I recently held a seminar on rape in war with military lawyers from across the world. We talked through a number of obstacles to prevention and elimination of sexual violence, but at the end of the seminar everyone agreed that the biggest of them all is silence.
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. As Congolese (and Egyptians) cast votes, they speak out for all rights.
The Daily Beast’s first Women in the World Summit played stuck to lowest-common denominator issues, and avoided the “scary” and “controversial” (read: political) realities of women’s lives.
There is no shortage of reports or data documenting the abhorrent extent of sexual violence in the DRC. Women are targets working in the fields. Women are targets walking home. Women are targets virtually everywhere.
This Thursday the UN will discuss one of the world’s most common, and most ignored, forms of terrorism: mass rape.
