FEATURE: MSF calls on authorities to ’swiftly’ respond to sexual violence crisis in DRC

The extent of sexual violence in the DRC is recognised and denounced by many national and international actors. Yet, this condemnation is not followed by sufficient actions.

CAPE TOWN, July 15 (ANA) – International humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF – Doctors Without Borders) has warned of the lack of support available for survivors of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), calling on authorities to swiftly respond to the huge medical, legal, socioeconomic, and protection needs of the vulnerable.

In 2020, there were nearly 11,000 survivors of sexual violence who needed assistance in 6 of the 26 provinces of the DRC, MSF said in a report issued on Thursday.

The extent of sexual violence in the DRC is recognised and denounced by many national and international actors, says Juliette Seguin, MSF head of mission in the DRC.

“Yet, this condemnation is not followed by sufficient actions, whether in terms of prevention, care or protection. Our teams on the ground are daily witnesses that needs are far from being met.”

The data collected by the organisation in 2020 shows a worrying picture of the physical and psychological state of patients treated for sexual violence, infections, unwanted pregnancies, physical injuries resulting from the violence, severe psychological trauma, including among minors who represented one fifth of patients treated by our teams in 2020.

“The immediate and long-term needs are significant but approaches and funding that would allow them to be met are severely lacking,” Seguin says.

“Last year, for the DRC, less than six percent of international funding requested to respond to humanitarian health needs was disbursed, and 18 percent of the amount requested for the protection of people and human rights.

“This trend continues in 2021. Beyond funding, some innovative approaches adapted to the local context are not implemented. The resulting lack of support constitutes a double penalty for survivors,” she says.

“It happened on the way back home. We were walking… when we came across men carrying weapons… They raped me, in front of my children… I’m not the same person today. I feel pain everywhere… But the worst is the gaze of others, the isolation,” one sexual violence victim said.

MSF said its teams have been treating survivors of sexual violence in the DRC since the beginning of the emergency intervention in April 2018.

The shortcomings identified by MSF teams in the support to survivors mirrors the weakness of the response to gender-based violence (GBV) in the country, the organisation said.

In the first half of 2020, the United Nations (UN) estimates that barely one in four victims of GBV had access to medical care, 5 percent to psychosocial assistance, 15 percent to legal assistance, and only 0.5 percent to socioeconomic reintegration.

“The narrative of sexual violence as a ‘weapon of war’ tends to erase the fact that this violence is also perpetrated by unarmed men and in more stable regions where few actors are present to offer support,” Seguin says.

“While troop movements and fighting clearly increase the number of sexual assaults, these are also perpetrated by people not bearing arms, and their victims are equally in need of care, support and protection,” she says.

Women and girls in conflict-ridden countries tend to “devastating” challenges including serious barriers to healthcare and food, as well as sexual violence, which is used as a weapon of war, according to the United Nations Population Fund (UNPFA).

Not far from the airfield in Bambari is Aviation Camp for internally displaced persons, where dilapidated straw dwellings house people who have fled conflict that has plagued Ouaka prefecture in the Central African Republic (CAR). Some have been living there since 2014, the UN agency said this week.

According to the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), there are more than 14,000 displaced people in the Aviation and PK8 Camps in Bambari, the majority of them women and girls.

A woman in PK8 Camp who is a victim of sexual violence recalled encountering a man who emerged from the bush, machete in hand, demanding sex.

“I fled, but he caught up with me and hit me with the machete in the face. He started to undress me, but I struggled and screamed with all my might. Finally, he left when he heard that the population would come running to help me. I was lucky, but it was not the case for other women who had already crossed paths with this man. I currently live in fear.”

In 2020, the Gender-Based Violence Information Management System, a monitoring system maintained by humanitarian partners including UNFPA, recorded 9,216 cases of gender-based violence countrywide, of which 24 percent represented sexual violence.

More than a third of those brutalities were committed by members of armed groups, and the rest were perpetrated by civilians, according to the agency.

From June 2020 to May 2021, a UNFPA partner documented 619 cases of gender-based violence, of 195 cases of sexual violence, 136 were committed against minors.

– African News Agency (ANA)