Children affected by the sexual violence epidemic in Eastern DRC have unique needs. Those
who have been directly affected by rape require recovery programs that are designed and
implemented specifically for young children. Those who have witnessed crimes of sexual
violence and murder require psychological support that is age-appropriate. Those children with
families that have been divided by the sexual violence and those who have experienced forced
displacement require assistance to understand their changing worlds. And finally, those children
conceived through rape require particular care to help them overcome the stigma and low selfesteem so commonly described in these circumstances. Care for children conceived of rape must
also include support for the mothers to help them accept and love their children and children who
have already been abandoned should be reunited with their families if feasible or adopted into
appropriate homes.
Through the brutal sexual assaults that have been committed over the past decade, the armed
militias in Eastern DRC have affected not only the current generation but also the next
generation. On the scale of need, the work required to support the well being of children
affected by rape in Eastern DRC has barely begun. Yet the literature suggests that without
sustained attention now, these children will grow to become another generation battered and
imprinted by trauma.
L IMITATIO NS
This study has several limitations. First, because it was retrospective in nature, the original
information could not be verified and missing or inconsistent data could not be corrected. It was
not feasible to contact women to validate the data collected at the time of interview. Because of
the retrospective nature, it was also not possible to confirm that the data were collected in
standardized manner. For instance, one of the survey questions asked about the level of
psychological trauma. Some women with horrific stories of rape, torture and loss were
surprisingly rated as having “No psychological trauma” or “Mild psychological trauma”.
Questioning of staff revealed that some interviewers were reporting their own subjective opinion
on the woman’s level of psychological trauma rather than actually asking the woman to rate her
level of psychological trauma and recording the response. Because of the manner in which this
particular question was answered, the responses were not felt to be meaningful and therefore the
data from this question were not analyzed.
The retrospective nature of this study also introduces documentation inconsistencies and data
gaps. For example, the questionnaire asked each woman to state the name of her home village.
Some women provided the name of their village while others provided the name of their district
or the name of their neighborhood. Because of these inconsistencies, we were unable at the time
of data analysis to map the home villages of women who had presented to Panzi Hospital
requesting post-rape care. Such mapping would have allowed an interesting analysis of
geographic patterns of sexual violence as well as correlation with known locations of military
offensives over the past decade. Also, there were some frustratingly high rates of missing data
that cannot now, years later, be rectified. For instance, in 34% of the interviews, the month that
the sexual assault occurred was not recorded. And finally, due to the constraints of the
questionnaire and lack of follow-up questions, it is impossible now to make some simple casual
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