When Rape Reorganizes: An Ethnographic Study of Sexual Violence in Eastern DR Congo

Rachel Niehuus
Anthropology, History, and Social Medicine
UC San Francisco

In November 2012, a study conducted in eastern DRCongo reported: one-third of men admit to have raped; twenty-two percent of women identify as rape victims. While these figures are similar to rates of sexual violence in the United States, the ‘rape epidemic’ in Congo has unique manifestations. Through a combination of long-term participant-observation, semi-structured interviews, and archival research, this dissertation project interrogates the relationship between sexual violence, kinship, and dependency in eastern Congo. For sixteen months, the author lived and worked in hospitals and communities in the North Kivu province; there, they observed that in a place reeling from twenty years of cyclic violence, rape further destroys the social fabric and simultaneously creates new relationships of dependence. Contributing to the anthropological scholarship on violence, this dissertation project challenges the prevailing description of rape as purely creating a lack with ethnographic stories that attest to its reorganizational capacity.