STUTTGART, Germany,Jan 21, 2011 — Women are not the only victims of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, according to a ground-breaking research study which was presented to U.S. Africa Command staff, January 21, 2011.
Summarizing their findings on sexual and gender-based violence in the DRC were Dr. Lynn Lawry, International Health Division, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense - Health Affairs, and Dr. Michele Wagner, U.S. AFRICOM's Social Science and Research Center.
Introduction: (In progress) -- So what we're doing here is we're starting this out with a command, introduce the whole concept that you've heard the commander talk about on several occasions, and that's the gender-based piece that we have to work into all the policy considerations and actions and exercises and operations that we do, because there's so many important issues built around that -- women's and children's health issues, a whole myriad of issues. But this one is the most pressing. It gets the most attention, and it is because it's the most horrific problem you can imagine. And for those who'd like to dig into details, the details are unimaginable.
And so with that, I'd like to turn this over to these two experts and I think they're going to hit you over the head with a couple of 50-pound sledgehammers over the next couple hours, and this is a real wake-up call for a lot of us who are not familiar with the problem.
DR. LYNN LAWRY: So thank you, for that introduction. Now I have a lot to live up to. Hope I don't fail.
I want to thank everybody for allowing me to come here to present this. This has been an incredible experience of dealing with these data, particularly in Washington, D.C., and presenting this and seeing the reactions. So I'm interested to see what the reaction is when I present this as well.
I've spent a tremendous amount of time in DRC. I started in former Zaire during the Rwandan genocide, came back to work with those refugees -- the Hutu refugees -- in the Bunyakiri rainforest, worked with Kabila as a rebel -- Laurent Kabila, Senior, while he was a rebel trying to get passage for refugees through the forest. So I have an incredible on-the-ground experience and idea of what the issues are on the ground.
I'm going to talk to you about gender-based violence in the Congo. It's more to do with how gender-based violence affects every facet of life, and I hope that in the end, the command will be able to see that it's not just a medical problem; it's not just an issue for one group. It's an issue for everybody and it actually has bearing on security in the region and in the continent. We'll have to figure out how to break the cycle of violence. We haven't been able to do that thus far and we'll see that, through the data, that there are ways of doing that. Next slide.
I do have several coauthors. Some of these are students, some of these are fellows. If you'll notice, Colonel Ong (ph) was also on this paper. He was a great support in helping us with background research and working on this project with us. The support actually came from Africa Command and although some people would say, what does Africa care about gender-based violence -- or Africa Command -- it turns out that Africa Command does care and is greatly supportive of what we've done on this study. Next slide.
So the Democratic Republic of Congo, former Zaire: For those of you who do not know a lot about the history, it's endured conflict for over a decade, sometimes up -- you would say more than a decade, actually. The international, national and civil armed conflict has resulted in mass displacements. There's lots of regional fingers working in: Rwanda, Uganda -- everybody sends their rebels in to do dirty work despite peace agreements and times when they needed to stop doing that.
It was in the early 2000s that actually the -- at the time, it was MONUC; it has recently been changed to MONUSCO -- was set up, which is the U.N. peacekeeping troops. And they actually decided to develop a strategy to deal with the gender-based violence that was happening in DRC and it was later that the DRC itself wrote a national strategy to combat SGBV and it was put into writing in 2009. Next slide.
So let me explain the difference between qualitative and quantitative data. I'm not going to go deeply into this but I want you to sort of understand how studies are done and how they work. When we're talking about qualitative data, we use qualitative data to complement quantitative data and vice versa by adding context to the qualitative data.
So my data, the quantitative data, give you a number. The data that Dr. Wagner does gives you the context. So when she says, this woman told me x, I can tell you that that woman represents x percent of the population.
And why is that important? Because numbers talk. And that means that by able -- by being able to extrapolate it to a number, you can say that you need x number of dollars to be able to effect any change. And this is important when you're talking to Congress, when you're talking to donors and et cetera. You have to be careful, though, when you have qualitative data not to extrapolate it beyond what you're talking about. If you talk to 20 people, that's the experiences of 20 people. That does not represent every woman in DRC.
But unfortunately, it's used by advocacy groups to overextrapolate. Why? For the main cause of getting attention to the issue. Sometimes you have journalists who will take that data and say, this is all DRC. And if you've seen, the advocacy groups will use these really fancy titles and shocking titles -- the war on women, the rape capital of the world -- which is actually not being very contextualized to the situation that happens in DRC.
And there is a net positive effect of having such advocacy in that you do -- you are able to get attention to an issue that may have been sort of falling by the wayside. But there's also a net negative effect, and that is that you overestimate the problems, you underestimate the real issues and you start allocating money towards a problem that may or may not exist.
And in the case of DRC, what we're seeing is one hospital that has huge amount of press, stars going to it, has computers and lights and everything in the periphery; doesn't even have any lighting or tables to actually examine patients. So there is a negative effect and you have to be very careful to understand that qualitative is not extrapolated beyond.
Go ahead. If you look at the studies that have been done, most of them, again, are the experiences of individuals. These are the qualitative datas. There are also clinical data that we've seen in the news, where one clinic, mainly Panzi Hospital in South Kivu, will do a study and then they extrapolate that out to the province, which, in fact, is not correct because the patients who came to the clinic describe the patients who came to the clinic, not the surrounding area, not the province, and certainly not all of DRC.
And what happened in the end is that the U.N. used that data to then say, "In DRCCCÃ?," which of course was incorrect. But if you actually read the report, the authors in that report also extrapolated beyond what they could methodologically extrapolate to.
In the case of clinics, it represents those who can actually reach the clinic. It doesn't represent those who can't get to the clinic. In our studies, we use a four-hour walking distance is considered "access to a clinic." So anybody who can't get to the clinic, either by roads or because of flooding or because of -- for any reason, it doesn't represent them. It only represents those who can actually walk through the door.
There's also focus group data, and we've seen quite a bit of this also in DRC, where we -- they get together seven or eight people or more and they throw out these open-ended questions and then they start recording what these people are saying. Focus groups are problematic, as -- because the one who is the noisiest is the one who's going to be heard the most -- and those who may feel uncomfortable talking in a focus group. So again, you've got an inherent bias and you don't necessarily get the sort of full range of what's going on. Next slide.
So quantitative data represents a population base on -- considered on your sampling frame. If I'm in a province and I randomly sample all 20, or 20 of the 50 villages in that province, I can extrapolate to the province. I cannot extrapolate to the next province. So as long as my sampling frame is representative, I can extrapolate it to some certain larger population, not necessarily the whole country. When we did our study in Liberia, we sampled every province, every district randomly, and therefore we could say that it was a national survey.
In the case of the study that I'm going to show you, it represents South Kivu, North Kivu and Ituri district, which used to be a province, now is a district and probably in the next election will go back to a province, but that's another story. It represents those areas. I can't say that it represents anything more than that.
It is complementative to qualitative data. There are sometimes answers that I get that I don't understand, and I need to go back and talk more in depth with people to figure out what the issues are. And I think between Dr. Wagner and I, you'll see that some of the data that I present today, she'll be able to explain in more depth what those data mean. And much of it can be used for policy and programmatic recommendations. Again, if you have a number, you can put a figure to it. You can then resource towards what the issue may be.
However, qualitative or quantitative data is much more expensive. We're talking about -- the logistics are a nightmare, which I will show you, and it's sometimes difficult to accomplish, particularly when you're doing this in war-torn areas, which are many of what my studies have been in the past. Next slide.
There were three quantitative studies that were done. The Demographic Health Survey: Unfortunately, the Demographic Health Survey, which is run by the UN, only asks women about violence. They don't ask men about violence; they don't ask children about violence, and they don't interview men about violence, so the violence module is quite limiting.
The Human Rights Center at Berkeley does amazing work, but their study was really focused on justice. But they were the first to sort of go in and start dabbling and figuring out the gender-based violence. But they did come up with quite a small rate.
And then our study, which was published in JAMA in August of 2010, which is what I'm going to talk to you about. Next slide.
So our study was the first population-based study to look at all forms of gender-based violence, not just rape but also physical violence, domestic violence, molestation and from all sides: combatant to what happens in the community. The idea was to help donors, MONUSCO and the government of DRC to be able to support their national strategy using data that they were unable to do by themselves. And by understanding the context, we're able to look at the needs and the gaps and come up with recommendations that may help them better -- to better inform their prevention and response strategies for sexual violence. Next slide.
So the methods: These are spelled out in a paper that I know all of you got. I'm not going to go into this deeply; I just want to point out a few things about the methods. We did this study in March of 2010. It took us four weeks to do this: three weeks, actually, on the ground, a week of planning and making sure that our logistics were set up.
Using structured questionnaires, we trained Congolese data collectors. This is what I do all over the world. In Afghanistan as well, we use female data collectors. In the case of Congo, we used both male and female, but we were able to show that there were no differences, based on our training, between the answers that we got between men and women when they did their household studies. It's a multistage randomized cluster study, meaning we randomly picked villages in areas, went into that village, randomly selected houses and did 10 houses in that village, and then left to do another village. That way, we can extrapolate it to a larger population.
We included South Kivu, North Kivu and Ituri District. We wanted, actually, to do Maniema, but unfortunately we needed $10,000 more to do Maniema and we were unable to get that money to actually include Maniema in the study. We covered 19 different territories, and overall the study represents 5.2 million adults in South Kivu, North Kivu and Ituri District. Next slide.
This is our sampling frame. It's blurred because it would be boring for you to actually read. (Laughter.) But I can tell you that if you look at it, it's complicated. And it is complicated. My statistician and our team sat down and had to work this out. But this is how we have to do this to ensure that our study is -- has a sampling frame that represents what we're trying to do, to actually say that we did what we did and how many houses we lost, how many we didn't, how many we threw out, et cetera. Next page.
