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Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma
ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wamt20
Gender Relations and Social Reintegration of Rape
Survivors in South Kivu: An Analysis of Favorable
and Unfavorable Factors for Reintegration
Cécilia Agino Foussiakda, Ntinu Mutama Kabesha, Germaine Furaha Mirindi,
Claire Gavray & Adelaïde Blavier
To cite this article: Cécilia Agino Foussiakda, Ntinu Mutama Kabesha, Germaine Furaha Mirindi,
Claire Gavray & Adelaïde Blavier (2022): Gender Relations and Social Reintegration of Rape
Survivors in South Kivu: An Analysis of Favorable and Unfavorable Factors for Reintegration,
Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, DOI: 10.1080/10926771.2022.2133655
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10926771.2022.2133655
Published online: 12 Oct 2022.
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Gender Relations and Social Reintegration of Rape
Survivors in South Kivu: An Analysis of Favorable and
Unfavorable Factors for Reintegration
Cécilia Agino Foussiakda
a
, Ntinu Mutama Kabesha
b
, Germaine Furaha Mirindi
b
,
Claire Gavray
a
, and Adelaïde Blavier
a
a
Psychology Department, Faculty of Psychology, Logopedics and Education Sciences, University of Liege,
Liege, Belgium;
b
Social Sciences, Université Evangélique En Afrique, Bukavu, Democratic Republic of
Congo
ABSTRACT
Stereotypical beliefs about male honor often impede the social
reintegration of rape victims. We conducted a qualitative study
in Kalehe territory in the province of South Kivu, Democratic
Republic of Congo, to understand strategies that facilitate the
continuity of married life despite dishonor due to the rape of
their wife. We interviewed men and women in eight couples
separately. Our respondents implemented marital survival
mechanisms that had not been thought out or planned. These
strategies mainly involved a symbolic acceptance of women
after rape. In our sample, some men remained in their marriages
despite the perceived economic, sexual, and identity-related
emasculation that made them less than men. Others engaged
in polygamy. The presence of children born of rape made it
dicult to their mothers for social reintegration. However,
female children born from rape seemed to better reintegration
than boys because of house chores, and marriage, from which
their stepfather would benet a bride price. The boys, on the
other hand, were considered as herders and a potential danger
associated with their biological fathers. In conclusion, our study
shows that, although women reintegrated their matrimonial
homes, they experience violence due to the hegemonic mascu-
line socialization and patriarchal foundations.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 08 November 2021
Revised 19 June 2022
Accepted 22 September 2022
KEYWORDS
Strategy; reintegration; rape
survivors; gender; dishonor;
emasculation; polygamy
Rape is an extremely serious practice that frightens women in the eastern
Democratic Republic of Congo. It is used by various armed groups to humili-
ate and dishonor local communities (Dunia, 2017). Women are raped by
military in various circumstances. They experience rape at home in the pre-
sence or absence of their husbands. After the attack, the perpetrators abduct
and take them into the forest to serve as sex slaves to their attackers for several
days, or even months causing threat to their husbands to flee. Those who
cannot flee are either killed or beaten and subject to enforcement to watch
their wives being raped (Mouflet, 2008). Women are raped outside their
CONTACT Cécilia Agino Foussiakda ceciliaagino@gmail.com Psychology Department, Faculty of Psychology,
Logopedics and Education Sciences, University of Liege, Liege, Belgium
JOURNAL OF AGGRESSION, MALTREATMENT & TRAUMA
https://doi.org/10.1080/10926771.2022.2133655
© 2022 Taylor & Francis
homes, in the fields, when getting water or going to the bush to look for
firewood (Duroch, 2004).
According to Baaz and Stern (2009), rape in the Congo has been examined
under several possible explanations. First, rape is a kind of booty of war in
which men rape and commit acts of sexual violence to their victims for their
own enjoyment. Second, military use rape to terrorize and subjugate commu-
nities to impair the dignity of their male enemies. Third, it is used as a weapon
to destroy the community structural relationships. Many armed groups
destroy family ties by violently raping Congolese women to live their victims
sterile. We have observed a kind of male power that fits into the ideological
axioms of male supremacy that feminist writer Dworkin and Dufresne (2006)
defines as a man’s capacity to terrorize, by using himself and constraint to
induce fear in a class of people.
