Ending The Sexual Violence In Congo: If you carry a Cell phone, you are carrying a part of this in your pocket

Here is wishing you and everyone who stops by, a very Happy and prosperous New Year.
Some of us make resolutions at the beginning of each year, others just take each day at a time. 

Whichever is your style, let us purpose to make the world a better place. Let's lookout for one another. Be kind to one another. 
Does not matter who it may be, female, male, Asian, Hispanic, European, African, American, Black, White, or Brown.
 For you see we are all intricately connected. And really what you think you do for the next man, you are actually doing for yourself.

My first post this year is about Sexual violence in the Congo, I ended last year by writing on sexual violence in India.  There seems to be increasing violence towards women sexually, many of these women do not have a voice, therefore the onus is on us all, to raise our voices in unison in their defense.
Some of you might have heard about the Democratic Republic of Congo, or maybe not.
referred to as DR Congo, Congo-Kinshasa, or the DRC, is a country located in Central Africa. It is the second-largest country in Africa by area and the eleventh largest in the world. With a population of over 71 million, the Democratic Republic of the Congo is the nineteenth most populous nation in the world, the fourth most populous nation in Africa, as well as the most populous officially Francophone country. One of the Poorest Countries in Africa and one of the richest in mineral resources. An irony that is not lost to most of us

By 1996, following the Rwandan Civil war and genocide and the ascension of a Tutsi-led government, Rwandan Hutu militia forces (Interahamwe) fled to eastern Zaire and began refugee camps as a basis for incursion against Rwanda. 

These forces allied with the Zairian armed forces (FAZ) to launch a campaign against Congolese ethnic Tutsis in eastern Zaire. A coalition of Rwandan and Ugandan armies then invaded Zaire to overthrow the government of Mobutu, and ultimately control the mineral resources of Zaire, launching the  First Congo War. 

This newly expanded coalition of two foreign armies allied with some longtime opposition figures, led by Laurent-Desire Kabila , became the Alliance des Forces Democratiques pour la liberation du Congo-Zaire (AFDL). 

In 1997, Mobutu fled the country and Kabila marched into Kinshasa, naming himself president and reverting the name of the country to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In 2009, people in the Congo may still be dying at a rate of an estimated 45,000 per month, and estimates of the number who have died from the long conflict range from 900,000 to 5,400,000. The death toll is due to widespread disease and famine; reports indicate that almost half of the individuals who have died are children under the age of 5. There have been frequent reports of weapon bearers killing civilians, destroying property, widespread sexual violence, causing hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes or otherwise breaching humanitarian and human rights law. An estimated 200,000 women have been raped.

Since 1996, sexual violence as described above has been used to intimidate, humiliate, and torture hundreds of thousands of women and girls in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has frequently been described as a "weapon of war," and the  United Nations officially declared rape a weapon of war in 2008. War rape makes a particularly effective weapon in genocide because not only does it destroy its physical victims, but entire communities as well.

Today, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, particularly the eastern region of the country, is known as the rape capital of the world. While "the law specifically prohibits and provides penalties of 10 to 20 years imprisonment for child and forced prostitution, pimping, and trafficking for sexual exploitation...There were no reported investigations or prosecutions of traffickers during the year [2007]."  There is no law against spousal sexual assault.

Rape is simply a fact of life in the DRC. As Noel Rwabirinba, a sixteen-year-old who had been a militiaman for two years said, “If we see girls, it’s our right…we can violate them”  This casual statement reflects a generally callous attitude towards the female sex as well as the normalization of rape in the DRC.

"The unimaginable cruelty of sexual violence reported in the DRC conflict includes public rape in front of the family and community, forced rape between victims, the introduction of objects into the victims' cavities, pouring melted rubber into women's vaginas, shooting women in the vagina and inducing abortions using sharp objects.