Responding to Rape as a Weapon of War in the Democratic Republic of Congo: CIDA's Actions in an Evaluative Framework

Do the responses promote peace and security and establish enforceable conduct standards for security personnel?

None of the four target areas of the CIDA program specifically focuses on security. One organization need not seek to rectify every aspect of the DRC’s complex sexual violence catastrophe, however, and the Joint Initiative does seek to train police and the DRC’s military to protect civilians from rape. Nonetheless, given that the Congolese administration officially coordinates these security forces, and given this governing network’s current fragility, supervision of security personnel may be minimal.

CONCLUSION

The tenth and overarching question is whether CIDA recognizes these rapes as attacks both upon the individual victims and upon their communities and seeks to rectify the problems suffered at both levels. As various observers have made clear, rape as a weapon of war not only leaves individual survivors in need of medical, mental, and economic assistance but also turns community members against one another and further devastates the economies of already war-torn regions. Thus, survivors require treatment to improve their own individual lives, but repairing survivors also empowers them to revive their communities, and non-individualistic, community-level treatments remain essential as well. CIDA has recognized the communal dimension to some extent by including “socio-economic reintegration” and judicial improvement in its Project Against Sexual Violence. Nonetheless, CIDA’s efforts in the DRC have just begun this year, and the degree to which they can help entire communities sociologically and economically overcome their wartime rape experiences remains to be seen.

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1.) A sociological concept, a universe of moral obligation includes all people that a particular group believes it must protect and aid.

* Men have been raped as well, but most rapists attack females.

* This thesis remains controversial, and the question of its validity is beyond the scope of this essay. What is important to note here is that CIDA has recognized that women may catalyze their communities’ growth.