A marriage often breaks down after a rape has occurred. Some surviving
female victims of rape, those who were not a subject driven to the forest for
sextape slavery, are referred to hospital for medical treatment. Consequently,
some are fired or abandoned by their husbands. In that case, a long process is
necessary before the women can return home. During this separation, the
children remain with their father if survived from killing. Sometimes a father
flees far from his home village, abandoning his children. If this happens, they
are taken by relatives (grandparents, uncles, aunts, etc.) to await the possible
return of one of their parents (Kelly et al., 2011).
There is no doubt that the effects of rape last longer than the act itself.
A woman who has been a subject to rape in a field is afraid of coming back to
her farming activities. Thus, there is a decline in family productivity and
sudden increase in poverty and food insecurity. Women who become preg-
nant after a rape are often forced to bear their unwanted children, as the
community views abortion as an outcast act and illegal (Nelson et al., 2011). In
addition to the physical scars of rape, women often experience psychological
harm, which can reflect in serious depression, fear, anxiety, shame, guilt, and
persistent nightmares (Brown, 2012). Victims of rape and sexual violence do
not receive psychological treatment and are forced to relive their trauma
every day without support or emotional guidance. Many raped women are
abandoned by their husbands or their communities and labeled as impure and
outcast, often leading to revictimized (Kelly et al., 2011).
The effects of rape often go beyond the individual, affecting her family, her
village, and her whole community. The rapist’s goal is not only to mutilate or
kill his victim but also to control a whole sociopolitical process by paralyzing
it. This is an attack against both personal identity and cultural integrity
(Finnbakk & Nordås, 2018). Gottschall (2004) mentions that rape in wartime,
unlike rape in peacetime, is not identified as a crime of passion, related to
uncontrollable sexual urge. It is a crime motivated by the desire to dominate
women or other men through women. Feminist publications, as well as a good
2C. AGINO FOUSSIAKDA ET AL.
deal of social and historical research work, have shown that rape is not
a consequence of war but a strategy for waging war and is used to maintain
the order of the gender and social control over women (Branche & Virgili,
2011). It is one of the instruments of hegemonic masculine dominance
(Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005).
In patriarchal societies, women are often considered as depersonalized
symbols who bear men’s honor and reproduce the culture and other tradi-
tional values (Saucier et al., 2015). Thus, stereotyped beliefs about male honor
often led husbands to reject their wives in case of rape (Kelly et al., 2011),
whether individual or gang rape. This means that dishonoring a woman
amounts to dishonoring her entire community, and principally the men.
Women victims are injured not only by the rape but by the reactions of
their husbands and their communities, which have been dishonored.
Social reintegration is even more complicated for women who bear their
assailants’ children after rape (Kelly et al., 2011). These children, who are
symbols (products) of dishonor, compound the rape itself, and their existence
stresses the woman’s suffering and the discrimination against her by her
husband and the community. As the fruits of rape-caused pregnancies, these
children represent a real puzzle for their mothers and relatives, who are
responsible for raising a child they never wanted to have. In many cases,
these children are described as bad luck children or snake children
(Muhayisa et al., 2016).
Benghozi (1994) describes rape as dishonoring violence that incorporates
three levels of shame: being ashamed, being shameful and bearing shame. It is
an ongoing crime of defilement, a violence of shame that affects not only the
woman’s physical being but also her moral and social being (Moureau, 2017),
and this makes it difficult for the victim to reintegrate socially. It is both
shameful to live with a raped woman and dangerous to keep her in one’s
home (Guinamard, 2010). The most frequent reflex of husbands, and even the
community, is rejection. The most common social reaction is distancing and
stigmatization (Finnbakk & Nordås, 2018; Mahano & Kangami, 2018). Even in
France, and Europe in general, which are very different from South Kivu,
women say that they no longer feel like themselves after rape. They no longer
recognize themselves; they have changed and their whole life is turned upside-
down. Shame is also very common in Europe and the rest of the world, and
rejection is still frequent (Moureau, 2017).
