Stephen Lewis addresses the Tides Foundation "Momentum" conference with the message: Sexual violence is a global health crisis.  "It can safely be said that not a day goes by without some authoritative report from some country of hideous sexual violence directed at women. It has become a world-wide contagion. And it is a huge issue of public health: the health of the women, psychological, emotional and physical is torn asunder."

San Francisco, California - On July 10th, Ann Njogu, a human rights activist in Kenya, wrote as follows to friends and associates: “The last couple of days have been a nightmare for me and several other civil rights activists who were arrested in a most brutal manner after police stormed the hotel [where] we were planning to hold demonstrations over Grand Corruption (sale of the Grand Regency hotel by a cartel led by the Finance Minister --- who has since resigned in disgrace over the same). But on Tuesday, 8th July, when they arrested seven of us, the police not only brutally arrested us but also sexually violated and harassed me and a male colleague. One senior officer even had the audacity to put his hand inside my trouser, fondle my private parts and my breasts, all this while the rest were busy brutalizing us. Upon arrival at the police station, my colleagues sought to know from the senior police officer why he had sexually assaulted me, and without warning, this police officer, who we have since learnt was the deputy officer commanding [the] Division (very senior position), grabbed a police baton from one of the junior officers and set upon us in a most vicious manner. Other officers joined in, hitting, kicking and insulting us and it did not matter that some of us were already bleeding … we were later taken to court, charged with participating in an illegal assembly (never mind that we were inside a hotel and it’s the police who stormed in), and released on bail. The police also refused to record our complaint over the violations at the police station.”

The Grand Regency Hotel is in Nairobi. You will recall that in the immediate aftermath of the Kenyan election, the country, in parts, was reduced to chaos induced by ethnic mayhem. At an unprecedented rate, hospitals reported a huge intake of women raped and mutilated. One can’t help but feel that that pattern of events --- devastating for Kenya --- may well have been the catalyst for episodes like those in the Grand Regency.

Early last week, as everyone knows, charges of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes were laid against President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan by the International Criminal Court. Imbedded in the charges were grotesque crimes of sexual violence. If the phrase “the killing fields” of Cambodia has entered the language, then “the raping fields” of Darfur cannot be far behind.

Later in the week the President of Indonesia was forced to express extreme regret for murder and rape committed by the Indonesian army when it was attempting to subdue East Timor.

And at the end of the week, the Uganda Law Reform Commission reported to parliament that of 6,000 people interviewed in a formal survey, 92% reported that some form of domestic violence was taking place in their communities. The report cites sexual violence, psychological torture, physical and bodily harm and marital rape. The highest levels of violence were recorded in Northern Uganda where a bitter civil war has raged for more than a decade.

It can safely be said that not a day goes by without some authoritative report from some country of hideous sexual violence directed at women. It has become a world-wide contagion. And it is a huge issue of public health: the health of the women, psychological, emotional and physical is torn asunder. That’s the objective.

There’s not a region of the world that’s exempt. It’s happening in Iraq; it’s happening in Afghanistan … and before anyone becomes too smug about it, it’s worth recalling the astonishing article in the LA Times, written by Jane Harman, chair of the House Homeland Security subcommittee on Intelligence. She wrote that women serving in the US military are more likely to be raped by a fellow soldier than killed by enemy fire in Iraq. And then, at a visit to the VA Healthcare Centre in Los Angeles, the doctors told her “that 41% of female veterans say they were victims of sexual assault while in the military, and 29% reported being raped during their military service”. She also employs figures from the Department of Defense showing a 73% increase in sexual assaults within the military, 2006 over 2004 (we’re talking of almost three thousand assaults).

I repeat: no country is exempt, and I return to the narrative: it’s happening in the Middle East; it’s happening in Columbia, and we know from the painful historical record, that sexual violence occurred at nightmare levels in the Balkans and during the Rwandan genocide. Indeed, in both of the special criminal courts established for Rwanda and the Balkans, the judges have found genocide and rape inextricably linked.

