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	Shocking levels of sexual violence occuring in the DRC by Agence France Presse & agencies Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)   May 2011   More than 400,000 women and girls between the ages of 15 and 49 were raped in the vast, war-ravaged country in central Africa during a 12-month period in 2006 and 2007, according to the study published in the American Journal of Public Health.   That is 26 times more than the 15,000 women that the United Nations has reported were raped there during the same 12 months.   "Our results confirm that previous estimates of rape and sexual violence are severe underestimates of the true prevalence of sexual violence occurring in the DRC," said Amber Peterman, lead author of the study.   "Even these new, much higher figures still represent a conservative estimate of the true prevalence of sexual violence because of chronic underreporting due to stigma, shame, perceived impunity, and exclusion of younger and older age groups as well as men," she said.   The study, which gathered data from 2007, did not capture sexual violence among girls younger than 15 years or women older than 49 years and did not include sexual violence among boys and men.   "Although the burden of sexual violence among these groups is uncertain, a review of the records of 4133 women attending Panzi Hospital in Sud Kivu showed that 6 per cent were younger than 16 years and 10 per cent were older than 65 years," the study said.   "In addition, Human Rights Watch reported that sexual violence in 2009 doubled in comparison with 2008. If this assessment is accurate, then the current prevalence of sexual violence is likely to be even higher than our estimates suggest."   Commenting on the study, Michael van Rooyen, director of the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, said that "rape in the DRC has metastasised amid a climate of impunity, and has emerged as one of the great human crises of our time".   May 2011 (UN News)   The United Nations envoy leading the world’s body efforts to eliminate sexual violence during conflict has welcomed the release of a new detailed study on sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) that sadly indicates the prevalence of the crime is much worse than previously reported.   The study, published yesterday in the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH), estimates that almost two million Congolese women have been raped and that women and girls are victimized at a rate of nearly one per minute.   Margot Wallström, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, last night issued a statement describing the study as “a commendable effort that helps to fill the gap in empirical research in this area.”   Ms. Wallström is tasked with tackling sexual violence committed during conflicts or in post-conflict situations while the AJPH study examined a broader field that included acts of domestic violence.   “This inevitably makes the AJPH figures higher,” she said, noting that official UN figures tend to be conservative because the Organization can only report to the Security Council on sexual violence that it has been able to verify.   “The UN cannot extrapolate from a small sample the incidence of sexual violence throughout the DRC. Additionally, the UN has ethical obligations that are not generally incumbent upon academic researchers – namely to avoid interviewing survivors or exposing them to any risk of reprisal/re-traumatization in the absence of the ability to deliver services or follow-up on the case.”   But the envoy stressed that “studies like this are important, and valuable in shedding light on risk factors, such as age, or region of residence, which moves the analysis beyond isolated incident reports to convey a sense of patterns.”   Ms. Wallström underscored that conflict-related sexual violence remains one of the biggest obstacles to peace in the DRC. “Although a lot of work remains to be done, achievements include the adoption of UN Security Council resolution 1960 last December, which gives us the instruments needed to ensure that mass rape is never again met with mass impunity.”   * The Nobel Women''s Initiative hosted a gathering of over 120 women from around the world in Quebec last week to tackle the increasing use of sexual violence in war. The conference, Women Forging a New Security: Ending Sexual Violence in Conflict, sought to develop new strategies for both individual and collective action to end rape in war, visit the link below for more details. Visit the related web page
	More than 1.5 billion people live in countries affected by violent conflict by Sarah Cliffe, Nigel Roberts World Development Report 2011   The World Development Report 2011: Conflict, Security, and Development examines the changing nature of violence in the 21st century, and underlines the negative impact of repeated cycles of violence on a country or region’s development prospects. Preventing violence and building peaceful states that respond to the aspirations of their citizens requires strong leadership and concerted national and international efforts. The Report is based on new research, case studies and extensive consultations with leaders and development practitioners throughout the world.   We recently released the 2011 World Development Report on Conflict, Security and Development. The report isn’t an end in itself -- it’s intended to fuel a continuing conversation on ways in which societies can escape destructive cycles of violence.   The report describes how injustice, corruption,unemployment, bad governance and human rights abuses can precipitate violence, and how confidence between the state and its citizens and the creation of legitimate institutions can resolve it. These findings emerged less through our analysis and policy documents than through the consultations we held around the world.   Essentially, we reversed the conventional order of WDR consultations. Instead of drafting the report and then going out to get feedback in the final stages, we worked from the outset with civil society and government reformers in different countries, and with partners in the UN system and regional institutions. They all helped us define the problem, and the scope of the report. We were helped by new technology – we received over 1.2 million responses to an SMS survey in DRC, for example, while people from dozens of countries posted text, photos and videos about conflict on the WDR web. For answers on how to tackle violence we looked above all to societies that have managed to emerge from decades of destructive violence, and to the policy-makers who helped lead these transitions.   