In a remote village church hall earlier this year, one of my colleagues in the Red Cross spoke with about 20 men in mismatched military uniforms. They were members of one of the more than 100 armed groups sprawled across the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. This mineral-rich region has been ravaged by conflicts for 30 years.
Conscious of the mood in the room and careful to avoid tension, my colleague, a soft-spoken Congolese man whose identity I’m keeping private for his safety, carefully broached the uneasy subject of sexual violence, which had persisted in the region for decades but surged dramatically as fighting had escalated in 2023.
“At the beginning, they denied it ever happened,” he told me.
As the discussion in this mountainous village progressed, denial gave way to justification: “A man cannot go without a woman,” one man said. And even more troubling: “Women want it — they just don’t know how to ask.” But eventually, the men began sharing real-life situations and debating them. Someone mentioned that local tradition prohibited touching women when going into combat, a phrase my colleague noted, since it offered insight into the culture. He tried to understand what these men believed about sexual violence and use it in his arguments against it.
The conversation was part of a pilot program the International Committee of the Red Cross has been conducting to try to better address sexual violence in armed conflict. Last year, the United Nations recorded a 50 percent increase in verified cases of conflict-related sexual violence. According to the ICRC, over 120 armed conflicts are happening today, a sharp increase from the number at the start of the millennium. And when new wars erupt, gruesome allegations of sexual violence almost always follow images of death and destruction.
Talking about sexual violence in conflict is difficult. For centuries, its stark cruelty has been blurred by euphemisms uttered in hushed tones. Within the I.C.R.C., the minutes of the decision-making bodies mentioned the word “rape” only five times in 100 years. Unspoken and unnamed, sexual violence has too often been tacitly accepted as an inevitable byproduct of war.
It isn’t. Sexual violence is a grave violation of international humanitarian law. But merely breaking the silence isn’t enough to prevent it. How we speak about it to those who carry guns matters just as much.
In recent years, the I.C.R.C. has partnered with social scientists to study the culture and behavior of armed groups and forces, analyzing examples from the Australian and Philippine armies, armed groups in Colombia and northern Mali and cattle herders in South Sudan, who have participated in the country’s armed conflicts. The researchers sought to understand instances when fighters showed respect for the norms of international humanitarian law, what influenced their behavior and how these influences could be replicated to prevent future violations, including sexual violence.
Their findings were clear: Relying on legal frameworks alone is insufficient. People break the law all the time, of course. But they will be less likely to break the law if they believe that what it says is also the right thing to do, the researchers found. This is why understanding and addressing the underlying beliefs and values that drive behavior in combat is so crucial.
Last year my colleagues in Congo used the results of this study to adapt the way the I.C.R.C. speaks to armed groups and forces about sexual violence. They started by asking armed groups on the ground what they thought about sexual violence. Many of them, both men and women, saw it as a minor transgression.
I experienced this firsthand a decade ago in eastern Congo. In a village school with a sand floor, a dozen men, members of an armed group, sat on low wooden benches during a session on humanitarian law. My colleague explained its principles in Swahili, using flip charts to illustrate his points: A wounded enemy fighter receiving first aid after surrender. A military camp built at a safe distance from civilian houses to spare them from the effects of a potential attack.
Suddenly, the mood shifted. The next image on the flip chart depicted a woman, her face contorted in horror, her body pressed against the ground by a man in military fatigues. Silence punctuated by nervous giggles enveloped the room. The message wasn’t getting through.
Over the years, I.C.R.C. staff members working in conflicts around the world have been learning from these experiences to find a down-to-earth and effective way to speak with armed groups and forces about sexual violence. The results of the study helped us deepen this practical knowledge and better understand why some messages weren’t landing.
They show that while law is important to set standards, deeper conversations are needed to influence behavior. Why does sexual violence happen? What are the perpetrators thinking?
On the margins of dedicated sessions that my colleague, the I.C.R.C. specialist in Congo, and his team organize, he tries to speak to the participants, who range from high-ranking commanders to soldiers and fighters, individually or in small groups. He might learn that a given commander does not see sexual violence as a problem, and this creates a culture of indifference that must be overcome. “The beliefs that exist in the community can also inform the level of banalization of sexual violence,” he told me.
A conversation I had earlier this year made me painfully aware of how toxic and pervasive prejudice about sexual violence can be — and that I was not immune.
On the outskirts of Goma, in a tiny room inside a metal container serving as a listening house, where trauma survivors receive psychosocial support, a 57-year-old man spoke quietly about the horrific attack he suffered by an armed group while collecting firewood. It was the first time in my many years of Red Cross work that I’d met a male survivor.
“I am not a woman! What are you doing?” he told me he screamed at his attackers. Their response was chilling: “Get on the ground, and you will see what happens.”
He paused, crumpling his cap between his hands. “I had never heard about this happening before, men attacking men in this way.”
Two weeks later, he was still grappling with the physical and psychological scars of the attack, which had cost a friend his life. I admired his courage. I also kept thinking about my immediate reaction to meeting a male survivor: a mix of surprise and unsettling discomfort.
Horror crept over me as I realized that I too had become so accustomed to sexual violence against women and girls that I was no longer shocked by it. His pleas of desperation — “I am not a woman!” — were a troubling sign of how his community, after decades of armed violence, had become numb to the horrible mundanity of sexual attacks against women. And in the 15 years I spent as an aid worker in Congo, the Central African Republic, Colombia, Nigeria and South Sudan, I had internalized the same prejudice.
My I.C.R.C. colleagues who are part of the pilot program target these ingrained prejudices by speaking about the devastating impact sexual violence has on survivors and on entire communities, but also on the perpetrators and their families.
They also speak to the honor, power and responsibility that come with carrying a weapon: You say you are defending the village. What is the village? Cows and trees? No, it is the people. Whether we deal with professional armies or decentralized armed groups living among communities, their image matters to them. And sense of honor remains a powerful argument.
The early results of the pilot program offer hope. Before these sessions, only 41 percent of participants recognized the consequences of sexual violence. Afterward, 77 percent understood its profound impact. The I.C.R.C. has started using this approach in other countries where it works.
“During the discussions, they open up and start coming up with their own arguments, and you feel how the attitudes start to change,” my colleague who’s leading the program in Congo said. “Even if it is not yet the behavior.” Shifting behavior takes time, but starting a thought-provoking discussion that may change attitudes is an essential first step.
Confronted with the scale and horror of new reports of sexual violence that continue to emerge from conflicts around the world, it is easy to succumb to cynicism and simply accept it as inevitable. We must continue working to prevent it instead.
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