We had Congolese supervisors and interviewers. We had 15 men and nine women. We established three teams that went out into the periphery. Our researchers worked closely with them. On average, they can complete eight to 10 surveys a day, and they work between nine and 20 days. Some of the teams we had to send out into the bush and it meant going quite deep into the bush and so it took them longer for travel days to get to the site, do the interviews and get back. Next slide.
If you look at this picture, it's a sort of raft. This is how our data collectors had to get to some of the areas. I only show you this with the mode of transport to show you that 46 villages we could reach by a four-by-four, four had to be reached by canoe, two by boat, six by air, 38 by motorcycle, 15 villages had to be -- they had to do two-day rainforest hikes to get to where they needed to be, and then the combination of motorcycle, canoes and on foot was four villages.
So we tried to make sure that we didn't throw out villages because we couldn't, quote, get there. We got there, and in some cases the data collectors came back and said that when they were in those areas and they were asking where that village was, some of the surrounding villages had no idea there was another village that actually existed on the map. Next slide.
The participants: We used one adult, male or female, over the age of 18. I am very uncomfortable about interviewing children; I'm not clear that informed consent can be done with children in an area that is rural, so I tend to get child information from an adult who I know and feel comfortable that I can consent. If there wasn't someone there, we went to the next adult in the household.
We basically flipped a coin to decide whether it was a male that we would interview versus a female, and we made every attempt to make sure women were part of the study. In Congo, it wasn't as difficult as it is in some of the Muslim countries that we interview in. But by and large, I'm able to get about half and half to actually represent male and female views in the study.
We use verbal consent, the reason being that any time you ask for somebody's signature, a thumbprint or anything, there is an automatic assumption that you'll get something for that, no matter what you say, because that's how aid is distributed. In general, when USAID or any NGO comes by and is going to give food or some sort of non-food items, you're required to put a thumbprint or a signature or an x and therefore, to get away from that, we don't ask -- we're allowed to do verbal consent.
The only stickler is that we have to mark on our surveys yes or no that there was verbal consent. If that is not marked off, we can't use the surveys. So we make sure that our data collectors understand that quite well. If there are people who we feel are in extremis, those who are tearful or we feel may be suicidal, we do have to refer them to mental health programs. And so before the study, we have to ensure that there is someone or someplace to get people to go if needed. We haven't had any problems with that in the past, but it is a requirement by the review board. Next slide.
Human subjects protection: Just very quickly, all of my work has to go through ethics review. In this case, we had to put it through Uniformed Services University; also the Kinshasa School of Public Health -- that would be another slideshow to discuss how that happens -- and McGill University. Next slide.
So, finally, the data: what you came to hear. Half the study was men, about half the study was men and women. We did 1,009 interviews with households. We only had 11 that refused, one because they weren't old enough to participate; four just refused to participate -- they were either busy or really needed to get to their work at the time; six were interrupted and they couldn't complete the interview. Our rule of thumb is, if 80 percent of the interview is filled out, that's considered complete; if not, they have to be thrown out.
The mean years of living in the current village was 22 years. That means that we could actually get accurate information from the people living in these villages. They hadn't fled; this wasn't an in-and-out migration, communities that we went to -- these were people that stayed during the conflict so we could get conflict information. Next slide.
We looked at mental health. Not to go into this in too much death -- depth, but again, we looked at symptoms of major depressive disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder as well as suicide thoughts and suicide attempts. If you look at the overall, the rate is about 40 percent of the population has some or all of these mental health symptoms. If you look at those with sexual violence, the rates nearly double. And we had seen this in Liberia and we've seen this in other places, that actually having a risk of or an experience of sexual violence nearly doubles your mental health issues. Next slide.
We looked at combatant status: 20 percent of the population in these areas, in North Kivu, South Kivu and Ituri, served as a combatant at some time during the last two to three wars. If you looked at the breakdown of that, half of those combatants were actually women. So we're not just talking about males being recruited or kidnapped or abducted, we're also talking about women.
When we asked about the roles that they played within the combatant groups -- sexual servitude is a role considered by the U.N. as in a combatant group -- 53.8 percent of women were sexual servants and 19.2 percent of men acted as sexual servants. And we have qualitative data interviews where we found that there are not only bush wives, but there are bush husbands. So we know that there are both sides of that coin.
They were most commonly recruited into fighting forces by abduction or kidnapping. This is different than Liberia: Those who served in the combatant groups in Liberia went there because that's where you could get food, water and shelter, as opposed to being kidnapped, and they stayed because there were threats against their family; whereas in Liberia, they stayed because that's where they could get food, shelter and water as opposed to not being able to survive outside of it.
The combatants definitely had higher rates of major depressive disorder symptoms and post-traumatic stress disorder as well as suicide attempts than the general population. And if you looked at combatants who had sexual violence, the rates were more than double the population rates as well, with females having much higher symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder than males who had suffered sexual violence as a combatant. Next slide.
So the overall sexual violence: Everybody wants to know, what is the rate of sexual violence in DRC? I can't tell you about all of DRC. Again, I can tell you in the east, in South Kivu, North Kivu and Ituri, that the rate is 40 percent among women and 23 percent among men. Everybody says, men and sexual violence? It happens. We saw the same, similar rate in Liberia. This is not just a female problem. Men also actually suffer sexual violence.
If you break it down, then, into whether it's combatant-related violence -- sexual violence -- or community-related sexual violence, 75 percent of this is combatant-related. So what? Well, community sexual violence is a general crime. Combatant-related sexual violence is a war crime. There is a difference, and that has to be delineated.
And if you remember, there was a group that actually looked at violence out -- the sexual violence that was presenting to Panzi Hospital. They made the claim that civilian violence was going up to the tune of, I think, 1700 percent? Which was extrapolated to the east. Of course, that study could not be extrapolated.
The people that were showing up at the clinic who had had sexual violence were presenting over the time period, the number of civilian rapes had increased, who were presenting. It doesn't mean that the number of civilian rapes in the east had gone up. And in fact, when we did our data, we found something that was directly opposite and population-based.
So most of the sexual violence that we're seeing in DRC is combatant-related and possibly war crimes. Next slide.
If you look at the type of sexual violence, again, we use the U.N. definition of sexual violence, or the internationally recognized definitions. There is rape. There's gang rape. There's being stripped of clothing. There's being forced to undress, molestation and sexual slavery. By far, rape and gang rape are the two types of sexual violence that are used most commonly. And by rape, I mean any orifice, and it can be either instrumentation or penetration. So and it -- if you look at some countries in the world, oral is not considered rape. In the international definitions, any orifice with instrumentation or penetration is considered rape. Next slide.
If you look at the patterns of what happened with sexual violence among survivors in DRC or in these three areas, about 30 percent of the female survivors reported that they were gang raped. So not only were they raped, but a good portion of them were gang raped. Twenty percent of men and women, again, served as sexual servants in combatant groups.
And if you look at the rebel groups that use sexual violence pattern-wise and systematically and as part of their campaigns, it came out to be that the Mai-Mai, the FDRL (sic), the UPC and the Interahamwe were the most common rebel groups to use violence, although I will tell you that we had 53 different rebel groups that were designated as using sexual violence. However, these four were the largest perpetrators of this.
Now, if you don't hear anything else that I'm about to say or that I've said, listen to the next one. And it's -- I'm sorry that it's the last bullet on the slide, but this is the kicker. When we asked survivors what the sex of their perpetrator was, 40 percent of women said that their perpetrator was female, and 15 percent of men said their perpetrator was female. This was not something that was unknown. Anecdotally, we had heard this. The only difference is that I've now put a number to it. We know that it existed. We just didn't know at what rate and at what prevalence we could find this to be happening. And I think you'll see that Dr. Wagner will show you that although we hear about it anecdotally, it actually does exist.
And what are we talking about? Women raping men? They're using instrumentation, cutting off genitals, requiring to have bush wives -- I mean bush husbands -- as combatants in combatant rebel groups. So it does exist. Next slide.
If you look at the rebel groups by district and by group -- and what we've heard a lot about is that the military -- the FARDC -- aren't huge committers of violence. They're actually 6 percent of the sexual violence problem in DRC. Ninety-four percent of it is actually these larger, other rebel groups. So the Interahamwe and the Mai-Mai, particularly in North Kivu and South Kivu, are terrific perpetrators of sexual violence.
And if you look at the paper that I gave you from JAMA, you'll see that each group has a pattern. We can actually look at their patterns. The Mai-Mai and the FDRL (sic) will use both men and women to do -- to perpetrate sexual violence and rape. The Interahamwe do exactly what they did in Rwanda: They use men to perpetrate on women. And the UPC tend to do a sort of mixed type of rape. But we can actually take from the data that we have, look at patterns, look at where they were, look at time periods.
And although this graph was used for a group that asked us a specific question about these areas, we can actually go back year by year and look at what's happened. And interestingly enough, in the Ituri district -- this is 2008 forward, Ituri district -- it looks like sexual violence has gone way down from 2008 to present, and it's gone way up, actually, in North Kivu and in South Kivu. So we can look at how it fluctuates over time as well, based on the data that we collected. Next slide.
So how do we break the cycle of violence? The findings actually challenge the paradigm of male perpetrator and female victim. This is not just violence against women. And although many advocacy groups and many people have agendas to deal with this, it's not the only issue in DRC. Sexual violence is a very complicated issue in Liberia, in DRC and, I hazard to guess, in many parts of the continent.
And it's not just violence against women. If you look at the ICC trials over the last few years, there are women from Rwanda and Bosnia that are in custody who perpetrated sexual violence. It's not unknown. So it shouldn't be a surprise to all of us that this is happening in DRC as well. And we've also seen reports -- anecdotal reports -- of women perpetrating and men having been victims of sexual violence since the mid-1970s. The problem was we couldn't actually get a handle around the number and issue of what was going on.
