Horror in the Congo Wars

Sarah blogs here on the horiffic implementation of rape as a weapon of war. She discusses her thoughts on the related Guardian article raising much-needed awareness of the subject.

The behaviour of these soldiers, like that participants in countless other wars, is characterised by dehumanisation, outlined here by Amnesty International.

As Kate Bermingham asks, how can a man do this to another human being?

The answer is that they are not doing it to another human being, they are doing it to an anonymous representative of their opposition.

We have seen pictures of Iraqi prisoners of war being tortured by our forces with bags over their heads. This is a common way of physically dehumanising victims of abuse.

Hitler managed to persuade thousands of Nazis to take part in the Holocaust, in which millions of Jews were murdered.

He engineered their dehumanisation through mass propaganda dealing with them as a parasitic collective devoid of individual identities. He also forced all Jews to wear their religious symbol, a star, stripping them of any overriding physical differences within their community.

Now women are being raped in the context of war. I wonder if any of these women's heads are covered too.

Unfortunately women are an easily dehumanised target of abuse in some cultures becase they are considered inferior to men anyway.

War does terrible things to its victims, but also to the minds of its perpetrators. William Golding's 'Lord of the Flies' depicts how 'man is inherently tied to society, and without it, we would likely return to savagery'.

When society degenerates into a state of war, many of its citizens, denied the social structure to which their moral and social values are attached, regress into an animalistic state and become members of a pack, shedding their own value systems for an often vicious group mentality that allows them to abdicate from personal responsibility.

In this way, they dehumanise themselves as well as their victims.

Donate to the victims of rape in the Congo Wars