HELP THE WOMEN AND YOUNG GIRLS RAPED IN THE CONGO

There are horriific conditions in the Congo:

Girls as young as three and women as old as seventy-five have been raped and mutilated in Eastern
Congo. “Women are dying two types of death,” says Christine Karumba, Country Director, Women for Women International — DRC. “The two types of death are the physical and the emotional death. The physical death is where you are no longer alive to walk the earth, and the emotional death is where
you no longer see signs of hope and are dead inside.” Link

Victims of rape -How you can help

The [NYT] piece painted a horrifying portrait of mass rapes in war-torn Eastern Congo. According to the UN, 27,000 women were raped in the South Kivu Province in 2006, and “[t]he sexual violence in Congo is the worst in the world." These rapes are particularly brutal: "Many have been so sadistically attacked from the inside out, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair," wrote Jeffrey Gettleman, the East Africa bureau chief of the Times. "'We don’t know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear,' said Dr. Mukwege, who works in South Kivu Province, the epicenter of Congo’s rape epidemic. 'They are done to destroy women." Link

Via Boing Boing

Comments

[Rhea]

Thank you for posting this. I can't imagine how awful it must be to live there. Sure, rape is a fact of life for women everywhere, but there seems to be no escape for the women and girls in the Congo. I have made several financial donations toward this cause.

[yourdrum]

It is a terrible situation. It would be nice if other blogs in the Blogging Boomer Carnival would post on this rape epidemic and other social issues.

[Lloyd Davis]

Hi Peggy, I thought I got the photo from a New York Times article? There are a few blogs, if you google, Women raped in the Congo in google images that have used the picture, maybe they know. Peace, Lloyd