This approach made a huge difference to the report. In one broad-based consultation in Beirut last year participants all agreed that weak governance, corruption, lack of voice and exclusion were significant issues for the whole region, and were combining with unemployment in a combustible mix (although no-one at that point felt such issues could be debated openly, or would be listened to by those in authority). The same themes of in justice and lack of economic opportunity were repeated by community groups in Haiti and Nepal, and by young people in South Africa and the West Bank. Those meetings really helped us ground the report in reality.   The report is one thing: but the report per se isn’t the issue. The question is how to bring about change. We believe that the WDR’s analysis can be used to feed local and global debates, and to influence decisions in areas where new approaches to addressing violence are needed --- and so we very much hope that countries grappling with violence will find it helpful, and that policy-makers will use it to drive their reform agendas. We hope it’ll spark global policy discussion, personal debates, web traffic, and blog conversation.   What I Learned from the WDR, by Nigel Roberts.   I came to the World Development Report with years of field experience in conflict-affected countries, but I learned some startling things from the exercise.   One is that violence today is very different from the violence of the Cold War era. Another is that how to escape from persistent violence isn’t something we can really learn from academic or policy literature — we need to listen to those who have managed actual transitions from violence to stability.   Modern violence   When I joined the Bank in 1981, Cold War politics dominated the debate on violence. Proxy wars between the US and its allies and the Communist Bloc were playing out across the world. Researchers and policy-makers, caught up in this global contest, focused on the wars that formed the pieces of this jigsaw. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the eclipse of Soviet power, a great deal changed. There was a brief surge in the number of civil wars in the mid-1990s, but since then the incidence of “conventional” civil war (wars for political control of the state) has declined. Inter-state warfare is also rare now.   What we see, though — in part because we’re casting the analytical net wider than we used to— is still pretty alarming. We’ve estimated that 1.5 billion people live in areas experiencing or threatened by organized violence; that’s roughly a quarter of the world’s population.   Violence today is frequently localized, mutates from one form to another or just repeats. Motives often defy easy categorization. In central Africa, militias fight for control of mineral deposits, not the state. The FARC in Colombia, once known for its revolutionary Marxist credentials, is now notorious for kidnapping and cocaine trafficking. Moreover, global communications and transport networks have supercharged the international drug trade and have created virtual alliances between violent transnational groups — as well as animating the citizens’ democracy movements we saw in Eastern Europe in the 1990s and in the Middle East today.   Annual deaths from civil war are a quarter of what they were in the 1980s, but homicides from organized gang and drug violence are rising steeply, and leaving large parts of Central America and West Africa beyond effective government control.   The world is still a violent and frightening place.   The triggers of organized violence   What is important to understand is that these various forms of violence are triggered by similar kinds of stress factors — and that good policies can make a real difference.   Some stresses emanate from the global environment (such as drug trafficking and steep food price hikes), but those generated within societies are mostly rooted in exclusion, inequality and injustice – unfairness, in other words, be this in the sphere of security, politics or economics.   What transforms these stresses into open violence is a lack of credible, legitimate national institutions capable of mediating demands in ways that people find acceptable. Legitimate institutions, above all, are what break equations of violence. This is powerful information for policy-makers.   We focused our research on countries like Ghana, Vietnam, Rwanda and Indonesia — countries that have managed to extract themselves from repetitive, destructive cycles of violence over a generation or more. They did so through a simultaneous combination of short-term confidence building measures, and sustained efforts to build national institutions.   Short-term measures include creating inclusive political and social coalitions to help defuse the incentives for violence, and visible actions that signal positive change — particularly to those with grievances. Convincing signals come in many forms: firing abusive policemen, reinstituting rural health services, creating employment. Whatever has real local resonance.   Building institutions that people trust takes time, in many cases 20 years or more, and will always involve setbacks. As with any political process, institution-building is usually contested. It took over a decade for Nepal’s community-based forestry program to show serious results. This isn’t surprising when you consider that a feudal government was being asked to cede effective control over property to ordinary villagers.   What this means for the World Bank? Such findings have major implications for the way donors operate, starting with the Bank.   One implication is that our traditional division of labor between civil war and criminal violence makes little sense. The motivations behind different forms of violence are similar, the forms blur together and the solutions have much in common.A second is that knowledge of how to deal with today’s violence lies less with western institutions, more with emerging nations. Latin American community crime programs have much to offer to US and European cities struggling with gangs and drugs. This suggests very different ways of transferring knowledge than the ones we are used to.   A third is that institution-building is inevitably contentious, and that it takes decades to deliver durable results. This reality sits uncomfortably alongside the Bank’s relatively short operational time-horizons and risk-averse technical culture.   There are other implications too, and accepting them will require uncomfortable internal change. I’ve been pleasantly surprised so far by the enthusiasm the Bank is showing for reforming its approach to fragility and violence Visit the related web page
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