Patricia* is 15 years old and looks tough. Like thousands of other girls and women in recent months, she was raped while searching for food for her family around the displaced camps in Goma, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
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She sits pregnant in a Médecins Sans Frontières tent, hiding her face in her scarf as her mother speaks.
“Out of hunger, I sent her to our village to look for potatoes,” then “neighbors said she was captured, I thought she was dead…”
The village is called Mushaki and in February Patricia, her mother, her six brothers and sisters and many of the residents fled, leaving everything behind.
Nestled in a pass at an altitude of more than 2,000 m, about thirty kilometers west of Goma, the provincial capital of North Kivu, this town has been the scene of fighting between the army on one side and local militias on the other and on the other other side. the M23 rebels supported by the Rwandan army.
At the end of 2021, another uprising broke out, consisting primarily of Tutsis, and conquered large parts of the province, leading to the displacement of more than a million people.
Mattresses and pots on their heads – when they have had time to collect a few things – these displaced people are thrown back and forth according to the violence in areas where “gunmen”, soldiers and militiamen, extort or attack them.
On a Wednesday at the end of September, Patricia showed up again at the camp. She described being taken to a Hutu militia base and raped by one of them for several weeks. One morning she pretended to fetch water and managed to escape.
“Circle of Misery”
Sandra Kavira listens in front of her and her mother.
This young 28-year-old Congolese woman is a social worker at Doctors Without Borders. Since taking office in July at the Rusayo camp, one of the city’s largest, she has heard “hundreds” of testimonies like Patricia’s.
“Here we get at least ten new cases every day, even little girls as young as 4 and grandmothers over 80,” she explains, visibly affected.
Armelle Zadi, her supervisor, remembers a patient who was unable to move and remained bedridden after a “third gang rape.” “Your daughter had no choice but to prostitute herself to support the family.”
“Women are trapped in a cycle of misery,” she says.
Every day, “around 70 female victims of sexual assault – or more than 2,000 per month – present themselves in the structures we have set up,” explains Brian Moller, Médecins Sans Frontières emergency coordinator in Goma.
“These figures reflect only part of the reality, as they only refer to consultations carried out in the locations where MSF operates,” he emphasizes.
Sexual violence has been a scourge in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo for nearly 30 years.
“You too ?”
Wrapped up on her mother’s lap, Queen suckles peacefully.
“It happened when I left the camp for the first time,” explains Charmante*, 18 years old and a mother for a month.
While breastfeeding, she continues: “He was wearing a FARDC (Congolese Armed Forces) outfit, when he finished I couldn’t walk anymore, it was my friends who carried me back to the camp.”
Like her 19-year-old sister and at least two of her friends, Charmante was raped while collecting wood in Virunga Park (north of Goma) to resell and buy something to feed her brothers and sisters.
A week later, she went to an MSF health post where, in her words, she “tested positive for pregnancy.” Her mother is against abortion. A few months later the little queen was born. Another mouth to feed.
Some of the raped women met by AFP had received humanitarian assistance, others had not. They all had to make a decision at some point: either risk being raped or starve with their children.
Last November, 43-year-old Rose walked for three days with her seven children to escape the M23 rebels who invaded Kiwanja (about 70 km north of Goma).
Since then, she has lived in Rusayo and says she has received no help.
His eyes blur, his throat tightens. Sandra Kavira listens as Rose traces the thread of her life. A life full of violence, pregnancies, beatings, miscarriages and vigilantism.
She was already the victim of a gang rape in 2017 – in front of her husband, who then beat her daily – and knows how risky it is to leave the camps to “look for wood”.
She came to terms with it in June: “We were three friends, there were four men in FARDC uniforms. We were all raped.”
Before her husband leaves her with her seven children in the mud of the Rusayo camp, he beats her one last time to make her pay for this second rape and disappears.
In the Doctors Without Borders tent, Rose wipes away her tears and hugs her little 4-year-old Jean. “It’s hard to talk about it in the camp. But here we find neighbors, girls we know, and we say to each other: “Ah… you too?”
The victims’ first names have been changed