Congo/women : portraits de guerre pour la journée internationale des droits de la femme - Magazine Avantages

Congo/women : portraits de guerre pour la journée internationale des droits de la femme - Magazine Avantages

Website: Paul Carson Partnership

Our Mission

The mission of the Paul Carlson Partnership is to catalyze the growth of self-sustaining families and communities in places of deep poverty in Central Africa. Working together with partners in Africa and elsewhere, we invest in local efforts in health care, economic development, and education.

Distinctives of the Organization

We work in the economically poorest places with people who are rich spiritually and socially.

We work toward sustainability, building both economic and human resources on the ground.

We work from relief towards development, recognizing the core problem presented by deep poverty and identifying strategies to address it.

We work in and through partnerships--with individuals and communities on the ground, with other organizations, with churches, and with volunteers and donors.

We work in Central Africa, believing that our history in Congo had prepared us for future involvement in neighboring countries with similar cultural and economic contexts.

Our work grows out of and is motivated by the Christian faith of our founders and the current board and staff. Independently incorporated and governed, we are affiliated with the Evangelical Covenant Church.

 

http://paulcarlson.org/home

Varieties of Feminism

1. There are four major varieties of Feminism:
a. Liberal.
b. Marxist.
c. Radical.
d. Socialist (sometimes called "dual system" theory).
Other forms of Feminism include Functionalist Feminism and Black Feminism.
 

2. Liberal Feminism:
a. Gender prejudice is based around individual ignorance. education is seen as a
valuable tool in the battle against discrimination based around ignorance.
b. It is possible to legislate (pass laws) against sexual discrimination as a way of
changing individual attitudes and behaviour. 

For example, the Sex Discrimination and
Equal Pay Acts in the 1970's in Britain.
c. The general position of women in our society has significantly improved in the past
100 years. woman have legal equality with men, although they still do not have status
equality with men (that is, males still tend to have generally higher social status than
women).

3. Marxist Feminism
a. Capitalist class relationships are the root cause of female oppression, exploitation
and discrimination. Men are socialised into exploitative relationships in relation to work
and they carry this socialisation over into the home and their relationship to women.
b. Patriarchy is an ideology (a set of related beliefs about the world - in this instance,
male - female relationships) that stems from male attempts to justify the economic
exploitation of women.
c. The "family system" characteristic of modern societies benefits capitalism (and, by
extension, the men who tend to dominate positions of power and influence) because
women:
- can be forced / socialised into unpaid domestic labour.
- can be forced / socialised into responsibility for child-rearing.
This benefits the Capitalist because they do not have to pay women to perform this role
(the "reproduction of labour power" in society).
This benefits men because women perform a "domestic servant" role for all men.
d. Neither Marxist nor socialist Feminists see men as the "enemy" of women. To create
a Communist / socialist society men and women have to co-operate in to:
Overthrow the Capitalist system of economic exploitation (Marxist Feminism).
Create a more-equal and equitable form of society (Socialist Feminism).
e. For Marxist Feminists, the concept of social class is considered to be more important
than the concept of patriarchy since the latter is seen as a form of ideology that stems from class exploitation. Women are not a "sex class" because the only thing they have in
common is their sex - an upper class woman, for example, has little if nothing in common
with a working class woman. In addition, there is general agreement amongst Marxist
Feminists that the points in the following section are valid.

4. Socialist Feminism
a. Women's work and their social status is highly marginalized by their potential / actual
"dual role" in modern societies (child-rearer and worker). Employers are able to exploit
this dual role to pay women lower wages. Men are able to exploit this dual role by
receiving "unpaid services" within the home.
b. The main reason for women's lower status in relation to men is the fact that they are
generally economically dependent upon their male partner.
c. Male power over women is consolidated by ideological myths about women (that
they are naturally passive, that they have maternal instincts and so forth). These myths
are part of a powerful socialising influence upon women that leads them to define their
major role as that of "mother, housekeeper and child-rearer".

5. Radical Feminism
a. The concepts of patriarchy and sex class are key ideas in relation to the
understanding of women's position and experience in all societies.
b. Patriarchy has existed in all known human societies and, as such, pre-dates
Capitalist forms of gender inequality.
c. Patriarchal relationships are considered to have paved the way for Capitalist forms of economic and gender exploitation.
d. Sexual inequality is institutionalised in society. It is not possible to achieve sexual
equality through legal means or by "changing people's attitudes".
e. Men are the enemy of women. Women are a sex class in that they share a common
interest in freeing themselves from male oppression.
f. The universal causes of patriarchy are considered to be:
The exploitation of female biology by men (men can exploit women's incapacity
through pregnancy, for example). -> RAPE
Marriage-based family relationships in which men control women's behaviour.
Heterosexual relationships.
g. One solution to the problem of patriarchal exploitation is seen to be lesbian
relationships and female support groups.
h. Some Radical Feminists (e.g. Firestone) argue that female emancipation can be
achieved technologically (women being freed from childbirth and so forth).
i. In general, Radical Feminists see the exploitation of women as involving both the public
sphere (work for example) and the private sphere (the home - marriage as, according to
David Bouchier, an "institutionalised source of female oppression”).
This a dual form of female exploitation not experienced by men.

