Coming up on
Special Assignment this week:
Episode title: Our Bodies ... Their Battleground
Broadcast date: Thursday, 17 May 2012
Teaser ...
In 2008 the UN Security Council officially acknowledged that rape has been used as a tool of war. To date, horrific stories of the rape of women during wars continue to be reported. Although men also fall victims to this crime, the majority of victims are women.
Special Assignment explores the phenomenon of rape during conflict and revisits some of the horror stories told by the survivors themselves, as a reminder of the human faces affected by these wars.
According to reports, while many victims are killed by their assailants, others die of injuries inflicted during the sexual assault and many do not report rape because of the stigma.
The relevant statistics are inconclusive, but the numbers are staggering. For instance, in the eastern province of South Kivu alone, between 2003 and 2008 - 40 000 survivors of rape were treated.
According to the study done by the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and Oxfam which examined rape survivors in Congo, there is no stereotypical victim of this crime. In the study, the victims were women whose ages ranged from three to 80 years and came from all ethnicities, across various backgrounds.
They were raped in homes, fields and forests. Almost 60% were gang-raped. These crimes have a high level of impunity. Similar stories are told by other rape survivors wordwide including, but not limited to, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Liberia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in the 1990s.
The major struggle is to find lasting solutions to deal with this crime and to ensure that these survivors are able to move on with their lives, despite their ordeal.
Our Bodies…Their Battleground is produced by IRIN News.
Special Assignment is on SABC3 on Thursdays at 21h10.