Nevertheless, some raped women manage to reintegrate into their families
with their children if they and, most of all, their husbands develop resilience.
For example, Skjelsbæk (2006) reported that, in Bosnia, where rape was also
used as a weapon of war, some women were supported by their husbands after
being raped. To face up to their attackers, who wanted to exterminate an entire
ethnic group by attacking the women, the men developed resilience strategies.
We can describe this as positive masculinity that transforms men’s dishonor
JOURNAL OF AGGRESSION, MALTREATMENT & TRAUMA 3
into a strength enabling them to support women in difficult situations. In
Canada, survivors of rape take part in adaptive activities based on emotion
regulation such as sports, reading, and drawing. Other women turn to religion;
they attend church and pray often, seeking support, understanding, and
meaning for their lived experiences. Negative practices are also described,
such as drug and alcohol consumption to overcome emotions, as well as
isolation, avoidance, and denial. Self-destructive strategies without suicidal
ideations and multiple sex partners have also been reported (Northcott, 2013).
The sociocultural context in the DRC, a country where issues related to
inequality of men and women persist, would likely lead to different strategies
than those observed in Canada and Bosnia.
Several studies have focused on rape and sexual violence in the DRC, with
the aim of restoring women’s dignity and well-being, but very few have
analyzed the reasoning and strategies used by husbands to settle arguments
for or against the reintegration of the raped women into their marriage and
family. However, this is not automatically supported by an understanding,
welcoming, positive attitude, either individually or collectively, due to social
norms related to male domination, which consider rape as a kind of unfaith-
fulness and betrayal by the woman. Two tendencies are observed in men in the
DRC. The first is to be supportive of their wives insofar as they consider
themselves to be victims too. The second is to repudiate the victimized wife. In
either case, these behaviors are guided by the material and symbolic function-
ing of the group and the community, through a cost-benefit calculation. This
calculation also applies to the rape survivors in their exercise of reintegrating
into their households and families. Our study seeks to shed light on this kind
of reasoning and strategy within a married couple, by adopting a reading of
gender and paying particular attention to cases where a child was born of the
rape.
Method
A qualitative approach was used to define and understand the social reinte-
gration strategies that women and their husbands implement so they can
continue to live as a couple despite the rejection and stigmatization they
suffer from in their families and communities. First, a pre-survey was con-
ducted with the Panzi Foundation to identify rape survivors who had
received treatment there more than 10 years before. Then the survey was
done in Kalehe Territory, the homeland of many of the rape survivors who
had been treated by the Panzi Foundation, which put us in contact with
Naomi, a psychosocial assistant who lived there. Naomi was visited in
Kalehe, where she is responsible for a women’s group within the local church
affiliated with the Eighth Community of Pentecostal Churches in Central
Africa (8
e
CEPAC).
4C. AGINO FOUSSIAKDA ET AL.
Kalehe is one of eight territories in the province of South Kivu in the eastern
DRC. It is located about 80 kilometers north of Bukavu, the provincial capital,
and close to Kahuzi-Biega National Park, an area in which many armed groups
operate. The common language of the area is Swahili, but people also speak
their local language, Kihavu. The population lives mainly from agriculture; but
as is the case throughout South Kivu, women in Kalehe do not own land. To
earn money, a woman and her husband may also work on plantations belong-
ing to churches, non-governmental organizations, or certain individuals.
The selection of respondents was facilitated by Naomi, who speaks the local
language. Women concerned were firstly located and identified by our survey.
Then, the individual consent from each woman and her husband was
obtained. The selection process produced eight couples in which the wives
had been raped by members of armed groups. Interviewees included one
couple in which the wife had been raped before the marriage and only one
couple that did not have a child resulting from the rape. In this study, we did
not investigate cases of rape committed by members of the community in
which the victims lived, since in those cases the aggressors act cunningly to
avoid being identified and judged. Victims of this kind of rape are often too
ashamed and afraid to report it. Moreover, rape by a community member is
usually veiled in silence; the victim remains in her family, and consequently
she has never been treated or separated from her husband, which means that
the idea of reintegration into the family does not apply.
