What support do you need from us as the U.N.? So we get the
commitments from them.”
Her third objective is to
bring in new partners in the fight against sexual violence in conflict,
particularly from the private sector, which, for example, can be encouraged to
scrub its supply chain of minerals extracted from conflict zones.
Joining the battle wasn’t
difficult for Bangura, who lived through the civil war in
“When I travel to victim
countries, when these women come to talk, sometimes I just hold their hands,
and they don’t talk, they cry. And I just cry with them because I come from a
post-conflict country and I know what we went through. The fact that they have
somebody who is listening to them, more of them come... They know you know.
They know you understand,” she said.
“We had about 65,000 women
who were raped during the course of the conflict in
“But we ended the conflict.
We addressed the issue of sexual violence. We put in place the right laws. We
trained the police to respond to them. We have special courts for rape. It
became a crime not only for perpetrators, but for marital rape. We have it in
our laws. So if we can do it, so can anybody. But first you have to have the
political will.”