It never ends. There are appalling stories emerging from Zimbabwe of Mugabe’s thugs raping with impunity. Inevitably, the news stories focus on the political condemnation of Mugabe, but just beneath the surface, roiling with hatred and brutality, is a pattern of sexual violence, shocking in its extent and ferocity. If proof be needed, just hark back to the Sunday Times of July 6th with the following headline: “A sharp rise in pregnancies shows Zanu-PF’s campaign is reaching new depths of cruelty”. The story reads in part: “Dozens of teenage girls have been made pregnant after being taken into the bush and raped in torture camps by President Robert Mugabe’s youth militia …” “ … it is a particularly brutal and disturbing element of the months of violence, and its after-effects will be felt by those girls and their families long after the rest of the terror sweeping the country has died away”, said one human rights worker. “Some of the girls will never recover.”

In Liberia, where the savage civil war has finally ended, the raping continues unabated. In fact, rates of rape increased, as they so often do in the immediate aftermath of conflict – but instead of receding gradually as would be expected, they’ve continued to climb. A UNICEF survey revealed that more than half the rapes reported last year were attacks on girls between the ages of ten and fourteen. It does give new meaning to depravity.

But the catalyst for the increasing world-wide concern is undoubtedly what’s happening in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The gruesome litany of raping and sexual violence in the Congo has been chronicled for at least twelve years, since the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide, but it’s probably fair to say that what prompted the crescendo of contemporary public awareness was a visit to the Congo in the summer of 2007 by Eve Ensler, author of the Vagina Monologues, and the remarkable piece of journalism she produced on her return documenting the nightmarish dementia to which women have been subjected … two hundred thousand women is the most reliable estimate. There followed a sudden surge of interest amongst the media and within the United Nations.

What the surge revealed is of particular note: none of what has been happening in the Congo is new to the United Nations. The Security Council, the Secretariat led by the Secretary-General, and a number of UN Agencies, working right there on the ground in-country, have known for a decade of the horrors visited on women, and it is one of the great inexplicable delinquencies on the part of the international community that virtually nothing was done about it before now. The violence has been the subject of a succession of authoritative and blood-chilling reports from Human Rights Watch to Amnesty International, with no result.

Eve Ensler uses the word “femicide” to characterize what’s happening to Congolese women in the full view of the world, and when she does, a torrent of fussy linguistic misogyny is brought into play, and comfortable bureaucrats recoil with horror. But how else do you describe an unrelenting pattern of attacks on women, precisely because they are women -- so extreme as to destroy their physical anatomies while subjecting them, and the family members who are forced to watch, to scenes of rape and mutilation worthy of Caligula in his worst moments of insanity?

In the Eastern Region of the Congo --- where the most awful depredations occur, where the roving bands of crazed militias hold sway, where the government forces have often been as bad as the rebels they fight --- in the city of Bukavu, in the Panzi hospital, thousands of women present each year with fistula, their sexual and reproductive tracks torn apart, many HIV-positive, all of them traumatized to lesser or greater degree by the madness to which they’ve been subject.

What would you call a so-called international community that knows all of this and does nothing, year after year, until it comes to the attention of mainstream media? What words best describe   ‘humanitarian efforts’ that amount to standing by, while excellent but tiny and desperately poor indigenous grass-roots NGOs provide solace and support to tens of thousands of rape victims, ranging in age from under a year to over eighty – grass-roots groups that struggle with backing from a handful of international NGOs who form a network of solidarity that is valiant but pathetically small.

In fact, just to demonstrate how slowly enlightenment is embraced by the apparatus of the United Nations, it’s necessary to point out that when an ostensible peace agreement was signed between the government of the Congo and the various rebel groups last January, not only were the raped women given no voice at the peace table, contrary to previous and explicit Security Council resolutions, but the peace accord contained an amnesty provision for the militias involved in the conflict. Give up your arms and a decade’s worth of torture and terror will be forgiven and forgotten. It’s simply beyond the pale. And the accord was orchestrated and signed by the UN peacekeeping forces in the Congo. How vile is that?