Women and men who took part in our study were interviewed simulta-
neously, in separate sessions, by a female interviewer and a male interviewer.
In this study area, a woman may not discuss intimate questions with a man
with whom she is not in an amorous relationship. Similarly, men would feel
embarrassed to discuss intimate matters with a woman. Nevertheless, we were
aware that positioning issues could mean that men would perceive the male
interviewer as a judge or a competitor and therefore might not reveal to him
certain weaknesses or failures caused by their socialization. In patriarchal
societies, men are taught from childhood to take ownership of paternal super-
iority through a feeling of rivalry, unlike little girls, who experience this
superiority with powerless admiration. Men occupy positions of power and
have more privileges than women as advocated in (Delphy, 2000). Our ana-
lyses are based both on individuals (husband and wife) taken in isolation and
on the couple. Here, the sampling unit is the individual, while the unit of
analysis is both the individual and the couple, which enabled us to compare
and understand the wife’s discourse in relation to her husband’s and to
identify the information we sought from the couple.
Our sample was composed of couples who were married and lived together
before the rape and who were still together, except for one couple in which the
wife had been raped before marriage, as mentioned above. In this work,
anonymity of interviewees has been protected by assigning letter codes to
JOURNAL OF AGGRESSION, MALTREATMENT & TRAUMA 5
the couples: CA, CB, CC, CD, CE, CF, CG, and CH. At the interview location,
the couple was placed in two separate rooms – the wife in one room and the
husband in another. To induce trust in the couples, interviews were conducted
in the residence of a former community organizer with the Panzi Foundation
known by the couples as facilitator as Naomi.
An interview guide was used in which the questions had been translated from
French into Swahili and others from Swahili to Kihavu. The interview essentially
concerned the couple’s perceptions of their experience before, during and after
the rape. The qualitative analysis consisted of reading and re-reading the narra-
tives to identify prominent and recurring themes. Themes were chosen based on
the number of times the issues were raised in the self-reported narrative.
Narratives stories were used to identify support man gave his wife and what
their daily experiences were in the community. We also analyzed the potential
impact of a child born of rape on familial and marital relations and the com-
munity’s influence on these relationships. This influence was captured through
the representations and discourse of the spouses participating in the study.
Results
Many strategies have been used by family and community members to support
the socio-reintegration of rape survivors. The latter include the support from
husbands, acceptance of polygamy by women and men, emasculation of men,
and having children in the family.
Support that survivors received from their husbands and others immediately
after the rape
All couples interviewed thought that, before the rape, they were leading
a functional lifestyle. The women were raped between 2002 and 2010, and
their children of rape were now 10 to 18 years old. All these victims said that
they had not received any support from their husband’s right after the rape,
whether the crime was committed at home or in the forest, where the women
had spent between six months and two years. Men were reluctant to sexual
intimacy for the fear to catch sexually transmitted diseases, mainly HIV.
Considering their wives to be impure since they had had sexual relations
with several unknown men, it was necessary for physicians, friends, parents,
fathers-in-law, or even other community members to intervene and make men
aware that they should not abandon their wives. This was the case with
Mr. CA, who said, “I was afraid that my wife had HIV, but I was reassured
by the hospital later.” Hence, we can see a double avoidance: the men avoided
contact with their wives, who had become unclean or ill in their eyes; they also
avoided facing the shame their spouses were now enveloped in. Thus, the
women victims received very few visitors during their stay in hospital.
6C. AGINO FOUSSIAKDA ET AL.
