GOMA, CONGO — The high school senior was walking home when a local businessman, standing outside a hotel he owned, asked her to step into his office. Inside, she said, he raped her.
Now, this 17-year-old is doing something very few Congolese women have dared: She's pressing criminal charges.
"I expect justice and want him sent to prison," said the teenager, whose name and that of the man she accuses have been withheld for her protection. "My hope is that he will not do this to other girls."
More than a decade of civil war and lawlessness in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo have left the region with one of the world's worst records for sexual violence against women. In fact, rape has become an increasingly common tool of war, used by virtually every rebel militia and even government soldiers to terrorize civilians and punish enemies.
Until a couple of years ago, rape was barely considered a crime in the region's corrupt, male-dominated justice system, where the accused often bribe their way out of trouble for just $10. Most fighters, whether government soldiers or guerrillas, simply walked away from their crimes.
Rape victims faced public shame, divorce and abandonment while their attackers sometimes returned to rape their victims again.
Now, a small number of legal clinics and aid groups, including one opened this year by the American Bar Assn., are striving to end Congo's climate of impunity by putting rapists behind bars.
Their work is a drop in the bucket so far, with just a few dozen cases, compared with the thousands of rapes over the last 10 years. But there are promising early signs of change, including a military prosecutor who has doubled the number of rape charges against soldiers in the last three years and the 17-year-old girl who is facing down one of Goma's leading businessmen.
"It's slow, but we are seeing an increase in women coming to us for help," said Mathieu Ndongo-Koni, director of the ABA's gender-based violence clinic in Goma.
Along with the rebels, Congo's unpaid and undisciplined soldiers account for much of the problem.
Upoki Kandoni, 29, sat recently in Goma's central prison, accused of getting drunk after clashes with rebels and raping a woman in a displacement camp on the outskirts of town. He has a wife and child in a village 200 miles away, "but here I'm single," he said.
