Here's something that makes me lose all faith in humanity.  Recently in the Congo, "rape capital of the world," 200 women and four baby boys were gang raped over the course of four days within miles of a United Nations peacekeeping base.  

It's easy sometimes, being a woman living in the west, to get caught up in the minutia of everyday life.  In discussions over what is and is not misogynist, over problems like the sorry state of women in the high tech world.  Why aren't there more women in tech?  Why do girls suddenly start losing interest in math and science at around age 11?

I don't mean to trivialize these issues.  Obviously, since I'm usually the one who's bringing them up in the first place.  But it's important sometimes to stand back and take a broader look at women's rights throughout the world.  And let me tell you something: it's ugly out there.

No one has any idea what to do about the situation in the Congo.  It's a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions, and apparently no one can stop it.  Women are suffering horribly, from not just the social stigma but from grievous physical injuries incurred in these assaults.  Ruptures, fistulas, intestinal displacement.  The medical terms alone make me nauseous, much less thinking about them being applied to actual human beings.

It's frankly difficult to believe the scope and scale of what is happening in the Congo.  That atrocities like this could continue to occur in the world, with no one to stop them.  Things so horrible that the word "atrocity" barely seems to cover it.  

What else can you say about 200 women and four baby boys (aged one month, six months, a year, and eighteen months respectively) being gang raped as a calculated military action?  And this is just a drop in the Atrocity Bucket, compared to everything else that's happened in the Congo since the conflict began.

I don't want to talk about it - I've been not talking about the situation in the Congo for weeks now.  But not talking about it is no way to solve a problem.  Talking about it may not fix it, but pretending it's not happening definitely won't.  

In the west, rape usually occurs as a person-to-person crime.  She was asking for it; no she wasn't; stop blaming the victim; this is what happens in a pornographic culture.  Blah blah blah, and the culture wars go on.

But in the Congo, I think we can be pretty clear on what is happening.  On what has been happening.  On what continues to happen, around the clock, unceasingly.

It speaks poorly for us as a species, that this kind of thing happens in the first place.  Even worse that no one can figure out how to stop it.  Really?  No one?  Not a thing, eh?  All those troops we have deployed around the world, and why?  Why even have a military, if it can't do something like stop this kind of thing from happening?

This is probably one of the worst things happening in the world right now.  I think we can all of us, men and women, feminists and "feminists," left-wing and right-wing, agree on that.  Maybe it's time we set aside our petty squabbles and bickering and DO SOMETHING.  ANYTHING.

Photo credit: Flickr/United Nations Photo