Canada, Congo, Kivus, Women
The two eastern Kivu provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo are the worst places in the world to be a woman or a girl. Over the last decade, a complex and ongoing series of conflicts, described as the unleashed unprecedented violence on the bodies of women and girls in this region. The brutality is extreme: the raping of three-month-old infants and eighty-year-old women, the dispatching of militias who have HIV, AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases to rape entire villages, women being held as sex slaves for weeks, months and years and women being forced to eat murdered babies. Women and girls are raped with such frequency that the Congolese invented a new word to describe the phenomena, revioler: to re-rape.
For years, the international community has attempted to stop mass rape in the DRC; yet, as recently as in 2008, the United Nations UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women described the situation in the Kivus as, the worst crisis of violence against women documented so far. This has been echoed by aid workers and humanitarians who have called this region the rape capital of the world and the worst place in the world to be a woman or girl.
'The Worst Place in the World to be a Woman or a Girl'
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world's deadliest crisis since World War II
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Canada Must Support the Women and Girls of the DRC
Canadians play significant economic and political roles in this region and strongly impact the lives of Congolese women and girls. Politically, since the 1960s, the Government of Canada has supported peace-building initiatives in the DRC and throughout the Great Lakes Region: Burundi, the DRC, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda by sending peacekeepers to UN missions and taking lead roles in peace talks. Economically, ; its corporations own over 5.7 billion dollars in cumulative mining assets and formally employ over 13,000 Congolese. Much of this investment is legitimate and bolsters the weak Congolese economy, but the UN and several non-government organizations allege that Canadian corporations have committed wrongdoing in the DRC, where mineral exploitation fuels a conflict that preys upon women and girls. On an individual level, a mineral component of cell phones, which is exploited by violent armed groups for profit and exported by Canadian companies.
Canada is the largest non-African investor in the mining industry in the DRC
millions of Canadians own coltan from the Kivus,
Despite formidable links to the DRC, the GoC has, since 1996, disregarded UN requests for peacekeeping support in this region, failed to secure meaningful women's participation in peace processes and failed to allocate aid dollars to effective programs that support rape survivors in the DRC. In the last three years, the GoC has withdrawn its political support for peace processes in this region, cut its direct aid to the region and
We, as Canadians, must not neglect our responsibility to offer solidarity and needed resources to Congolese women and girls, whose bodies are a battlefield in the worst place in the world to be a woman. We must build a relationship with the women, children and men of the DRC that we can be proud of.
instructed its foreign service not to use the terms gender equality, justice for victims, and international humanitarian law when referring to survivors of rape in the DRC.
instructed its foreign service not to use the terms gender
NO MORE RAPE
Rape in the DR Congo: Canada, Where Are You?
Liu Institute for Global Issues
University of British Columbia
6476 NW Marine Drive
Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z2
NO MORE RAPE campaign: Research-based advocacy by
The Africa Canada Accountability Coalition's Gender Security Project
