On a hot day last November, Deborah M., a 22-year-old woman living in a camp for displaced people in the Democratic Republic of Congo, decided she had to take a risk. There was no food for her or her three children in the camp, where donated rations were chronically insufficient, so she set out in the early morning on a four-hour walk back to the small farm plot they had fled when Rwandan-backed rebels occupied their village earlier in the year.
She thought that there might be vegetables to harvest. But she also knew she might encounter rebels, or Congolese soldiers, or members of a local militia — and what could happen if she did.
Deborah’s gamble went badly. There was no food left in her garden, and she was confronted there by three armed men, who dragged her at gunpoint into an abandoned house, beat her and raped her.
In pain and distraught, she made it back to the camp late at night. The next morning, tears streaming down her face, she tied her 9-month-old daughter on her back with a frayed piece of cloth and walked to a clinic that treated victims of sexual violence, where she told me her story.
At the clinic, run by Médecins Sans Frontières, the international medical and humanitarian organization, staff members moved her efficiently through a series of steps they take hundreds of times a week: emergency contraception; prophylaxis for H.I.V.; vaccination against hepatitis; a rudimentary group counseling session. An hour later, Deborah was finished.
But no evidence was collected. She did not talk to law enforcement officials. She said she would not report her attack.
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The post Congo Has Astronomical Rates of Sexual Violence. Now Victims Have Lost Access to Care. appeared first on New York Times.