It’s hard to know whether embarrassment or concern has finally brought multilateralism partially to its senses. There has been an unexpected volte-face. So extreme have things become --- this war on women --- that just last month, June 19th to be exact, the Security Council of the United Nations unanimously adopted a resolution defining acts of sexual violence in conflict and post-conflict situations as an issue of international security. And so it is that sexual violence joins HIV/AIDS and climate change as the only issues outside the normal ambit of the Security Council that have been designated as matters of peace and security.

The Council described sexual violence in armed conflicts as reaching “appalling levels of brutality.” It went on to say that sexual violence is used “… as a tactic of war to humiliate, dominate, instill fear in, disperse and/or forcibly relocate civilian members of a community or ethnic group.” During the debate, retired Major General Patrick Cammart, former Commander of MONUC, the Congo’s 17,000-member peacekeeping force, said dramatically but saliently “… it has probably become more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier in an armed conflict.”

I summon all of this material today to make the point to all of you that there’s a terrible assault on women continually taking place in parts of the international community, and it’s an assault that compromises their collective health in every way. The response thus far has been negligible.

Long before the Security Council took notice, sexual violence was escalated from a battle “tactic” to a systematic “strategy” of war where, from the outset, it’s understood by military commanders, by military factions, by military marauders that the cheapest and easiest way to destabilize and disperse a village, a community, a province is to rape the women and girls. Sexual torture eviscerates the women, and it terrorizes and traumatizes their children as well, and their partners, their extended families, the communities themselves. It’s the ultimate sabotage of human health. In the darkness and depth of the trauma, physical and emotional, the women are rendered incapable of playing roles society has assigned to them. They are lost as parents who take their children to health clinics and schools; lost as the mainstays of the family life; as the gatherers of wood, the drawers of water, the providers of meals; as the farmers who maintain agricultural productivity; as the bearers of children because in so many instances they can no longer bear children.

And in a final, what feels to be almost diabolical touch, a significant number of the women find themselves stricken with HIV.

Somewhere, somehow --- not surprising perhaps --- the men who prosecute war in this world have learned, from each other, that the shredding of women is the shredding of the health of entire communities, even countries. This is their odious version ---shrewdly calculated --- of “gender analysis”: the militias understand the sexist societies in which they were raised, and know that those societies need strong healthy women to survive, and to thrive.

International human rights Conventions all use the same phrase: everyone is entitled to the “highest attainable standard of health.” How can that be reconciled with sexual violence? And yet, almost all of the countries where violence abounds have ratified the Conventions.

As far back as 1948, the World Health Organization adopted as its mantra the words: “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” How can complete physical, mental and social well-being be reconciled with sexual violence? It’s not possible. And to the extent that the world, and its institutional construct, the United Nations, are slow to respond or fail to respond, the world and the United Nations are complicit.

There is no room here for domestic insularity. I’m speaking to an overwhelmingly American audience; it’s vital to recognize that the United States can in no way keep its distance from the abattoirs of malice in this world. We talked yesterday of a paradigm shift; well that shift has to embrace the concept of global citizens, has to understand that when it comes to an issue of international peace and security like sexual violence, the obsession with boys and guns and war has to be transformed into an obsession with forcing the Security Council to go beyond mere words, with an all-consuming determination to prevent the rape of women and girls, with medical services to repair the reproductive tracts of the women, with safe houses so that the women can recover in security, with counseling so that psyches can heal, with the quest for justice so that the culture of impunity is forever expunged from the planet.

I want to end on a personal note. Back in the 1990s, when I was working for UNICEF, I coordinated a study on the consequences of armed conflict on children. It won’t surprise you to learn that the findings were terribly distressing. But as horrific as was the predicament of children in war, and as terrible as were the consequences, there was always some tiny measure of restraint attaching to what was done to children. Even the most heinous of predators appeared to feel a microscopic twinge of shame.

There is none of that when it comes to women. None. In country after country, it’s open season on women: unrestrained, unabashed, unimaginable.

And that’s why for AIDS-Free World, this is the ultimate test of legitimacy. To be sure, AIDS is the entry point. But the over-riding reality is inescapable: sexual violence defines the most important struggle of all: the struggle to proclaim and to implement gender equality. There will be neither justice nor health for the women of the world without equality.

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