One of the problems that I've found from all of our qualitative discussions in DRC is that unrecognized and untreated survivors -- I'm talking about male survivors in particular -- may cross borders to perpetrate and fight in another regional conflict. Why wouldn't they? They're not recognized. They're not treated for their post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. They're suicidal. So picking up a gun and going over somebody else's border is not a problem to them. And there are villages in DRC where they report that 200 men had reported sexual violence, and where are they? They went to Uganda. So we're talking about a highly migratory group of individuals that can cause regional unrest.
And also, one important point to remember is that someone who has had sexual violence perpetrated upon them are at risk for perpetration in the future. We know this from U.S. studies, where if you look at those who have suffered sexual violence as a child, that they are more likely to perpetrate when they get older. So this is not an unknown fact. Next slide.
There are two ways of dealing with sexual violence. There's a prevention strategy and a response strategy. When you're looking at these two, there's very different ways to deal with this. Response is basically making sure that those who have suffered sexual violence can get adequate care in facilities that have adequate supplies and can address the consequences of sexual violence.
When you're talking about prevention, you're talking about trying to figure out why groups are using sexual violence and how do you deal with that and how do you prevent that. It's two very different types of strategies.
When we're looking at policymakers and donors, we have to be able to adjust the societal paradigms. It isn't violence against women only. It is men as well, and we have to start understanding that women can perpetrate as well as be survivors. And men can perpetrate as well as be survivors.
The conventions -- the U.N. and national SGBV strategies currently don't actually address this. And the prevention and response programs, RFAs that are put out by USAID and advocacy, do not address men's issues or the fact that men can be survivors. And they frequently -- when you talk to the advocacy groups, they say, well, you are now asking us to not spend money on women.
And that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that you need to include men in your strategies if you're going to actually address the whole issue. And it's not about taking away resources from women's programs. It's about making sure that even if it's one man in 2 million women, that that man has the right to the same services that everybody else does. And by not including them and, in fact, excluding them, means that you're not allowing that person to have the rights of everybody else. There has also been a lot of emphasis -- emphasis in DRC on the FARDC as the main perpetrators of SGBV or sexual violence. We know now that it is not just the FARDC. We also know that it's a smaller part of the problem, But Dr. Wagner will explain a little more detail and context to this.
We're not excusing them, but we're also saying that the larger piece of the problem are the rebel groups that are out doing these things. And DDR -- for those of you who don't know what DDR is, it's demobilization -- disarming, demobilization, reintegration, and there's another, rehabilitation, which doesn't usually get added. Again, DDR is part of stability operations. If you look back in history, the most successful DDR program that the U.S. has been involved in was the Marshall Plan, making sure that soldiers were disarmed, that combatants were integrated, rehabilitated and put back into communities to create a safe environment.
The U.S. is the largest donor to the U.N. DDR program, but the DDR programs don't address male survivors of sexual violence, and they don't address female combatants who may have been perpetrators of sexual violence, and they largely do not address the mental health issues that occur. It's a very disjointed program that doesn't necessarily have guidelines for how they treat.
And then finally, medical, psychosocial and legal care should address both men and women, boys and girls. Currently, medical care is geared towards violence against women. Next slide.
And if you look at questionnaires, intakes, measures of effectiveness and checklists, they don't really account for male survivors. It's all about making sure that the female survivors are addressed. And training guidelines -- actually, when they're training health-care providers, we're training them to recognize and treat women. We don't necessarily train them to recognize and treat men.
And if you talk to health-care providers, as I have in DRC, and you ask them how comfortable they feel, about 20 percent will say they feel comfortable treating -- identifying and treating female survivors. When you ask them about men, you get blank stares and you hear crickets. So this is not an issue that they have been taught to recognize. And medical care is also not adapted for male survivors. Most of the groups in DRC do not actually ask the sex of the perpetrator. Why is that important? If you were raped -- if you are a male who was raped by a female, that's a different HIV risk and vice versa. So instrumentation is different than penetration. It determines your risk for injury. It also determines your risk for HIV. And so you do have to ask the sex of the perpetrator. Next slide.
Final thoughts. In breaking the cycle of violence, the findings show that the majority of sexual violence is conflict-related. As far as we can tell based on our secondary analysis, it's systematic and widespread by certain groups. Other groups use it as just targets of opportunity, or "it happens." Some of it is just general crimes based in the community, but the largest part of it looks like it is war crimes.
The ICC is starting to establish grounds for further investigation. They do have Bemba in custody now and are looking at ways of using evidence-based data to actually do prosecutions, as opposed to just using witness statements which as, again, can be used -- can be used appropriately or inappropriately.
Prevention strategies and funding have to address rebel groups, not just the FARDC, and this is a very difficult part. This is the group that's falling though. NGOs cannot use USAID money to approach rebel groups. And we found out yesterday through the lawyers here that we don't even have the appropriate authorizations to address rebel groups. So who's going to do it?
We have to come up with other ideas, either training the FARDC, who are an integrated group of rebels that have come back and forth through the FARDC to be able to do the training for the rebel groups to try and prevent this, or we have to come up with something a little more imaginative to be able to do that.
And then finally, ethical research, both qualitative and quantitative. Again, if my data gets thrown out there, it's easy to dismiss, to say, you know, so what, you found women that are perpetrating; I don't understand that, therefore it's invalid. And a lot of times, the qualitative data can also be thrown out and dismissed. But when you put them together, it's harder to dismiss.
So using ethical, qualitative and quantitative data to further define the issues and to come up with prevention and response strategies is a must. And it is actually gaining more ground in our USG partners as well as in the UN, who are coming up with strategies to figure out what the unresearched areas are. However, again, having tried to find money for research over the years, there's no money associated with the WO list -- WHO list, but there's a list. Last slide.
So finally, I would ask, is the east really all okay? We have to move beyond gender synchronization. We have to ask the hard questions and then we have to respond what we find. We can't dismiss it. And we have to come up with much different ways of trying to break this cycle of violence. Thank you. (Applause.)
MICHELE WAGNER (?): Today, I'm going to be talking on some of the research that I did in connection to working as a SCRAT, a sociocultural research and advisory team member in the DRC, for the purpose of developing a curriculum, a program of instruction for sexual and gender-based violence for a Congolese military battalion that we were training in Operation Olympic Chase at Camp Base in Kisangani.
So I just have a picture of Kisangani, where it is. Also, you can see where it is in relation to where Dr. Lawry did her data. Some pictures of Kisangani. I, too, traveled by canoe and that was the main way of traveling in Kisangani to get across the river.
I'm going to be talking -- I'm not giving the presentation that I thought I was originally going to give, which actually focuses on talking with men and developing a program of instruction for a population that was almost exclusively male. There was one female soldier at Camp Base.
But instead, I worked also in several other venues while I was in Kisangani. Not only did I work at the base where the U.S. was training Congolese soldiers, Camp Base, but I also worked in a rehabilitation camp across the river called Camp Likusu (ph) where there was a large number of women soldiers. In that case, they were women, ex-rebel, not quite integrated, so women combatants who are waiting integration into the FARDC.
I also worked with the 9th Brigade. I worked with female soldiers there who did a sexual and gender-based training and sensitization. And then they put together, based on their own experiences, a play about sexual and gender-based violence in order to teach the legal dimensions, because many Congolese soldiers had not had a lot of familiarity with law and points of law. It was decided by the women themselves that the best way to think about this and to be able to communicate it would be in a play.
So we actually did brainstorming sessions where we talked about all the different forms of sexual and gender-based violence. The women discussed each form and discussed their own familiarity and which forms they found were the most widespread, with sexual slavery being one of those forms. Actually, it was the second most widespread, and just rape in general being the first. And they put together a play, which was then enacted at Camp Base.
So it was part of the training. It was kind of a lab outside of the classroom in which soldiers could talk more and think more about the legal dimensions. But also put that in the perspective of actually -- scenes that the female soldiers had encountered. They kind of developed those scenes with a storyline and put them together into a play. But they were based on actual experiences and realistic brainstorming that came from the actors.
So I worked in three different venues, and most of my work, then, concentrated on Camp Base and the male population there. But to talk with Dr. Lawry, I decided to add some of the other work that I did. So this is a kind of contextualization of some of the facts that she gave you in soldiers' voices, giving you a sense about how people are talking about it and what people are saying, how they're speaking to it or almost to it so that we can talk about how qualitative data touches upon it, but needs to touch upon it more.
So let's see. The assumption that I made when I started my research were -- I made four different assumptions. Dr. Lawry's data actually wasn't published yet, so we talked together on the phone.
And I was also familiar with male rape in military contexts because I work as an expert witness in the U.S. And I've had the Rwandan examples of that and also dealt with trying to get a male to testify about being raped when he didn't have a mental category for that. He didn't have a way to talk about it, because it was against everything that he thought rape was. And so he had a really hard time even articulating what had happened to him, aside from just talking about details by kind of going in a trance almost and sort of talking about what he was feeling, what he was seeing at the time, and not actually being able to talk in mental categories about it.
So the assumptions that I worked with when I went to do my research -- one is that rape is about power. Many people feel that rape is primarily about sex. And a lot of the discourse of soldiers was about that. Rape has a sexual dimension, of course, but rape -- why it's committed is often about power.
And because I was dealing with soldiers, people who in Congolese society were armed, they had power. They were males, and in Congolese society males are seen to have a certain amount of social power. I talked to the soldiers, especially at cafes, at length about what power means. What is power? What is powerlessness? What is a male? What is a soldier? What is a civilian? To sort of get them to lay out a conceptual territory and also the vocabulary for talking about this.
Because of Dr. Lawry's study, I knew that the conventional vocabulary and the conventional way of framing questions needed to be modified and opened so that I wasn't actually imposing any kind of paradigm on questions that I was asking.
