How to Report the Unthinkable

Increasingly, worldwide, rape and other forms of sexual violence are being recognized as serious human rights violations.  In situations of armed conflict and in fragile post-conflict countries, sexual violence is systematically employed to harm and demoralize individuals, break families apart and terrorize communities.

At the IRC, I have interviewed several humanitarian colleagues who work to combat sexual violence and provide care to survivors.  Some operate in cultures where rape entails such disgrace for a woman, clinical and psychosocial outreach must happen in secret; others in more open societies where reform is happening and perpetrators are even brought to task.

And then there is the eastern Congo, where spiraling rape is terrorizing thousands of women and girls.  I have never visited Congo, but read about and watch what is happening there in an attempt to process these horrifying acts. It is almost impossible to comprehend.

The stories of rape, mutilation and murder are unthinkable.  Women and girls are walking targets, left physically damaged and emotionally terrorized.  Accounts of what is happening are so horrendous -- so gruesomely specific -- it's almost impossible to believe.  We are told what is happening -- but why is it happening?

The reporters covering the Congo crisis today join those journalists who, in the wake of the Balkan wars and the Rwandan genocide, exposed the systematic rape that was perpetrated.  In translating the untranslatable, those journalists spurred the world to acknowledge the grave human rights violation sexual violence was.  Today, New York Times’ columnist Nick Kristof calls eastern Congo "the rape capital of the world."

For some journalists -- and for all humanitarians -- continuing to remind the world is a full-time job.  This week, as horrors raged in Congo, I had the honor of participating in a training course for 25 senior sexual violence humanitarian professionals.  The course was organized by the International Centre for Reproductive Health and the United Nations Population Fund and took place in Ghent, Belgium.  Participants included local and international NGO staff members, UN, government and academic representatives from 17 countries including East Timor, Liberia, Pakistan, Sudan, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, among others.

For a little while, far from the desperate regions they serve, these 25 humanitarians learned new techniques for responding to sexual violence.  My role:  to help them communicate with the media more effectively...  or, as my new friend Lillian Kona, a coordinator of sexual violence interventions with the UN Population Fund in Northern Uganda, put it, to "get the press on our side."

To that end, we practiced messaging, speaking with conviction and navigating the sensitivities involved when reporters want to interview rape survivors.  As part of my session, I showed a recent 60 Minutes piece hosted by CNN’s Anderson Cooper entitled “The War Against Women.”  Subject:  sexual violence in the Congo.  Airdate:  January 2008…nearly a year before the current horrors began.

When the piece was over, I resumed my place in front of the class.  Looking out at the men and women who spend their waking hours serving women just like those portrayed in the clip, I couldn’t help marveling that even they were silenced.  Silenced by the magnitude of the horrors taking place there.  For these brave humanitarians, responding to sexual violence is obviously so much more than a job.  

Bidding goodbye to my new friends, who would soon return to countries where social norms have been disrupted, where gender inequalities have been exacerbated and where -- in some cases -- rape is right now being used as a weapon of war, I couldn't help marveling at the juxtaposition.  All that time, effort and care the organizers of the course had spent teaching these humanitarian professionals new skills…all the time, effort and dedication these individuals had devoted to learning them…all that time, effort and commitment made so women and girls who have been shown an absolute lack of humanity are served better.  It's really something.