Polygamy as a way to escape from dishonor
The results show that, after women rape, the first reaction of all the men was to
think of marrying a second wife for obvious reasons, such as the inability to
care for their children and the devaluation of their wives considered as
prostitutes. In our study, three men opted for polygamy: Mr. CC, CD and
CF while others remained monogamous couples following their economic,
sexual, and identity-related emasculation as a subject of discussion in the
following section. In all cases, the men avoided divorcing their first wives
since they were unable to take care of the children when the women were not
there. In South Kivu, it is the custom that, if a couple divorces or separates, the
children remain with their father; in many cases, it is common for these
children to be mistreated by the new wife. Mrs. CC’s comments confirm this
inability on the part of men: she said, “When I returned from captivity in the
forest, I found my youngest child full of sand fleas; my husband was unable to
care for them correctly.” These stories reveal that there are fixed, gender-based
organizational imperatives that structure family functioning. In this context
and in patriarchal societies in general, the work of care is traditionally
women’s responsibility, Mr. CC told us,
I made several decisions: she left; she didn’t want to, but I had to remarry as well. But, on
the other hand, I wondered what I’d do with five children if my wife didn’t come back
home. So, I put up with it.
Taking care of the children and providing other kinds of care is a role assigned
to women, but, in patriarchal Congolese society, if a man fires his wife, the
latter does not take the children with her since they belong to their father. We
will not use the term “custody” since that would imply that a divorce had been
granted, whereas in rural areas that is an almost nonexistent procedure that
calls for sums of money that rural populations do not generally possess. The
three men also justified their polygamy by considering that their wives had
become impure and unclean, essentially prostitutes. Talking of her husband,
Mrs. CF said,
My husband went off and took another wife, but after nine years, he came back to me
becoming a drunkard, insulting me too often, and calling me an Interahamwe woman
(the term refers to Hutu militia who committed the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and
who immigrated to DR Congo), and convicting me for not running away during the
rape.
Mrs. CF herself considered that she was guilty and felt obliged to apologize to
her husband. Mrs. CF was raped twice by two different attackers at different
times. Her husband considered her to be a prostitute since she was unable to
flee. During the interview, she admitted to us that she had been soiled and no
longer deserved to take her place at her husband’s side. Thus, she saw his
polygamy as a sort of pardon she had been granted. When talking about
JOURNAL OF AGGRESSION, MALTREATMENT & TRAUMA 7
polygamy, Mrs. CG said, “I pardoned my husband because he had pardoned
me too.” The reasons mentioned above led Mrs. CF and Mrs. CG to internalize
a kind of guilt. We use the term “pardon” because they considered being raped
as dishonoring not only their husbands but their communities. Mrs. CD
stated,
He couldn’t stand the fact that I was raped. He went and married a second wife, and he
spends more time with her. He doesn’t do anything at home anymore. He’s become very
violent, like a madman. He drinks alcohol and he’s starting to terrify me. He never stops
insulting me, saying that I’m a prostitute, I should return to my husbands, but he was
there when the bandits came.
According to these remarks, Mr. CD considered that his wife had become the
wife of her assailants, which is why he used the word “husbands” in the plural.
Mrs. CF and Mrs. CD had to continue living with their husbands, who now
maintained a second home where they spent most of their time. Their pre-
carious economic situation kept them under male domination and induced
them to tolerate conjugal violence. They would not find it easy to marry again
in their environment because of the dishonor and defilement they bore but
also because of the number of children they had to support. Mr. CD married
a second wife but abandoned her after nine years and returned to his legit-
imate spouse. In this case, we note that there are two victims: the first wife,
whose economic precarity and dishonor meant she had to agree to stay
married to Mr. CD, and the second wife, who was abandoned along with her
child and thus became an indirect victim of the rape.
As for Mr. CC, his first reflex was to marry another woman and have
a child out of wedlock, but he decided to return to his first wife in exchange
with certain value to her because of her deflowerance. He told us, “Great
women come from the village. Imagine that you were the first one to know
her [sexually], and then suddenly this incident happens. And you tell
yourself, it could happen to anyone!” This man had great consideration
for his wife. His words “great women come from the village” mean that
villagers are women of value, virgins, morally acceptable compared with city
women.
The three men who became polygamous had in common the fact that their
wives had experienced multiple rapes and had remained with their attackers
for several months. These men resisted welcoming their wives back and
treated them as prostitutes – dirty and impure – when returning home; all
of them became violent against the survivor. The five other men remained in
monogamous couples for various reasons. Mr. CA and CH were physically
attacked while their wives were being raped in front of them. They felt sexually
weakened and incapable of marrying second wives. Mr. CD admitted indir-
ectly that he did not have many material goods and consequently was unable
to marry a second wife. He said,
8C. AGINO FOUSSIAKDA ET AL.
