Raping Women and Girls for your Technological Convenience

Is it possible that the Laptop and Cell Phone you are using right now may have cost over 4 million lives and lifelong miseries to tens of thousands of women and girls in Congo? Since 1998 a brutal war has ravaged the Democratic Republic of Congo, over 4 million casualties and tens of thousands of women and girls have been systematically kidnapped, raped, enslaved, mutilated and tortured by the warring soldiers. All of these atrocities for the coveted prize of plundering Congo’s natural resources of diamonds, gold and coltan (a metal used in cellular phones and laptops).

In a documentary by Lisa F. Jackson, The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, shown on HBO an expose’ of a shocking unimaginable depth of detestable monstrosity so surreal yet grotesquely real as seen through a camera lens. The film features interviews with survivors, activists, peacekeepers, physicians and, most chillingly, two groups of rapists who are soldiers of the Congolese Army. Above all, it highlights first-person accounts of dozens of rape survivors, who recount their stories with pulverizing honesty and immediacy.

A solo documentary by Emmy®-winning filmmaker Lisa F. Jackson, herself a survivor of gang rape, travels deep inside the DRC to understand what is happening and why. Where others fail especially the media in bringing to the world’s attention the shocking plight of women and girls caught in the middle as casualties of a resources war motivated by greed in the Congo, Lisa Jackson took the challenge single handedly.

The film shocks you while at the same time offers hope in seeing the resiliency of the victims and the untiring impossible work of caring and rehabilitating the victims in a society that has shunned these victims as if they are half human beings.

It traumatize you in disbelief as the victims finally speaks out in all honesty and heart wrenching frankness breaking their silence slowly and painstakingly trying to rebound out of the miseries they have been relegated to by their criminal perpetrators.

Women and children suffering a fate so damned because they are in the wrong place and time treated worse than an animal by maniacal soldiers and Congolese armies alike who instead of defending them attacks them instead. To quote some chilling recounting of the dastardly act that is so numbingly shocking that you wonder what kind of dark human being can do such monstrosity defies any logic:

We were raped by twenty men at the same time.

They have taken their guns and put them inside of us.

They kill our children and then they tell us to eat those children.

We are all alone. Our husbands have been killed, or they have denied us.

These numerous victims’ girls as young as 5 years old and women as old as 80 years old are savagely attacked by demented perpetrators thinking they have the right to do so because they were in the jungle for too long combined with idiotic superstitious belief perpetrates such dastardly act with no sliver of remorse. What strikes me is the comment of the lone policewoman in a one person sex crime department dealing with tens of thousands of victims faced with enormous work load has not wavered in doing what needs to be done, to quote:

To diminish the case of rape I think the first thing is we have to fight the problem of impunity.

Indeed, the culture of impunity creates an environment that sadly permeates society's mindset that rape is acceptable and unless the perpetrators are held accountable for their dastardly act it will remain a problem that destroys the very fabric of society.

Think about it the technological convenience that we take for granted may have been brought to us courtesy of the plunderers of Congo at the expense of over 4 million dead and tens of thousands of women and girls suffering physical and psychological trauma for life and some hanging by a thin thread or may have been dead by now infected with aids due to the savagery inflicted on them. We can choose to ignore this problem and let them suffer in silence displaced in their own country or we can help in our own ways by lobbying our representatives to stop the outrageous barbarism in Congo, urge the media for more coverage, join some organizations at the forefront of this issue or organizations that are featured by the documentary.

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