Medical aid for women rape victims
Project sponsorship in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Kivu
With medica mondiale support, the Congolese women’s organization AFPDE (Association des Femmes pour la Promotion et le Développement Endogène) is able to provide medical care to women in Kaniola, a community in the province of South Kivu. AFPDE helps with the payment for operations and needed medications, and ensures that women receive supportive accompaniment. Around 950 survivors of sexualized violence have been able to obtain medical and psychosocial help since 2008 thanks to medica mondiale.
AFPDE helps women who are in especially dire need of medical help. Because of the rapes, in which the perpetrators use objects such as sticks, hot plastic objects, and even pieces of broken glass, many of the women have vaginal and intestinal tears and cannot hold their urine or their stool. Some of the women and young girls have had their uteruses and vaginas completely destroyed. Still others were infected with HIV.
For many rape victims, aid organizations such as AFPDE are often the only chance they have to obtain medical care. The women usually do not have the money to get to the hospitals, which are far away. Plus the villages are located in the midst of forests where they are inaccessible; there are neither roads nor telephones. AFPDE picks up the expenses for travel to the health centres as well as for treatments and medications. Women with particularly severe injuries are transported to hospitals in the cities of Kaniola, Walungu, and Bukavu.
Emotional support for women and girls
Nearly all of the patients have been severely traumatized and require psychological accompaniment and supportive care during their social rehabilitation. The criminal acts inflicted upon them, frequently in the presence of their families, have serious consequences for the victims. If a woman is raped, she is viewed as unclean and is usually ostracized by members of her family and her village community. On her own, she is often exposed to even more violence. The AFPDE staff members give the victims a chance to talk about what they’ve been through – all women are visited on a regular basis in the hospital or at home. In some cases AFPDE has been successful in mediating between family members and women rape victims, and gotten them accepted back into their families.
