When one hurts or kills a women
one hurts or kills hummanity and is an antrocitie.
Gino d'Artali
and: My mother (1931-1997) always said to me <Mi figlio, non esistono notizie <vecchie> perche puoi imparare qualcosa da qualsiasi notizia.> Translated: <My son, there is no such thing as so called 'old' news because you can learn something from any news.>
Gianna d'Artali

SPECIAL ABOUT DR DENIS MUKWEGE (Democatic Republic Congo)
PART 2

Since long I've know and read about the Congolese Dr. and gyneacologist Denis Mukwege living and working in Congo and because of the greusomeness and neverending number of rape victims he, in 1999, decided to open a hospital, Panzi, only to try and help them and he figaratively speaking fought to death in trying to do so. The perpetrators: rivaling tribes in war raping the women of other tribes as a trophee and proof of their 'bravery'. Dr. Mukwege literary saved thousands of women ('till today about 60.000 and counting) and not only deserves a minutes long standing ovation. Since 2008, Mukwege has been awarded dozens of prizes in recognition of his work, including the UN Human Rights Prize (2008), in 2014 he was awarded the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought and the Seoul Peace Prize (2016) and the Nobel Peace Prize (2018). All because in his words <You can and must end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war in armed conflict only by abolishining it.> Together with the Yazidi activist Nadia Murad, Dr Mukwege received the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize <for his efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict.> He has also been granted honorary degrees from the Universities of Edinburgh and Harvard. A 2015 documentary entitled 'The man who mends women - the wrath of Hippocrates' illustrates his life and work. The film was subtitled in all EU official languages with the support of the European Parliament. Something he more than well deserves and especially his goal of what to do with the money. He not only deserves our deepest respect but also our full support, to start with for the victims and last but not least Dr. Denis Mukwege.
With this special I'll take you on a journey wich will take you along his road of high- and downlights.
Gino d'Artali
Indept investigative journalist

This is part 2 which will take you on his hazardous but still immensily heroic journey but of which dr. Mukwege said: <I did and do it for the women.> from 31 Oct 2021 'till 5 Oct 2013

RELATED

WOMEN'S MEDIA CENTER
29 Jan 2014
By Lauren Wolfe
<<Never-ending trauma: In DRC, rape survivors are punished with more rape.
The horrors are so terrible that they sound made up but—somehow—they aren't. A woman raped in front of her husband. In front of her parents-in-law. Forced to watch her child killed and then raped. Forced to have sex with her son in front of militants. Raped when nine months' pregnant. The examples are endless in the Democratic Republic of Congo. There has been such extreme humiliation of women at the hands of militias for nearly two decades of war. Here is one woman's experience, in her own words: I had just finished bathing and saw that military men had arrived at my house. They forced open the door and forced me into the main room. Then the rape started. I wanted to defend myself. I asked why this was happening to me. I was beat by one while the other raped me. My children cried. The soldiers forced us to be silent and threatened to kill us. I am ashamed and want to die but I also want to protect my children. I don't know what happened to this woman when the soldiers left her house. Did her husband leave her? Many husbands have—claiming that their wives have lost <value> or are now drawing negative attention to the household. In fact, a 2012 study conducted by the South Africa-based Sonke Gender Justice Network and Brazilian nonprofit Promundo in Goma, in Congo's North Kivu province, found that 43 percent of men surveyed agreed with the statement that <A man should reject his wife when she has been raped.> Men have walked out of their marriages, leaving women to figure out how to earn money to feed themselves and their children and to cope on their own with the extraordinary violence perpetrated on them. But many men have stayed. The question then becomes: Did these men help their wives through the trauma they’d expe-rienced? Did they honor them despite this cultural shame of having been violated? After their 2012 study, Sonke and Promundo went back to DRC to conduct further research on exactly this. What they found in their new study is shocking. <We went into the study thinking it was positive when men did not reject wives or partners who experienced rape in conflict,> said Gary Barker, international director of Promundo. But that's not what was going on. What was happening was that the combined trauma of the war and of the rape of their wives was creating a situation in which men became abusive to their partners. In fact, more than half of the men surveyed reported ever carrying out some form of violence against their female partner, and 65 percent of women reported ever having experienced violence, including sexualized violence, from a male partner, i.e., women were attacked by their husbands on top of being raped by soldiers. <We were distressed at how much men are traumatized by their partners' experience of rape and how much men's trauma was taken out in the form of physical violence on their already victimized wives,> Barker said. Violence begets violence. And in DRC, that has come to mean rape: <The scale of rape over DRC's years of war has made this crime seem more acceptable,> said Susan Bartels, chief researcher at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, in 2010. She was commenting on a study recently completed that found that rape by civilians had increased 17-fold in the country.

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While such treatment may be inhumane, it's also important to look at the reasons why a number of men have chosen to take out their anger on their victimized wives. <To truly assist women survivors of conflict-related rape in DRC and elsewhere, we need to understand how women's trauma affects men and how men’s trauma affects women,> Barker said. In DRC, basic hardships like poverty, hunger, childhood trauma, and lack of work have taken their toll on generations of men and women. (And by <hunger,> I mean that 57 percent of men and 60 percent of women eat only one meal a day or less, according to the researchers.) Another major finding was the high levels of trauma among men from the war—<which further exaggerates levels of violence in the home,> according to the report. Large numbers of men, the study said, have also themselves been the victims of various forms of violence, including of sexualized violence, whether during the war or in childhood. Researchers found that there was a <clear association> between men's exposure to violence during childhood and increased likelihood of perpetration later.
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Take a look at these statements from women in the study to get a better idea of how they've been treated after their rape: <He feels weak and frustrated because he was not able to stop the rapist, or get him. He feels that he lost his power and fertility. He accuses his wife for this.>
<The community makes it very difficult; my husband feels ashamed, and me too. People don't respect him because he has no work and a wife that was raped.>
<The day I told him that I was raped, he fell on the floor and got ill. He lost his self esteem and needs medicine.> >>
Read the complete article here:
https://womensmediacenter.com/women-under-siege/never-ending-trauma-in-drc-rape-survivors-punished-with-more-rape

i.e.: Where there are 3 *** that's the WMC journalist's editing.
Where there is ----* that my, Gino d'artali's, editing
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