Essay --

The widespread violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is associated with an epidemic of rape. The alarming brutality in the Eastern Congo results in thousands of cases of rape and genital injury with devastating psychosocial consequences. A disturbing ideology promoting and rewarding behavioral dominance through the subjugation and violent treatment of men, women, and children, led to an emerging socially literate psychology of militarized masculinity. Through active examinations of this framework, concepts like rape as a weapon of war emerge in an attempt to explain the connection between the proliferation of armed groups and the perpetration of sexual violence as a pervasive and destructive feature of society. In this conflict environment, rape is a vehicle for terrorism, displacement, and demoralization that deliberately incurs severe sexual trauma leading to a new pathology of rape with extreme violence . These emerging pathologies are denoted as social phenomena , emerging in the context of war from perpetuated violence, and explained in retrospective analyses of sexual violence. We view the role of social behavior through the interactions between aggregated individual acts of rape, and the long-standing systematic pressures and processes in the conflict. What’s missing is the analysis of collective behavior and the impacts on social cohesion. In the Congo, wider social norms and entities – the masculine collective – like rebel groups continue to promote behavior conducive to sexual violence. It is therefore important to go beyond the traditionally narrow individualism of gender analysis, and examine the behavioral products of masculine socialization – moving the conversation from morality to sociology, and f... ...ctural violence that makes them a target of sexual violence. This cover-up is done through established sociospatial zones that engender violence and characterize the environment as a space in which violence routinely occurs, and where women are routinely violated. Most examinations in the Congo focus on the practical military application of rape as a weapon, not the psychosocial implications that enable intimate partners to take advantage of men, women, and children. Because intimate partners are presumed to be far removed from a military context, and are viewed as civilians, they are effectively removed from the zone of scrutiny and find solace in sociospatial zones which condone sexual violence. As a result, the victims are ultimately blamed for the violence visited upon them, and the enormity of what is done to them in these areas remains largely unacknowledged.