I also knew from the political asylum cases that often men didn't have a way, exactly, of talking about rape that occurred to themselves. So I interviewed people in an open-ended way that just talked about their life experiences. We talked a lot about their experiences as soldiers, what they saw, what they heard, different days that they remembered. We talked in general with them, giving me the categories about power, especially because I needed to collect this vocabulary, because I was developing teaching and I wanted to be sure that I was hearing the terminology, hearing the mental framework, and that that was reflected in the teaching so that it would be relevant to the people who were being taught.
We were doing the teaching in Lingala and Kiswahili, especially in Lingala. So getting that laid out and also getting the nuances -- in Lingala, what's the conceptual feel for a certain term for sexual violence? In Swahili, what is it? Because they're not exactly the same. So laying all that out became a major part of what I was doing.
So I assumed that rape was about power, and we talked about power. Also, rape is about the rapist in many cases. Whereas before it was thought to be about an under -- older ideas about rape, that women were asking for it -- rape was thought to be more about the victim, or the survivor. But studies in the U.S. have shown that rape is about what the rapist is feeling, what the rapist needs, what the rapist is trying to act out.
And so I needed to talk to men about their feelings about themselves, how they saw themselves as men. What is a "full man" as opposed to a "not full man"? In their own societies -- because they came from many different cultures -- the group of soldiers that the U.S. was training at Camp Base was actually the result of mixage. And they came from many different militias, as well as the Congolese army for at least a generation.
So they came from many different cultures and many different languages. So getting them to talk in their own cultures about how do you talk about a man? And were there proverbs for teaching men about what is a full man, what is an adult man? And when you're a man, what kind of responsibility do you have in terms of handling power?
We used proverbs a lot. We used songs. We used all kinds of sayings. We used jokes as a way to try to just lay it out and start picking up those nuances with them generating it along. Also, because of Dr. Lawry's research, I assumed that the interviewees were likely to be, possibly, both a survivor and a perpetrator -- both, or either/or. So I had to be sensitive to the fact that I was talking about -- to people who had been on either side of the equation. I had to be nonjudgmental, very open, very understated, and not actually directly approach the question, and instead created a kind of semantic feel and a conceptual feel that made people comfortable to be able to speak but not actually ask them the question -- instead create a context in which they could add things if they wanted to.
Then I also understood that the lived experience of interviewees might not coincide with the gendered ideas about sexual violence. Because of that, I was very careful not to use the usual words, because I thought maybe they had a different way of talking about it. So I didn't actually frame questions. Instead I created a field for study -- a field for talk and let them sort of bring me into it.
So I want to talk a little bit about who is -- who are the FARDC, and then some of the experiences of various FARDC soldiers.
The current Congolese National Army is the outcome of two wars, a peace process and a post-war process of assimilating rebels into the national army. This army includes people from different generations of military. It includes people who were -- came from the era of President Mobutu -- that is the era from 1965 to 1997 -- who have a certain definition of what a soldier is and what a military is. It also included people who came from the generation of 1996-97 -- the first war in Congo. This was a war in which Rwanda supported Congolese rebels -- together with elements of the Rwandan army, conducted a campaign inside of Congo that had two objectives. One was to pursue members of the former Rwandan government, military and militias who had been living inside of Congo as refugees. And, as reports are coming out, many of these people were killed in 1996-97. In fact, there were enormous massacres.
Another reason for that war of '96-97 was to challenge the Mobutu government, which at that time was beginning to crumble and actually challenge state power. In that generation, we had people who became combatants by -- voluntarily or by force. So we had people with very, very different experiences of being a combatant and different experiences that were very different from the previous generation.
Also in the FARDC, in Camp Base, we had people who had become combatants for the Second Congolese War, which was from 1998 to 2003. We had people in that war who had become combatants voluntarily or by force, and they had very different experiences. As well in the FARDC soldiers in Camp Base, we had people who had become combatants voluntarily or by force after 2003 or had been involved in the post-2003 conflict and were just being integrated now as former rebels.
So we had people whose experiences as soldiers, their experiences of what a military is, what a war is, came from very different generations and different kinds of conflicts. All of these were represented in the battalion of Olympic Chase. The older members of the battalion -- the ones who joined in the Mobutu era -- described the military as something to be proud of. The Congolese military was one of the preeminent militaries in Africa from their point of view, and in fact the Congolese military had trained other militaries, including Angola. Now Angola trains the Congolese military.
The officers and troops who had joined in that initial era -- during the Mobutu era -- recall having primarily joined voluntarily. They were attracted by the modernity of the army, the fact that it had tanks and helicopters and planes. They saw the military as a secure job. They saw that it had housing and other benefits that their families could benefit from. They saw it as a place that had educational opportunity, and many joined, actually, for the opportunity to study aviation and aerospace. And many aspired to be pilots.
However, by the end of the Mobutu era -- by 1990 -- the actual experience of military personnel from the Mobutu generation did not jive with their aspirations and was beginning to change. The end of the Cold War had led to a cut in funding as Mobutu became more disposable. And as his economic aid diminished, so did the resources available to his army. So one of the Camp Base residents who came from that era talked about the end of his experience in the Mobutu army as one that was based on pot-smoking and banditry. And he actually defected.
Importantly, though, the people from that generation, even from the late 1990s, as the military began to slide, do not talk about sexual and gender-based violence as a major part of their experience. They're very, very clear on this, that the upsurge in sexual and gender-based violence came later in the decade and wasn't there as a baseline by 1990.
In Camp Base, FARDC personnel of the generation of soldiers that came in between 1996 and 1997 -- that first war, the war against Mobutu -- are divided between those who were forcibly recruited and those who actually joined voluntarily with the goal of ousting the dictator. And they had very different ideas about themselves depending on how they came into the army. In general, that group is called the kadogo group -- the "child soldiers." "Kadogo" is a word that's Swahili and was used a lot in Rwanda for child soldiers because many of them were young people who were involved in that campaign.
Interviews, then, with the people in that kadogo generation divide between those who see themselves as liberators and who identify with that -- many of whom are in the current military and hold positions of power -- and people -- and this relates to Dr. Lawry's study -- people who managed to cross back into civilian society. People who now pass as civilians don't identify with the military, have put their status as combatants behind them, and appear to be and present themselves and work to keep the image of being civilians.
This is why this issue of ex-combatant -- it's an actual category in society that even the people who would fall in that category often play a major role in making it invisible.
So one such person I talked to is a civilian working for a tech company. In his final year of high school, in late 1996, he became a combatant.
Question: How were you recruited?
Response: "I was not recruited. They came with a big truck. They forced us into the truck and took us to the forest. I was 17 years old and my little brother was 15 years old."
What happened then?
"After a while I escaped, but my younger brother did not escape. I managed to return home. But when I got there, everybody was gone. I didn't know where my parents were, and after a few days I found out that my parents had been killed. So then I decided to go back to the army and get revenge.
"This time I was recruited. They promised me money. At that time, the kids were fleeing to the forest to join the army. They were received in the forest by the rebels and given guns. This time I was in training deep in the forest. I was training with the army. But I got sick. I became very sick. And there in the forest I thought I would die. There was no one to take care of me.
"So I decided to escape again. And I tried to escape, but I didn't succeed. I was afraid of being caught and executed. After four months of training we were at Matadi. There I found my brother again.
"One day we were told to wait for a truck that would take us to a camp. Then I lost my brother in the crowd. I assumed that he had run away, so I decided to go look for my brother. I walked far, to the next big town. And when I got to that town I met a Rwandan commander. He told me that since I had been given training, he wanted me to now be his bodyguard."
Question: At this time, what kinds of experiences did you have?
"We were given orders to execute everybody every time we entered a village. This was because the commander told us that we wouldn't be able to differentiate who was friendly to us and who wasn't.
"I also saw girls being raped and killed. I saw women being raped in groups while their husbands were tied up, forced to watch and killed afterwards. I was sick of watching all this.
"And around this time I heard that my brother had been seen in a certain town. I escaped to try to find him, but I never found my brother. Then I went back to my hometown. I spent five months in hiding because I knew that if I was caught I would be brought back to the forest and executed.
"Now I'm a civilian and nobody knows what happened to me."
Through this conversation, the person was crying constantly throughout the entire conversation. And he was adamant that he needed to be passed off as a civilian and that people shouldn't know his ex-combatant background.
So this sort of -- I chose this to kind of illustrate how the fuzzy the line is between civilian and combatant when you have a whole category of people who are ex-combatants but not veterans, and how we don't have a category to be able to address this and how even ex-combatants themselves want to protect their identity and not necessarily be seen this way.
DR. LAWRY: We also don't have a funding authorization to deal with that category.
DR. WAGNER: Exactly.
I also talked to a female combatant whose entrance into the army also dates from this era. And I'm going to be giving you a lot of quotes from female combatants about why they joined the military.
"I went into the military because my entire family was massacred. All my family died in 1997. So I went in to defend my town. I saw people being kidnapped. I saw babies being raped and killed. I saw people being treated like animals."
So people of that 1996-to-'97 generation have a very different experience than those of the earlier generation. And as the war shifts again in these patterns, we still need to be able to track it down. And we need to lay them out more carefully with more research.
It shifts into the Second Congo War of 1998, where the rebel commander who ousted Mobutu, named Laurent Kabila, had a falling out with his backers, who then actually fought against him -- Rwandan and Ugandan military and militias supported by them.
Congolese soldiers call the first war -- the 1996-'97 war -- the "war of liberation." And I had to get this vocabulary. But most of the people I interviewed talked about the second war. They called it the Rwandan war because Rwandans and Rwandan-backed rebels played a prominent role.
This war was about seizing and controlling territory. It had a very, very different intent. And so it had a very different way of unfolding. It was about seizing territory in order to control lucrative resources, especially mines. In this war, it polarized ethnicity and mobilized ethnicity to create ties between Congolese of certain ethnicities and their external backers, using ethnicity as a tie to cross over the fact that they were different nationalities. At this point, sexual violence changes because ethnicity is becoming a major factor in people's identity. And internal Congo-to-Congo fighting increases and becomes much more violent and intense.
