Talk:Sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

Recommend sections by province, not by topic

I recommend creating sections by province (Kivu, Orientale) rather than by topic. This is because in Kivu the rapes have been committed mostly by surviving Interahamwe soldiers and in Orientale by LRA soldiers. Also in this way, I hope to make people more aware of the situation in Orientale. Any feedback? DBlomgren (talk) 03:06, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

That can work. Go for it if you have the information. Nicehumor (talk) 22:45, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

Increase of Civilian Rape

The article of the country itself says there is a growing number of civilians who have become rapist. Is there any reason why this is so and could there be a possibly future Gendercide of the male population of all ages to claim revenge against men? --58.7.196.120 (talk) 15:05, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

Please respond! --124.148.208.171 (talk) 04:59, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

Revising Page

I am planning to contribute a substantial amount of information to this article as a part of a Wikipedia Contribution class on Poverty, Gender, and Human Development at Rice University. Currently, this article focuses a lot on the “rape against women as a weapon of war” narrative. I want to expand this article to show the complexity of this issue by providing more information. I want to add information on the background of the issue, the prevalence of all forms of sexual violence, different forms that occur in the country (including, but not limited to: violence against males, violence perpetrated by females, civilian rape, and domestic violence), regional differences, differing perspectives, and add national and international prevention efforts. I will also be adding text from reputable sources to existing sections and reorganizing the article. I will be referencing publications from scholarly journals, reports to the United Nations, governmental reports, and news articles. Due to the high publicity of this problem and the international community’s attention to the issue, I believe that an expansion of the Wikipedia article could be beneficial. It would be really great to get advice on how to best add onto this article. Are there any suggestions about the plans I have made or advice for other elements I should incorporate to my edits? I would appreciate any feedback!

Juliabarrow3 (talk) 01:39, 6 March 2013 (UTC)Juliabarrow3

Article Review

The article presents a complex issue in a sophisticated, comprehensive, and neutral fashion, but there are a couple of areas of improvement that I would recommend to make the revisions that you have already executed more meaningful. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jessi.litman (talk • contribs) 14:49, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

The overall readability of this article is high, but there are a few moments where the word choice muddles the impact of the information. Review the page for opportunities to make ideas more precise. For example, this sentence in the Historical Background Section: "The Democratic Republic of the Congo has been ravaged by war, violence, and instability for decades, and this has led to a culture of violence that often takes its form in a sexual nature," could be reworded to say, "Since (insert exact year or time period here), war, violence, and instability have created a culture of violence in the DRC." How exactly does a culture of violence get translated down to a sexual level? Are there any studies or theorists who can explain this?

The organization of the content was effective, and I especially liked the "Other Perspectives" section. If you could expand this section even more that would be great. It is hard to make this type of article extremely analytical because it lends itself better to descriptives, but I think this section is really the place to bring your article to the next level. The references are all well-cited and diverse, coming from reputable sources. It is clear that a lot of thought and reading was involved before this article was written. The illustration is extremely clear and appropriate, but it is a but confusing to articulate differences between regions and then say that underreporting and lack of research prevent accurate representations. Maybe start with this information and frame it to say, "Although....., there is some information about regional differences."

Other than these few comments, this article is very nicely done. Maybe look through the article once more for opportunities to link the information with other pages. I noticed for example, that UNFPA wasn't linked. These minor edits could make a big difference overall. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Jessi.litman (talk • contribs) 14:52, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

Jessi.litman (talk) 13:14, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks Jessi - I really appreciate your feedback.

I completely agree with your first suggestion - I think rewording many of the sentences to make my intended effects more direct and clear would be very beneficial.

Thanks for your comment about the "Other perspectives" section. I thought that it was important to bring in other viewpoints to the problem. The only issue is that most accepted publications I can find share the same viewpoint and do not offer other perspectives. I will continue my research to see whether or not I can find more information to add in "Other perspectives." Thanks for drawing my attention to the framing of "Regional differences." I can see now that the way I had it framed was confusing. I used your advice and changed the organization of that section.

Juliabarrow3 (talk) 16:08, 8 April 2013 (UTC)Juliabarrow3

Peer Review #2

Juliabarrow3, great work! This article provides a lot of excellent infomation about a very important subject. I just have a few suggestions for improvement:

• Add some introductory info about why sexual violence is so prevalent and its impacts to your lead section.
• The Sexual abuse of children subsection randomly mentions that "Over 12 percent of children in the eastern part of the DRC do not reach their first birthday." Does that have something to do with sexual violence?
• Some of the wording isn't neutral, such as "This casual statement reflects a generally callous attitude towards the female sex" (under Rape of women). Make sure the wording doesn't sound too opinionated, even if the opinion comes from a source.
• There's a lot of passive voice - try to rephrase some of those sentences. For example, "The Democratic Republic of the Congo has been ravaged by war, violence, and instability for decades" can be "War, violence, and instability have ravaged the DRC for decades." You can just delete the phrase "It is said that..." in most places.
• Could you find or make a map that highlights regions with higher prevalence? It would have more visual impact.

Overall, great job! I'm excited to see the final product. Nadhika99 (talk) 04:07, 7 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks so much for your advice Nadhika99!

I definitely agree that the introduction is a bit sparse. I have added a sentence that discusses the prevalence of the sexual violence as an introduction to the topic.

