Women and Girl Rape Victims in the DRC and the Global Campaign to End Fistula

Jonathan Zilberg, Ph.D.

This paper is about the ongoing brutality of the victimization of women and girls in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo. It reviews how rape is used as a weapon of war both during and after such conflicts and how these human rights violations are ignored during political settlements and which provide legal impunity for the perpetrators of these crimes. The paper focuses on the most extreme medical condition arising from these brutalities, namely fistula, and discusses the broader global war by activists and medical personnel to end fistula in both conflict and non-conflict situations.

In addition, the paper critiques the American academic community for failing to engage the crisis and even in full knowledge of the problem turning a blind eye personally to providing financial aid to the victims for the low costs of these operations to heal fistulas. It similarly considers how American academics have failed to even provide any expression of moral support at the institutional level through seeking collective action in societies such as the American Anthropological Association, the African Studies Association or the American Medical Association.

In short, the paper focuses on one particular result of the combined effects of war and poverty on women, what can be done about it medically, and why academics, even those specializing in gender and feminism are so easily inured to such suffering and able to avert their gazes from the crisis.   As such, the paper is a call for action in the African studies community specifically and the American academic community at large to do whatever they can to ameliorate the suffering of these victims - if only caring enough to donate $40 dollars to the EndFstula campaign and thus bear the minor costs of a single operation which allows one woman at a time dignity and a future.