So it was at this time that many of the people I interviewed, asking them in their lives, how did they see the pattern of sexual- and gender-based violence? This is the time when they say it increased. And the soldiers from this era have a much harder time talking about it. But they're much more intense about the way that they talked, in general.
So a female officer who I met in the rebel camp explained a little bit about how she enlisted at the war at this time: "I enlisted in the army in 1998 when the RCD" -- that was the rebel-backed -- the Rwandan-backed rebels -- "came. The RCD took us out of Rwanda. I wasn't happy there, so I went back to my village. In the village, we all fought together. There were also many Hutus who were hiding in our village. The Tutsi came and attacked" -- she's using ethnic terms, now. She's not using military, she's not naming army, she's not talking about nationalities. She's not using political groups as much as she's talking ethnically. So: "The Tutsi came and attacked our village and killed all the adults. After that, they killed the children. Because of what happened, I enlisted. And this is how I ended up in the army."
This particular commander -- for the report that I wrote, there is an entire section; it explains why rape is an effective military weapon. This female commander is the source for those. She was a strong advocate for the effectiveness of rape as a weapon of war, and talked about it a great deal. In fact, she talked much more about it and much more openly than men.
Another female rebel from that same area explained: "I joined in 1998 because my brother and my father were forced and killed." This talking about "forced" is a kind of indirect way leading to something. I kept hearing about "forced." But because in many cases people were crying, I just let the person control the vocabulary, and felt that I would come back and do deeper interviews.
A third female rebel said, "I enlisted in 2002. They killed my brothers, and my sister was dismembered. I enlisted to avenge my family." Another female rebel said, "I enlisted in 2002. I'm from Ituri. The region of Ituri experienced a lot of tribalism then and a lot of people were killed. People killed each other. They burned my village. This made me furious. I was disgusted about what Rwandan Tutsis were doing, so I enlisted to protect my people."
Again, people were using ethnic terms there and it was very, very different from the way that people from earlier generations were talking about opponents and war. A female Mai-Mai sergeant said, "I was a Mai-Mai in Shabunda. What happened is that my husband was killed and the Mai-Mai forced me to replace him in order to protect my children." So this also jibes with the point that Dr. Lawry was making about family members being used as hostages in order to make people be recruited.
Also, forcible recruitment of females: Many of the women that I talk with actually voluntarily recruited -- or enlisted, and they actually did it, many of them, to talk in discussions about revenge, to avenge family members, to avenge things that they saw. In this case, we have Mai-Mai who were forcibly recruited people, which comes to a point that Lynn also makes sometimes about patterns of sexual violence for Mai-Mai as being different than in other militias.
DR. LAWRY: So if you look at the Mai-Mai, the Mai-Mai have a large portion of female commanders and then they have male commanders. And one of the things that I was curious about was to go back and figure out why the Mai-Mai had this separate pattern that I had documented quantitatively.
I met with a very high-ranking Mai-Mai general very quietly who had been integrated into the FARDC, and in our interview, he told me that because of the traditional beliefs of the Mai-Mai, that men who have sex have to go through a three-day cleansing routine or ritual after sex, which means that if half your battalion has had sex, they're not able to be used in any type of warfighting for three days.
So what they did was to recruit females, who don't have that traditional or cultural nuance, who can do the fighting and the raping and the sexual violence while the men are being cleansed or aren't involved in this, so that they can continue other types of acts when they're working.
Now, the interesting thing about this interview is that halfway through the interview, he says, you look familiar. And I said, can't be. I'm like any other aid worker in the West; you've probably seen a lot of us here. And when I went back to my desk in D.C., there is a picture of me in 1994 on the border of Rwanda and Zaire, and in that photo is that Mai-Mai general. So to think that you're invisible or not noticed is not the case.
But he was very open with me about this issue, about using women for perpetrating sexual violence versus males.
DR. WAGNER: When I was interviewing camp-based soldiers, I asked a person who had been a Mai-Mai -- I was asking him for reasons why men shouldn't rape women or like what he would say as a commander. He immediately said, because it takes away a man's energy and makes him unable to fight.
So some of these pieces start to kind of float around and come together. Right now, they're just pieces, especially because I was conducting my research for something entirely differently and Dr. Lawry's research hadn't come out yet. And yet we find ourselves able to have conversations on the basis of how people talked about this.
So the soldiers and -- actually the majority of camp-based soldiers, I think, joined during the war. Their definitions of themselves as soldiers, their ideas about combat, their ideas about who is a combatant and who is a noncombatant -- many of these ideas were formulated in this experience and it's different, again, from other generations. The reason that I'm emphasizing this is because often here at AFRICOM, we'll talk about the FARDC as one thing. But we need to be able to see FARDC people by gender, by generation, by experience. We need to actually see within it people --
DR. LAWRY: By rebel group.
DR. WAGNER: -- and by rebel group and not just kind of deal with it as an army, like that, that's kind of faceless -- one thing -- and generalize about it. We need to see the people inside of it and what their experiences are.
So this war officially ended in 2003 with a negotiated settlement, and the settlement called for an internationally supported process for disarming soldiers, demobilizing them and resettling them, or what you've talked about as DDR.
Or the other option would be to mix them into the Congolese army. So the battalion that the U.S. was training was a mixed battalion and the rehabilitation camp where I worked was a camp where people were waiting to be given a rank and formally entered into the Congolese army. They were sort of there wearing uniforms with no rank. Many of them had been actually rebel commanders. They were the harder ones to incorporate, and they were just there, unpaid and waiting to be incorporated somehow.
So this DDR process and this mixage process has been extremely difficult, and there are lots of reasons for that. The process has gone through -- when we talk about it, we sort of just talk about it as a process. We'll say, okay, it hasn't gone smoothly. But when you talk about it with soldiers and they personalize what hasn't gone smoothly, there are all sorts of different reasons.
For one thing, government soldiers have found it very difficult to demobilize. The majority of camp-based soldiers interviewed said that demobilization was not accessible to them. They said that they joined the army with no contract -- they just joined, either by force or voluntarily in a war -- and there was no way out of the army.
The camp-based soldiers were insistent and emphatic on this point, because it was something that I didn't believe and I kept asking many different people over and over. They emphasized that the only way to demobilize was to desert. So for many of them, they had been in the military for years without being paid, and they were soldiers at Camp Base who were not yet part of the system and weren't being paid. Also they were being barely paid: The amount that they were being paid would not cover the expenses for tuition for children in elementary school if you had more than two children, and wouldn't cover paying for children in school as well as medical expenses as well as food for a small family.
They saw themselves as being held in a situation where they were being forced and not allowed out, in a situation that was akin to slavery. They saw themselves as being held with no way out and with no control over their circumstances. They saw themselves as being unpaid or receiving a salary so low that it wasn't sustainable for their family, and they were extremely angry.
The rage of soldiers, the sense of emasculation that they were not allowed as men to provide for a family -- and for so many men, that was the definition of being a full man, having the ability to provide for a family -- the sense of emasculation that they felt from this system became a central theme of most interviews, and men would actually go into tears about how they felt emasculated, how they felt like they had nothing to say to their families, that they weren't worth anything. I'll go into that.
To give you a kind of quote about not being able to leave, here is a discussion from a soldier. "When I joined, it was the RCD against Congo. I hated all that because most killing was done between us Congolese. The Rwandans were using us. That is why I hate them so much. I also hate the fact that all countries came here to destroy our Congo and sell our way of life."
Besides serving as a soldier, what other jobs have you done in the army?
Response: "I've never had a chance to do anything other than shooting. I would love to get an education or learn something else in case I ever leave the military."
Question: Do you see yourself leaving and becoming a civilian?
Response: "In the army, we don't have a contract. There is no way out. So I see myself as serving as long as I live."
And consistent with Dr. Lawry's findings, many people talked about suicide. It was like a kind of joke that was there all the time.
Also, in Camp Base, there was either actual -- I think both actual and imagined poisoning going on, because there were people who had formerly served against each other who were now living together, and there was a lot of suspicion, a lot of hatred. And this was being experienced by people as poisoning, with people who were even tentmates accusing each other of having poisoned each other.
And there was a traditional doctor in town who was receiving the soldiers and charging them in dollars when they didn't really have dollars to charge. So this was an ongoing background theme at Camp Base, this issue of who's being poisoned. And it led many people who were already depressed to talk to me as if they were talking from a position of dying. So I'd have these interviews with people where they'd say, I just need to say these things, because I could die. At first, I felt like I could be manipulated, like this was a manipulation. But as it went on and on and people were actually getting thinner and thinner, I could see that whatever was going on, they were feeling it, and that this was real.
So even without problems in the formal demobilization process, the problem of not being able to demobilize, return and reconnection with families and lives after the war was very difficult for combatants. And I'm going to be talking a bit about the soldiers at Camp Base. For some combatants, their family and community had been so destroyed by the war that their connection to their former identity had been lost.
As one woman in Camp Likusu said at the rehabilitation camp, "My family had died, and after what I saw, I never wanted to go home again." So in a sense, she was mourning her social death of who she had been before.
A former member of the national army who had been captured by and had joined a rebel movement said, "I was away for 6 six years. I lived in the bush. I had a different name. No one had heard from me. When the war ended, I came out of the forest, but I had nothing. I just had a life. I still have nothing. Why would my family want to see me? I have nothing to bring them. I have a son, but what is there for me to take to him? Nothing. I'm a nobody." And he said that he doesn't communicate with his son.
A female former rebel said, "We're just living on hope. But I have never received anything from the military. Everything I do is just to survive. When I was fighting for the RCD, I got 5,000 francs, but now I get nothing and it's hard to explain what I have to do to survive."