Some people asked me to abandon my wife and marry another, but I said to
myselfHT that I had no father and no material goods to get one. So, I decided
to keep on prayingHT and wait for my wife, and after six months, she came
back.
Men who remained in monogamous couples shared the following charac-
teristics: they participated in farm work with their wives, they prayed, they
prioritized their children, they did not have the financial resources to marry
a second wife, and they had been counseled by friends or the church even
though their family members (brothers and parents) told them not to stay with
a defiled woman. Mr. CA said, “I went to Panzi with my wife, and I gave her
advice, telling her to be patient because God would help her, and I was praying
for her to be cured.”
Rape of the wife and emasculation of her husband
For men, the loss of material goods reduced their power over their wives. They
were no longer able to satisfy their wives either materially or sexually, nor
could they take a second wife. Based on social representations and certain
widespread stereotypes, a man who does not meet those two criteria is not
a man: he loses his identity. The case of the CA couple explains this perfectly.
Mr. CA could not marry a second wife because he was financially unable to do
so. He said,
Some people advised me to take a second wife because I should not remain [die] with
only two children, but I have no father or mother and I don’t have enough property to
marry a second wife. I don’t have the means to clothe her and here’s the family [talking
about his two children] that God gave me.
As for his wife, Mrs. CA complained of her husband’s inability to give her
more children. In her view, satisfaction as a couple was conditioned by
fertility. Since her husband had watched her being raped and experienced
physical, and probably sexual, violence, he had lost his virility, and therefore
his masculinity. He was seen as less than a man or not a man by his wife, who
nonetheless decided to remain in the marriage. Both partners were at rock
bottom and had no choice but to continue living together. Mrs. CA said,
You see him like that but he’s not a man anymore. My husband is no longer a man: he
doesn’t do anything in bed anymore. I can’t talk about this to relatives because my
husband has never had the courage to talk about it either. I’m unable to conceive and
I suffer a lot while I’m ovulating.
Mr. CA’s remarks strengthened the argument about their sexual dysfunction
following the rape. Each of them accused the other. Mr. CA said, “Yes, she gets
her period twice a month, and that leads her to believe that something’s wrong
with me. She tells me, ‘It can’t be on my side.’” In these comments, he assigns
JOURNAL OF AGGRESSION, MALTREATMENT & TRAUMA 9
responsibility for the couple’s sexual dysfunction to his wife’s irregular men-
strual cycle, yet at the same time, he ends up acknowledging his sexual
impotence by stating, “I was beaten around my hips and since then it hurts
when I have sex.” The CH couple had a similar problem: the wife’s menstrual
cycle was disrupted, and the husband became sexually impotent after being
beaten around his hips. It is clear to see that the attackers’ objective was not
only to rape the women but also to dishonor their husbands by making them
impotent. This is a case of rape used as a weapon of war to destroy a whole
community.
Children can unify or disturb the family
The children of rape are unloved; often, they are accepted by their siblings and
the husband only as additional workers for the family. They owe their exis-
tence within the family to their mothers. Mrs. CD said, “If I die, this child will
no longer survive.” She was worried about the future of her child, who was
perceived as a disruptive factor. Moreover, Mr. CD considered the boy as likely
to corrupt the couple’s other children; he was like a symbol of his Interahamwe
father – the killer, the rapist, the thief who could never father a good child. In
the CD and CG couples, the child of rape was considered as a stranger in the
family and in the community; these children were often stigmatized when they
played with their half-sibling or neighbors’ children. Mrs. CD said this about
her daughter born of rape:
The neighbors mutter when they see her go by, and wherever she wants to play, people
say that she’s Interahamwe. We hid it from her, and we hid it from our children, but it’s
hard to hide these kinds of things: people sometimes insult her, especially when she’s
playing with other children.
