Sexual violence, a public health issue in CAR -MSF
“After the assault, I thought I would take my own life,” says Charlotte*, a 18-year-old survivor of sexual violence from CAR’s capital, Bangui.
CAPE TOWN, April 12 (ANA) – Sexual violence has become a public health issue in the Central African Republic (CAR) over the past decade, with women and minors being the most affected groups, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) said on Tuesday.
In a country marked by years of civil war and facing a long-term crisis, assaults are perpetrated not just by members of armed groups, often the assault is committed by someone known to the victim. While access to medical and psychological care has improved over the years, the response remains insufficient compared to the scale of the needs, MSF said.
MSF, sometimes rendered in English as Doctors Without Borders, is an international humanitarian medical organisation of French origin.
“After the assault, I thought I would take my own life,” says Charlotte*, an 18-year-old survivor of sexual violence from CAR’s capital, Bangui.
With her mother having died, and her father having rejected her, Charlotte was living with her aunt and her uncle when her uncle raped her one day at home, while the rest of the family was out. Her aunt did not believe her and Charlotte felt completely alone and desperate.
She first went to the police without success and, after talking to a cousin whom she considers a sister, she decided to seek help.
According to MSF, Charlotte was very fragile, both physically and mentally, when she arrived at the Tongolo support centre, run by MSF teams. Tongolo means ‘star’ in Sango, the local language, and refers to ‘hope’, as the star shines among the dark sky.
Charlotte is one of the more than 6,000 survivors of sexual violence who have received medical, psychological and psychosocial care by MSF teams since the Tongolo project kicked off in Bangui in 2017.
Célestin*, another survivor from Bangui, also felt trapped and did not expect such a traumatic event would happen to him. He innocently offered shelter to a person he thought he knew, until he got sexually harassed one night.
“I was sleeping, and he came out of nowhere with bad intentions,” says Célestin. “He was drunk and forced me to do things I did not want to. I started to panic, I was so scared. He beat me but I managed to escape.”
Initially hosted across two different structures in Bangui, Bédé-Combattant and the Hôpital Communautaire, MSF opened the Tongolo centre in August last year near the Parc du Cinquantenaire in Lakouanga neighborhood. The new centre complements the others and is entirely dedicated to survivors of sexual violence.
Most of the survivors come from Bangui itself, a city where 890,000 of the 4.5 million Central Africans live, however one in four of the patients are from the capital’s outskirts, and a tiny fraction, which is increasing, are from more remote areas in other provinces of the country.
“The Tongolo initiative strives to provide a high quality and free programme of complete care accessible for everyone,” the project coordinator, Bilge Öztürk, says.
She says that the services are adapted for males, children and adolescents.
– African News Agency (ANA); Editing by Naomi Mackay