I'm going to talk just a little bit more about this. Another former rebel said -- and this is a woman -- "From 2002, I was a commandant for the Mai-Mai youth group. I found that we were more organized than the government is. I can say that every soldier for the government is unemployed. We are not able to eat; we are not able to take our children to school or to afford anything. We are just surviving."
And then another female former rebel added, "We live by the grace of God alone. I have never been paid. As far as being women, we are forced by circumstances to do bad things. I want to make it clear: What it is, is prostitution. We can't hide this fact. In stories, it is said that if you are hurt and have a big wound, the only way you can cure it is to see a doctor and expose it. Women too have a big wound and we need to open up and expose our situation, even if it's a shame."
So some of these interviews -- and the point that I want to make today is that from what I found in conducting interviews in Kisangani, DRC, is that the more that soldiers spoke, the more the simple generalizations about the FARDC being one thing, the gender generalizations that we make -- the more that they spoke about their lives, the more it became a blur.
And as my written report shows, a very strong case was made for the effectiveness of using rape against women as a weapon of war by women combatants, actually. A female rebel officer asserted that the very importance of women as the psychological center of the family and household make rape an especially efficient weapon. Rape can paralyze a household, which is the basic unit of production, and it can demoralize all the members of a family.
The commander also insisted that because women fill a wide spectrum of roles in war, going from reconnaissance agents to spies to bankers to logisticians, that the active roles that women make -- and play make them legitimate targets of war. The commander herself gave herself as an example. "I was in charge of logistics. I sold gold to find out about the enemy. We sold things in the enemy territory to find out about their tactics. Sometimes we slept with them to know about their strategy."
So rape is a weapon of war, but combatants must be willing to wield it. The conversations with both soldiers and former rebels revealed that they conflated combatant with anyone who they suspected of not supporting them. And for them, no one is neutral in a civil war. So everyone was -- either on their side or on the other side -- was naturally, then, a noncombatant on their side, or a combatant, no matter what their status was, if they weren't.
But why rape? Some former rebels explained that rape is a humane alternative to killing. Like a minefield, also, rape keeps threats alive and continuously present in the community. Rape makes the destruction last over a longer period, and this is preferable as a weapon and especially as a weapon of revenge.
As soldiers expressed it in interview after interview, they themselves felt so constrained and disempowered and humiliated -- they felt that they had been sacrificed by being in the military -- that they emphasized that rape was their revenge, that rape was a form of establishing power and domination.
So I know that I'm kind of going over time so I need to sort of bring this to an end. But what I've tried to show is nuances in how soldiers are speaking that connect to the points that Dr. Lawry was making. I'm trying to also show that the nuances about sex, even what constitutes rape, in the context of banalized sex, where survival sex is going on, and where sex is being used as a tactic in war, starts to blur all kinds of lines for the soldiers.
So when we were teaching in the POI about why not to commit rape, even about soldiers and civilians, combatants and noncombatants, there was an inability for people to agree on any of these categories based on their generation and based on their experiences. Because of that, something like a PowerPoint presentation where you just present the category and say, this is this, this is that, don't do it, wasn't something that would work with soldiers because they didn't agree. Based on their own experiences, they didn't agree.
So I designed the training as a kind of conversation that took place among soldiers, where one would be a facilitator but the class was -- instead of, like, me explaining and teaching unto them, it was bringing up these domains in a way that was structured and getting people to talk to each other. This was important because later people would need to talk to each other if they were in a situation -- in a context in which rape or combat-related sexual violence might occur, so it was important to get the conversation out and, instead of giving, feeding absolute categories, to bring up these categories, the words, the discussions, the values from people who had served together. So that was the kind of focus of the training.
Anyway, what our presentation does today is talk about knowledge: the ways that, at AFRICOM, we often talk that we know about the FARDC. We have certain statistics for them; we generalize; but we don't always see -- we don't see people and their experiences and their complexity, their generations, their interests. So this is something -- a different kind of knowledge that's very, very important to bring out and put on the table at AFRICOM.
Also, Dr. Lawry has taken what we have as generally accepted knowledge and norms, and simply by asking questions -- the question of the gender of the perpetrator -- she's actually broken through and created entirely new kinds of knowledge.
So because I work with knowledge development, I'm going to put in a plug for -- this is what we're trying to do here. We hope that this is valuable at AFRICOM. And we need to be able to do these studies to understand more so that we're not just recycling knowledge from other wars but we're actually tailoring it to deal with the exact -- the people, the environments that we're encountering now.
So thank you. (Applause.)
MR. : I think what we'd like to do now is open this up to discussion. For those of you who are listening in on VCO and for those here at the table, please remember to key your mics so that we can all hear the conversation. And I think now we'd like to open it up for questioning and answering of the panel members. Thank you.
Q: I -- I'm curious about something. And thank you. This was very informative and I appreciate it very much. When you were talking about this in a conflict context, I'm curious as to the degree to which non-conflict situations and the values of community and society norms versus criminality or aberrant behavior may apply here.
When Michele was talking in this last period and recounting the views of her interviewees, it was clear that they were somehow conflicted on their own sets of values versus the behaviors that they were compelled to perform as soldiers. Did you, in your interviews or in your observations, note that there was a similar kind of crisis of conscience even among civilians, or that the normal patterns of values that hold societies and families together were breaking down -- even in households that were not necessarily -- (inaudible)?
DR. LAWRY: I can answer a little bit about that. We didn't do a lot of interviews about values and concept, but we did do some quantitative data that looked at how families were functioning. And although the data's not completely analyzed, there are breakdowns, from what I know, from 10, 15, 20 years ago of how that society functioned -- that the family members aren't eating together. They aren't talking together. There are family members who are distressed that remain solitary and not able to do their activities of daily living.
So I think the war has broken down the family bonds, as well as the community bonds, the ethnic bonds, and those type of things that have happened. And this, of course, then just feeds into repeated and constant violence.
Q: I'd like to ask a question about a theme that Dr. Wagner brought up with the circumspect language and conversation of some of the respondents. They talked about the men being forced, but they never finished that statement. They never completed. They were alluding to things; they were distraught. But they never finished that. And I was wondering if you were ever to complete that cycle of research and figure out exactly what they were referring to.
DR. WAGNER: Yes. I was expecting that I would continue the research. And I'm hoping to.
DR. LAWRY: And in the -- in the quantitative research, we actually asked the question directly. A qualitative researcher tends to say, how do you feel? -- leaves it more open -- whereas a quantitative researcher goes in and says, have you ever suffered any of the following? Yes or no? Or they can either not respond.
And because we do our interviews one on one in a very private setting, we didn't have problems getting men to say that they had actually suffered sexual violence. So in the way that we present it, where they don't have to describe it, they just have to say yes or no, we got answers -- versus one on one and saying, describe what happened to you, which is a different -- it's more confrontational, or actually more in their face, and requires them to then go back to that time period to describe what happened.
Q: Let me also reiterate our appreciation for --
Q: Good morning -- (inaudible) -- must be painful. Could you please expand on the numbers? How is it possible that 40 percent of the gender-based violence is perpetrated by women, yet many units only had one woman in the unit? (Off mic.)
DR. LAWRY: It's 40 percent of women -- 40 percent of the sexual violence was perpetrated by women among women, and 15 percent among men. Again, we don't actually know the numbers of women in many of these rebel tribes. So the FDRL (sic), the UPC and the Mai-Mai have more than just one woman in their units. They have quite a few.
MR. : We need a moderator --
MR. : Dr. Holmes (sp) has a question, please.
MR. : All right -- forget the doctor. (Laughter.)
Q: First, let me thank you very much. Extremely interesting, thought-provoking, sobering. I guess what I'm trying to get my mind around in listening to you and the combination of your quantitative and qualitative information, data, is, what are the implications of this for us at AFRICOM, both within Congo but also more broadly? I mean, since -- for about the past three months, General Ward -- who unfortunately couldn't make it to this -- has clearly designed and has begun to formulate an instruction to us that we are going to mainstream -- for lack of a better term -- the lessons of this into our engagements with African militaries.
And he has likened it to the way we train American -- you know, the way the services train American soldiers, sailors and Marines to be conscious of safety: It's not something you think about, it's just the way you behave -- and that we will inculcate this through our engagements into the African militaries we deal with.
I think a -- perhaps a somewhat closer-to-the-mark comparison might be the way we have begun recently -- for -- in the same time frame you've been looking at -- to include modules compelled by the U.S. Congress on the role of militaries in democracies and an understanding of and appreciation of human rights and the responsibilities on militaries that those ideas, those concepts confer.
But when you get into such tightly focused, limited -- I mean, a mile deep, but not very wide, experience and conclusions and knowledge about one area of one country that is unique, even though there are similar situations in probably another dozen countries in Africa -- you've mentioned Liberia a couple times, but, you know, going back to the civil wars in Angola and Mozambique that began in the mid-'70s, and you know, what we have in the Sudan today, Darfur -- that, you know, people are relatively familiar with.
How can we take this knowledge and use it in an effective way that doesn't, by default, commit these sins of extrapolation that Dr. Lawry mentioned right from the beginning of her presentation, but can do so in an effective way that does succeed in what the general wants to do, and what, clearly, the U.S. government -- whether it's Hillary Clinton in the present administration or Condoleezza Rice in the -- and Jendayi Frazier in the previous administration, or whoever it is in the future -- this is not likely to change.
I mean, I do really believe it's akin to democracy and human rights, and central to our approach in dealing on a mil-mil basis and, more broadly, on a U.S. government bilateral policy basis with Africa. But how can we get it right? How can we not offend? How can we not transgress? How can we be meaningful with the knowledge that you've recognized in your caveats about this -- (off mic).