I also agreed with your comments on the first two sentences you pointed out. I took both of them out and have tried to look over and change sentences that seem too unbiased.

I also agreed with your comment about passive voice. I have since changed that sentence and am working on trying to change others to make everything more direct.

As for your last comment, there is very little information about regional differences of sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Most studies have focused on sexual violence in the war torn areas in the east. Although there is little research done on the west, I thought it was still important to convey the studies that do prove that sexual violence is prevalent in all regions and takes on different forms.

Thanks again for your feedback! Juliabarrow3 (talk) 16:15, 8 April 2013 (UTC)Juliabarrow3

Review comments

Juliabarrow3 asked me to review the article, so here are some comments. I won't have time to complete this tonight; I'll try to add more in the next couple of days. There's a lot of good information here, and I like the article, so please don't take these comments as criticisms -- in my world lengthy comments are a compliment!

• I removed quite a few links to common concepts and words like "civilian", "combatant", "Europe" and "threat"; links are ways to help readers who don't understand something quickly get to an article that explains it, so it's not usual to link commonly understood words. I also removed some duplicate links -- the idea is to link the first occurrence of something so the reader can click through if they like. There's no extra value for the reader in having something linked repeatedly -- the blue text for links should be a signal that this is a useful link to click, and if too many things are linked, the blue isn't a useful signal any more.
• I'd suggest expanding the lead -- leads should summarize the article, and a long lead (three or four paragraphs) seems right for a substantial article like this. There's a guideline -- WP:LEAD -- which you might want to look at, but the key point is to echo the main points of the article in the lead, so the reader has an overview.
• The "historical background" section is rather choppy at the moment. Think about what a reader who knows nothing about the DRC or the sexual violence situation there needs for context -- they need the history, with key points highlit, in more or less chronological order. Here's a compressed version of what I mean: "The Democratic Republic of Congo was one of the states created as part of the European colonization of Africa in the 19th century. It is X% Hutu, Y% Tutsi (etc., with any geographic information about the location of the major ethnic groups, if relevant). The country remained under Belgian colonial rule until 1960, when it achieved independence. Shortly afterwards, Mobutu took power and established a corrupt regime that lasted X years; sexual violence became institutionalized as a form of torture. In the 1990s civil war broke out in Rwanda, on the DRC's eastern border, and a wave of refugees crossed into the DRC; ..." This is compressed and probably wrong in places, but the idea is to give a straightforward consecutive history of key events that are going to be relevant for the rest of the article.
• The "Forms of sexual violence" has an impressive amount of detailed information. I like the way you've broken it up by type, but I'm not sure that you have the right information in the right section in every case. For example, does the information about children who commit sexual violence belong in the section on abuse of children? Maybe that could go in the later section on psychological and social ramifications. The last paragraph of the trafficking section is really about enforcement, and could perhaps go in the preventative section further down. Overall, though, there's really good data here. I think it could read a little more smoothly; it reads a bit like a list of statistics, one after the other, right now. I think it would help to start with a couple of the key statistics, stated very straightforwardly: "It has been estimated that as many as 400,000 women in the DRC are rape survivors, or X% of a total population of Y million women. The conflicts in DRC have led to higher rape incidence in the northeast of the country, particularly in South Kivu, North Kivu and Orientale, where ..." and then add in the more specific statistics after that. I think readers like to be led along a narrative trail, and at the moment you've got all the facts but I think you could build a more engaging narrative from them.

-- More tomorrow, if I have time. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 02:29, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

I had a bit of time this morning to take another look.

• The "Government policy" section makes reference to "article 14" and "article 52" but doesn't explain what those articles are. A law of some kind, or international treaty?
• I took out a link in the "See also" section to the Rwandan Genocide; that article was already linked in the text of this one. "See also" is used for links that don't appear in the article, but which a reader might be interested in anyway. I also took out an external link to Human Rights Watch; the Wikipedia article is linked, so an interested reader can go there if necessary. External links are intended for more directly connected websites.
• Generally, having gone through the whole article now, my main comment is a bit like part of my comment above: you have got some great data, and I don't think you need much more research -- it just needs to be copyedited for flow and readability. Mike Christie (talk - contribs - library) 10:33, 11 April 2013 (UTC)

Thanks so much for your input! I've been working on the changes you have suggested and I really appreciate the work that you did yourself on the page. I've tried, and am continuing to try, to make the sections more narrative and readable. Thanks again! Juliabarrow3 (talk) 02:46, 16 April 2013 (UTC)Juliabarrow3

Merge

I've proposed a merge from Military macho-violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, as "Military macho-violence" seems to be one editor's rather clumsy essay-like WP:NEO for when male sexual violence is perpetrated by the military. Or perhaps we can simply rename to Sexual violence by the military in the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Do we need two articles? It does rather seem to me that article creator User:Djena22 has simply posted his essay online, without any regard to this pre-existing article. Shawn in Montreal (talk) 14:27, 4 May 2015 (UTC)

Merge: I agree that Military macho-violence is an awkward neologism. There is a relevant section on the existing Sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo that can easily accommodate that content which is notable from the other page. Klbrain (talk) 00:16, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

 Done Klbrain (talk) 22:15, 19 October 2017 (UTC)

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