Source: ã www.sociology.org.uk 2005

http://www.sociology.org.uk/as4i4c4.pdf

Website: Raise Hope for Congo

The Campaign

The RAISE Hope for Congo campaign aims to build a permanent and diverse constituency of activists who will advocate for the protection and empowerment of Congolese women and girls. The Enough Project will collaborate with national, grassroots, and Congolese organizations, across various constituencies and the political spectrum, to build this grassroots movement.

The first step to building a movement is to raise awareness about the crisis in Congo. The campaign provides activists with informative tools to educate themselves and their communities about the conflict in eastern Congo and the epidemic of sexual violence against women and girls.
No matter how much we know or how much we care, we will only succeed if we speak out and demand action from our leaders. The campaign offers a menu of actions that activists can take to raise their voices and call for an end to the conflict and sexual violence in eastern Congo.

Despite the horrific scale of the violence, and the grave consequences of the conflict in Congo, we rarely see it on television, we seldom hear about it on the radio, and we hardly ever read about it in the newspapers. The campaign works with activists to raise the profile of the Congo conflict in the media and demand that the media shine a light on this invisible yet catastrophic crisis.

http://www.raisehopeforcongo.org/

Journal #17: Rape in war: the humanitarian response

Leslie Shanks, Michael J.Schull (2000), Canadian Medical Association or its licensors 

- Need for sufficient female health care workers

- Need for sufficient number of social workers who can "listen" and have time with women 

   (Allow sufficient time to establish rapport)

- Provide safe and confidential environment for disclosure

- Conduct a full history and physiclal examination

Factors that are connected to continuing sexual violence against women in DRC

Factors that (according to what I have figured out so far) seem to cause/aggravate the sexual violence against Congolese women since civil war in DRC. 

1) Culture

2) Aftermath of Civil War 

3) Economics

4) Access to resource 

5) Feminist Analysis of violence

Journal #16: Why Do Soldiers Rape? Masculinity, Violence, and Sexuality in the Armed Forces in the Congo (DRC)

[Culture - Among soldiers]

Abstract: Some stunning thoughts of soldiers are revealed through personal interviews by Baaz in this article. As detectives usually invest much time on discovering strategies of criminals, one who wants to, or feels obliged for the concern of humanity, prevent women from further being suffered, one has to devote efforts to know why, why, why in the world, soldiers commit such horrible crimes. Baaz categorizes different rapes according to the intention of rape, based on the interviews by soldiers in Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC), which is mostly blamed for the extensive rape as a war tool. That is,"normal" rape and "evil" rape.

Cynthia Enloe has outlined three main militarized rape: the "recreational rape," "national security rape," and "systematic mass rape."

There were, surprisingly, more stories than it appears to be: the dearth of "normal" sexual encounters in soldiers' own home.

            - Soldiers have told that since they are not paid well and cannot give money to thier wives, resulting declining desire and love of wives toward thier husbands. Accordingly, these soldiers who feel that they have lost their supposedly expressive masculinity go out and "pick up flowers" in the warfield, which is usually villages where vulnerable women reside. 

               One soldier says, therefore, if they(soldiers) can be rescued from conitnuing poverty, they will not at all imagine committing such crime because the soldiers, as a household who deserves repect from families, will be satisfied sexually and economically. There is no reason for them to go out and kill, rape, and amputate people. 

            - Also, some said that they feel dutiful to do bad things. While reading those words, I couldn't help but thinking that those soldiers have been suffering from mentally and materially unsatisfying lives, which seem endless. They seemed to be shouting that they did not have any other outlet but do such things to, maybe distract from disruptive thoughts and desperative and depreciating live conditions. And thus, they think that they have "rights" to satisfy those desires, while not thinking of the equal "rights" of women. 

Seemingly, their explanation seems to be reasonable enough about why they rape women, something understandable and admittable is undoubtedly different. The soldiers' thoughts have been constantly framed within satisfying their desires while living with other soldiers in the army, but were not trained to sympathize and think of the victims. Yes, it's hard to imagine how they shaped such thought. But they don't feel sexually attracted to female colleagues (soldiers).