DR. LAWRY: Thank you very much for that question. So I actually see this as a whole-of-command piece. It's not just medical; it's not just gender awareness; it's not just security. Gender-based violence or sexual violence in Congo is a complex area. It will take prevention and response strategies.
Now, understanding that AFRICOM by authority can only do mil-to-mil engagement means that that focus has to be mil-to-mil. So it means working with the FARDC. Now, one huge gap -- and I'm not sure how to fix this, but I think AFRICOM may have to work with this -- is how to deal with the fact that the majority of the sexual violence is being perpetrated by rebel groups.
So how do you do awareness with the rebel groups? Do you take the integrated FARDC-Mai-Mai-FDRL-(sic)-UPC-Interahamwe and train those leaders to then go out to the previous rebel groups and do the training there? I don't know. I don't know what that answer is.
I mean, one of the things that Dr. Wagner and I are going to do is to meet with the lawyers today to say, this is a gap. USAID can't deal with it. State Department can deal with it but doesn't have the capacity to actually be on the ground to do that type of awareness. AFRICOM is poised to be able to do that, given the military status. But how do we do it legally? So that's one way.
We had an interesting conversation with the chaplain yesterday, Chaplain Barnes (sp), who said that one of the things that they do is to be there for people who want to talk. Now, we know in DRC that the religious leaders are actually the first response, are the first place that some of the survivors will go. What they aren't doing, though, is saying, go to medical care. Because within -- if you get some of these survivors to medical care within 72 hours, you can decrease the risk of transmission of HIV by implementing emergency prophylaxis. But if it isn't done within 72 hours, it's less likely to help.
So being able to have medical work with the chaplains, to work with planners, to work with everybody else to sort of understand that there are ways to work prevention and response, but all work together, is a great way of doing that. Coming up with a strategy of how AFRICOM is going to deal with gender-based violence or gender issues throughout all of their programs, that's another way to do it.
These are just personal opinion, but I think these are things that now that it's up on the table and I've upset all the apple carts in D.C. with the fact that women are also perpetrators -- thanks to the money that AFRICOM gave, you're now the ones who -- (chuckles) -- can take credit for that and say, okay, we need to start changing paradigms.
Q: Okay. But how can you use the knowledge you've generated in eastern Congo and apply that to a broad range of engagements across the entire continent?
DR. LAWRY: You can't use this data to say that it's the same in Angola. You can continue the research. You can say, we know that Congo has these issues, and we need to support other research efforts to define the problem both quantitative and qualitatively in each country. Because each country is different.
Q: Permit me, if I may, to answer a little bit of that, Ambassador Holmes (sp). I'm Diana Putman. I'm in SPP. And thanks to General Ward's interest in this topic, the command has now created a gender working group. And we've sort of been instructed essentially to look at the topic of gender as foundational to what the command does.
And this is important because we are actually slightly ahead of the curve in terms of the requests coming out of the National Security Council now for the United States government to put together a national action plan looking at gender issues and peace and security.
So the sex- and gender-based violence work is one part of it. I think what we are beginning to understand is that our old paradigms, that you take a PowerPoint, you add ACOTA [State Department's Africa Contingency Operations Training and Assistance program], train key peacekeepers, for, you know, 10 minutes on SGBV and prevention of SGVB, doesn't work anymore. We've begun to understand the complexity and subtleties of this.
And so therefore, what the United States government is looking at more broadly is looking at a range of gender issues within the context of AFRICOM's role of professionalizing African militaries. We have a continuum of working with well-organized militaries that -- where this is not a problem for the militaries, they're not in conflict, and they're not teaming with rebel groups.
We will take one approach when we work with those militaries, because we don't have to talk about SGBV too much for them, for instance, other than reiterating some of what we already know. In other, weaker militaries where this is a problem, we'll need to take another approach.
What we're doing right now is laying forth a plan of action that allows us to take a number of activities we've already been doing in the command -- for instance, Colonel McSally's (sp) work and outreach's work on how do you mainstream women better in militaries, to the work we've been doing with Olympic Chase and laying out a sort of time-sensitive program of work that allows us to build on that and also fit into what the broader U.S. strategy is doing.
So the working group that we've got is bringing people in from a range of different directorates. And what we would like to do using this forum today is to tell anyone who's sort of listening in, if this is the topic that you're already working on or you're interested in contributing to, to please get in touch with me, because we'll be having not only the main working group but sub-working groups for elements of this.
MR. : If we could, we have a question from the VCO chat room. The question is: "What is the United States government's current support to reducing SGBV in the DRC with regards to both prevention and response? And in your opinion, what role does or should U.S. AFRICOM have as the DOD component?"
DR. LAWRY: So the amount of money that has currently been spent on SGBV prevention and response is more than $53 million. For -- that's only from the USG. Now, one has to look at that and say, what have we done for $53 million? And again, we have not been able to break that cycle of violence with that amount.
I think we sort of answered that second part with Diana's question, so I won't go into -- further with that.
Q: Yeah, I had a question. Chris Urban (sp), knowledge development division. And thank you both very much. It was very enlightening. The biggest question and concern I have, though, with all the work that we're doing and the things you're uncovering is, what's the government of DRC doing? I mean, it seems to me that however much effort we put, if they don't put at least the same amount of effort, it's doomed to failure. Can you talk about that in your research -- what you saw in terms of support or what they're doing, what kind of programs they're putting into place?
DR. LAWRY: They do have -- you know, it's -- when I started this study, there was no national strategic plan for addressing gender-based violence. After a few months of starting to do the paperwork for the study, all of a sudden the SGBV plan was written and signed off by the ministers. Now, I know from talking to the U.N. and those who are sort of working on that through getting it signed that it was quite, you know, a sort of, come here, here's the pen, let me put your hand on the line to sign this. I think that they're overwhelmed by what that means.
And if you compare -- and I actually did this, was to take the U.N. documents, the USAID documents and the national strategies and put them side by side, the national strategy leaves out a few things that the rest of the world may have thought was important to put in.
Now, it's new. It was only signed in November of 2009, so it's brand new. And the working groups that they're trying to put together, which includes U.N., government and NGOs -- as everything goes in DRC, it's always slow. Meetings are made, canceled, made, canceled, made, canceled. But it is a start, I think, because there are many other countries in Africa that don't have a strategy to actually address gender-based violence.
So as we do in the NGO world, it's baby steps.
Q: Thank you.
Q: (Off-mic.)
DR. LAWRY: Go ahead. I don't --
Q: We should probably have our colleague here, Colonel Myberg (ph), talk about it. But actually, the government of the Netherlands is funding work directly with the Congolese military on the prevention of sex- and gender-based violence out in eastern DRC. And it's excellent work, working with the international NGO Search for Common Ground. And it is the kind of groundbreaking work that we may want to partner with them. And it's an excellent opportunity, for instance, to (commit ?) to partner with an ally.
MR. : Yes, ma'am.
Q: I had a question. Well, I -- I've got a question about -- a little bit deeper dive about the training and integrating it with -- Ms. Putman and Ambassador Holmes (sp) were talking about -- we're in charge of creating and sustaining logistics-training programs, and not just because our funding stream tells us we have to, but because it's very important.
We include a module on SGBV. Perhaps it's 10 minutes, like -- (inaudible) -- training for -- (inaudible) -- pilot, we try to do about an hour or two. Our challenge is integrating -- is shifting from an operational or tactical-level training on skillsets and development, and then going to an affective lesson on SGBV prevention -- you know, how a logistician Marine goes from teaching integrating logistics operations, or how a -- (inaudible) -- goes from teaching how to sustain, you know, facility management, and then taking a break and coming back after break and have the authority to pull off an SGBV at the affective level, a softer approach, is a challenge that we're hearing from our NCOs that deploy as mentors who are going to teach the forces.
So I'm especially interested in your information about the POI development. The environment that you were in seems like a bit more of a softer environment and a more socially supportive -- (laughter) -- environment than a military, mil-to-mil, theater security cooperation engagement. But we are looking for information and support. So if we could -- if we could get more details about how you would suggest shifting from a very tactical skill of building, you know -- (inaudible) -- to taking a break and then talking about gender-based violence and prevention would be very helpful.
DR. WAGNER: We can talk offline maybe. But the environment definitely wasn't soft. So -- but we could talk more offline.
Q: Great. Thank you.
Q: I'm going to go back to the -- (inaudible) -- mic.
Q: Colonel Markmaar with the Dutch LNL (ph). I would like to thank the presenters for excellent briefings on this subject. You made it very comprehensive. And thank you, Dr. Putman, for mentioning the Dutch initiative that I'm not fully aware of in any -- to every detail. You attended the Dutch -- (inaudible) -- seminar, so you are ahead of me in this field.
But the thought that occurs to me is, I know and I'm aware that there are many other European partners concerned about this issue. And my question is, at what level should we coordinate and orchestrate all these initiatives to prevent that we are -- will be fractionized? Could AFRICOM play a role in that? Or would you address at a higher level, maybe the U.N.? I don't know. (Off mic.)
DR. LAWRY: There are coordination mechanisms that exist. They're U.N.-, NGO-driven -- again, this sort of civ-mil angst that much of the world has. If you have something to add that can be invited in, that's great. But the one thing that -- SGBV and the issues that are involved in DRC should never be coordinated by the military. They should be coordinated by the host nation first; if they're not capable, mentored by the U.N., and then the NGOs to follow, which is asked by the host nation.
So no, I don't think that having a military coordinating is advisable, and may not be appropriate in many settings. But being able to integrate pieces into the already process that's going on is helpful. It's just finding where that niche is. And if it's mil-to-mil or it's civ-to-mil, as the chaplains are doing, there are pieces that you could fit within.
Q: Colonel Clemons. I'm the div chief for West and Central Africa. I recognize your point that you made: We would need to research those phenomena in different countries before we developed SGBV approaches for the various countries. We won't get that luxury. This is going to be a mandate for us to incorporate this into our program's construction or costs on top of that.
