INVESTIGATION OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE IN EASTERN DRC D ISCUSSION THE MILITARIZATION OF RAPE IN SOUTH KIVU MILITARY PERPETRATORS Combining those perpetrators noted to have a specific military affiliation (28%) and those simply described as “soldier” or “man in military uniform” (24%), over half of all assailants were armed combatants. Another 42% of the sexual violence survivors simply described the perpetrator as “assailant” without any further identifying information. Within this latter group of non-specified assailants, there is most certainly some heterogeneity. However, the body of evidence presented here suggests that a large portion of this group is also comprised of armed combatants. For instance, the types of sexual violence perpetrated by non-specified assailants closely matched the types of sexual violence perpetrated by armed combatants (Figure 2). Similarly, the descriptions of attack locations demonstrate that like armed combatants, non-specified assailants were more likely to attack women in the forest or in the fields as compared with civilian assailants (Figure 3). Furthermore, in studying the patterns of attack, we found that the decrease in number of sexual assaults by non-specified assailants between 2004 and 2008 closely paralleled the decrease in number of sexual assaults by armed combatants in the same time period (Figure 9). In reviewing the 4,311 narrative descriptions of sexual assaults, there were notable similarities between armed combatants and non-specified perpetrators, which were not captured in the quantitative analysis. For instance, like the armed combatants, the non-specified perpetrators were more often noted to pillage money, food, livestock, and clothing. Both non-specified perpetrators and armed combatants were also known to force the victim or her family members to physically carry the loot into the forest. Females forced to transport looted goods in this manner were often sexually assaulted by the non-specified perpetrators or armed combatants once they arrived in the forest. This pattern of pillaging the home and raping in the forest was not observed with civilian perpetrators. The non-specified assailants were also much more likely to attack in groups, as were the armed combatants. In contrast, civilian assailants almost always attacked individually. Similar to armed combatants, non-specified assailants were often described as either encircling the family home or encircling victims in the forest or in the fields in order to corral them before attacking. And finally, as opposed to civilian perpetrators, nonspecified perpetrators were much more likely to attack women who were in the company of their male family members, and this pattern was also observed with armed combatants. With both non-specified perpetrators and armed combatants, the male family members were often restrained, beaten, forced to watch the rape or killed. To further investigate the relationship between South Kivu’s rape epidemic and the region’s militarization, we studied the number of sexual assaults by month and year. We compared this with documented military offensives for the area and found that several of the spikes in sexual assault numbers could be explained by a military strike or an intensification of military activity. For instance, Figure 5 illustrates a significant increase in the number of reported rapes for June 2004. In early June 2004, Laurent Nkunda and his troops seized control of Bukavu, claiming that they were protecting ethnic Congolese Tutsis from genocide.(48) During the attack on 33