And just looking -- looking at it resource-wise, the number of people involved for what we've done in DRC is probably only 1 or 2 percent of our efforts across the continent. So we're going to -- but DRC and your research is all we have to go on at this point in time. So there's -- it's -- (off mic) -- two points here. There's going to be a tremendous tendency amongst the engagement planners, people like me and my staff, to rely heavily on the research in DRC -- and the POI, we used to call it the DRC -- and apply it in other countries as best as we can. I get that. (Laughter.)
DR. LAWRY: Don't, please.
Q: You're all we've got. And then the only real comment I'd add is we have neither the staff capacity nor the resources to do this research in every country. So can you point us to other NGOs or groups that would be -- we could capitalize off of some pre-existing efforts?
DR. LAWRY: Well, I think first you should know the cost of doing that survey. So it was under a hundred thousand dollars to do that survey. In Liberia, it was $60,000 to do a national survey. So we're not talking about huge pots of money. There are NGOs that have the capacity to do these type of surveys.
Q: My budget for my (non-give ?) countries -- not the top 13, the other (40, I think ?) -- my math's not that bad -- (laughter) -- is typically about a hundred thousand dollars.
DR. LAWRY: Right. And there are other interested groups. There are -- USAID conflict mitigation that has interest and money to support these type of things. The Department of State has money. It becomes sort of a shell game of finding the money and moving it to where it needs to be.
The NGOs, for certain, cannot afford to do this. They're too busy implementing and doing their own measures of effectiveness than to do baselines. It's just -- it's not supported by USAID in their budgets, either, to have a population-based research. They'll rely on focus groups and qualitative data because it's cheaper.
There has -- at some point, again, like, we need to -- we really have to think about the rebel groups and figuring out a way to be able to prevent -- do prevention training for rebel groups. We also have to start thinking about research and baseline work.
Q: All right. I understand your strong recommendation about the rebel groups. That'll be decided at a policy level above us. But on the more immediate level that, you know, immediate, the policy decision that we do face in DRC is this issue of the U.N., MONUSCO, to bring in the FARDC into -- I'm sure we won't call it offensives, but we'll say operations of each. That's a very contentious subject, you know, that our -- I mean there's a list of it -- of the, given what you said about the rebel groups. This is where they operate, at the -- (inaudible) -- utility of -- flood MONUSCO, bring in FARDC into operations in the east.
DR. LAWRY: They are the national military. They need to professionalized even more. I think, you know, you've heard Michele's work and my anecdotes that you know, it's a mish-mash of groups and I think AFRICOM's ability to point this out again and again and again and to say that you've got, you know, ethnic rivalries. You've got groups that have been, you know, Uganda, Rwanda and everywhere else.
That's the only way you're going to be able to train them is to make that understanding and understanding that you've got Mai-Mai, loyal Mai-Mai within the FARDC but are in the FARDC because that was their only thing -- the only thing that they could do and adjust your programs and your plans to understand that the FARDC is not one group. It's a mixture of many groups that are angry.
Q: Thank you.
STAFF: (Inaudible, off mic) -- I had one other question down here. Yes, please.
Q: Hi, this question is for you, Dr. Lawry. I was just wondering, in your research, was there any attempt to quantify the long-term impacts of the sex and gender-based violence between the sexes? Did you see any differences in the long-term impacts between men or women and what they suffered?
DR. LAWRY: You do see mental health differences between women who have suffered sexual violence and males who have suffered sexual violence. So the one problem is that women have two hits. They have the community hit and then the rebel groups or combatant hits whereas 99-plus percent of the perpetrators against the men were combatants. But the mental health issues are much greater, statistically significant difference between men and women.
Q: How about as far as any physical consequences as well? Everybody knows that a child -- children being born, diseases, fistulas and any of that -- any of those -- any of those differences?
DR. LAWRY: I mean of course, there are differences. I mean men can't get pregnant, so there were what we expected, about 4 percent unwanted or pregnancies associated with the violence. What was interesting in the research is we had one male that said that sexual violence resulted in pregnancy. And we went back to that male and we said you do realize that you can't get pregnant.
It turned out that he was a bush husband and because he was forced to be a sexual servant to a female commander, she had gotten pregnant as a result of being a bush husband. So he was actually reporting it correctly. But again, this is how you have to go back and use your qualitative pieces to figure out why you're getting that answer.
You don't want to assume that the answer is wrong or they misunderstood the question. But yes, you do see fistulas. But again, and you have to keep in mind that fistula issues in Africa in general and in DRC, 98 percent of them are due to obstetric injury, not to rape. So we're dealing with an issue that exists long before we dealt with the issues of rape.
Q: We're almost out of time. I'm wondering -- Ross unfortunately left, but following up on his challenge to do something very quickly in response to the general's instruction and recognizing that you know, I mean the obvious significant points, recognizing the obvious significance of not committing sins of extrapolation.
Now, we've got an imperative to do something very quickly. And it would be most useful for us, in the context of what Diana described, this mainstreaming of gender issues and a gender approach to what we're going to do in the long term over the broad expanse of the (conversation ?).
But you know, for us, the imperative -- to do it quick -- to get it in there quickly because if -- it would be most helpful for us, while you're doing your deeper dive into conflict, while you're pursuing the paths you see in front of you, you know, before this meeting began two hours ago, if you could draw broadly applicable lessons and conclusions for us to use content-wise across a range of engagements to get us started as this surprisingly, modestly, costly research unfolds, we can then fine tune it as appropriate based on the resources.
But we need to start someplace because we've got an imperative to do it in a hurry. We've got what we've got. My gut tells me there's got to be something in there. We're doing something now. Lord knows if it's helpful or harmful. There's always some political sensitivity for us as an outsider, as the Americans to go into any situation and impose our values on our partners.
Consequently, we're telling them it's all about them. We know better. A lot of it's about us. And so we've got to do as best we can to find the right mind to do what -- to do good and to minimize unintended consequences as we move forward. And if there are things that can be drawn from your work, that would be very, very useful.
DR. LAWRY: Your partners are asking for training.
Q: Well, that may or may not be the case. What we're responding to is an imperative from above, an instruction from above to do this.
DR. LAWRY: Agreed. But the peacekeeping troops, Malawi, who are going to go to DRC when DIMO (ph) was going there to do pre-deployment training, they asked specifically for a module on gender-based violence.
Q: I think everybody who deals with Congo gets it and it's going to be part of everything there. I don't think that's true broadly with ACOTA and peacekeeping training throughout the company.
MELISSA JORDAN (SP): No, sir and -- sorry, my apologies -- I'm Melissa Jordan (sp) and I handle over six engagements, theater security cooperation. So we have pilot-to-pilot, a partnership for integrated logistics, operations and tactics and ADAPT, pre-deployment assistance team. So we teach operational logisticians from different countries who come together at the Kofi Annan center in Ghana. And we tend to have nine, you know, to 10 countries represented in that two-week course. ADAPT, which is in the early certification and we do it bilaterally in a phased approach two weeks at a time over the course of four different phases.
And you know, when you're talking about speed, we have our pilot curriculum review next month and the next course goes in May. So whatever resource we can get from the POIs, any new advice, then we can apply it very heavily.
The PKO, the Title 22 funding, especially more specifically, the Global Peace Operations Initiative funds, GPOI, those require that every GPOI-funded course have an element of delivering SGBV courses, which is why ACOTA, also funded by GPOI, also delivers it. ACOTA has a different focus than we do, where we have other theater security objectives at this level. That's where we stay.
But the challenge is to get that NCO -- we do bring in senior-level female mentors. We have a three-star general. We have a one-star general. We bring them in for -- (inaudible). We have a technical sergeant and she comes in. She teaches the Ugandans how to get their air load -- you know, airworthy ready to unload to an air cargo mission for -- on some mission.
Getting them -- getting logisticians and engineering folks or other specialty NCOs ready to do a segment on SGBV is a little bit more challenging. So for us, where the rubber meets the road is how to get that technical specialist spun up to deliver credibility and fluency with an element of SGBV. Does that answer your question, sir?
DR. WAGNER: There are U.N. modules that are used for peacekeeping troops and if you look online, you can pull down USAID modules, NGO modules and U.N. modules that are used for training about SGBV. In my experience, it's -- you walk away from the sensitivity. It's part of what you do.
This is -- you're going to do logistics. We're going to do international law. We're going to do international human rights law and now, we're going to talk about SGBV. It's similar to when you're a physician and you're in a clinic and you talk to a patient and you go through the medical history.
You just ask, is there anything I need to know about sexual abuse in the past? If you pussyfoot around it -- and I don't know any other way to say it, it becomes this taboo issue. It's better just to go into it and to say, now, we're going to talk about an issue that is, you know, widespread around the continent. It's not that they don't know that already.
Q: Have you review -- have you reviewed those? I mean do you think they're appropriate and helpful or do you think they could be improved based upon the work you've done?
DR. WAGNER: I think some of the U.N. modules need to be adapted to military use. You know, per country. But I think they are appropriate for use and I actually used some of those for training in Malawi, but contextualized to where they were going to be, which was DRC.
MS. : And to add on to that, the U.N. itself, U.N. PKO and UNIFEM are working right now on developing brand new training modules about SGBV for peacekeepers that they hope to make mandatory across the world. So there's a whole body of work going on that we can actually feed into if you want to talk to us some more.
MR. : Well, for everyone here in the room and out on the out stations, thank you very much. We -- exactly two hours, a lot of good feedback, a lot of good questions and we appreciate, I think, Dr. Lawry's here through the rest of the day. If you send myself or Dr. Putman an e-mail, if you would like to explore further and I think they're going to be down to lunch at the German Cantina, so -- (laughter). Thank you all very much. This has been a very productive and useful event. Thank you to our guests and tapers.
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AFRICOM History, Background