When he was asked how many children the couple had, Mr. CG said six, then
went silent, and then said, “There’s also the one the quarrel is about – the one
we say isn’t ours.” This husband says “we” to represent the family or the
couple, which might lead one to believe that his wife also has doubts about the
child’s parentage. In reality, “we” refers to the man and his other children.
Mrs. CD decided to send her child to school, against the will of her husband,
who wanted to use him to look after the goat. We observed that the mother
was strongly attached to her child, unlike the father, who considered him to be
a goatherd or employee. Conflicts exist within the couple, both as marital
partners and in their role as parents, because of the presence in the family of
children born of rape. These children constantly remind people that their
mother was raped. Despite the discrimination, these children experienced
from their siblings, their stepfathers and the community, all the women in
our sample felt a maternal bond to their children. Mrs. CC had this to say on
the topic:
10 C. AGINO FOUSSIAKDA ET AL.
His brothers never stop insulting him all day long, saying that when my husband and
I will die, they will end up firing him, and that hurts me a lot. They treat him as
Interahamwe and tell him that he consumes their food unnecessarily even though he
is not a member of their family. My elder child once asked if he could go back to his
father. My family in-laws advised my husband to kill the new child, but he didn’t want to
and justified it by saying that he’d end up leaving the house when he grows up. If I had
enough money, I’d buy him some land far from the village where he could set up house.
We heard the same discourse from the CD couple when they talked about their
children born of rape. Mrs. CD said, “They live in harmony but that’s because
I’m still alive. After I die, I’m sure they’ll be kicked out of the house. It’s
because of them that my husband went and married another wife.”
Our female respondents were not at all satisfied with their conjugal and
parental life. They suffered and wondered about their children’s future. The
husbands seemed to minimize the problem in their discourse; they wanted to
show that everything was fine, and their marital relationships were working
despite difficulties and poverty. They related everything to material goods, in
line with the roles assigned to them within the group. Their wives’ feelings and
pain meant absolutely nothing to them. This behavior stems from the way in
which boys and young men have been socialized through the ages so that they
are able to resist pain and do not appear weak. This is corroborated by
Mrs. CB’s comments, which contradict her husband’s: “After the rape, and
especially after my husband learned that the attacker impregnated me, he said
he didn’t love me anymore because I was carrying an Interahamwe child, and
he would corrupt my children.” The husband, on the other hand, said,
“Everything is fine with us, because before my wife was raped, we weren’t as
poor as we are now. This child is ours too – he doesn’t have anywhere else to
go.” Meanwhile, Mr. CD stated, “The neighbors always tell my two children
that they are Interahamwe, but the children work hard, especially the girl.” The
stepfather came to accept the new child over time, and this acceptance was
conditioned by the fact that the child contributed to the household labor.
Talking about her husband, Mrs. CD told us, “In the beginning, he didn’t want
this child but after being advised by friends and parishioners, he ended up
accepting him.”
Community as a pillar of social integration of rape survivors
In wartime, rape can be considered as a social fact; consequently, it needs to be
combatted by the whole community. Certain community members think this
way and work to make the male victims aware that they should not reject their
wives. Some comments from our female respondents appear below:
He didn’t want to go to the hospital with me, but the neighbors almost forced him to do
it. (Mrs. CA). He wanted to repudiate me, but the neighbors dissuaded him because I had
been raped while he was there, and I wasn’t the only case. (Mrs. CD). He’d already kicked
JOURNAL OF AGGRESSION, MALTREATMENT & TRAUMA 11
me out, but later, I’d say his brother forced him to take me back for the good of the
children. (Mrs. CC)
These quotes show that, when several members of a community were raped, it
created solidarity and they mutually supported each other. This solidarity is
reinforced by the family ties existing in many South Kivu villages, where the
inhabitants are grouped into clans. In this system of social organization,
respect for elders – for fathers-in-law and parents – plays a big role. The
family has a strong impact on the couple, as a son-in-law owes his father-in-
law respect. “My dad played a huge role with his advice and by using his
authority,” said Mrs. CG. Mrs. CB describes how she was supported by her
husband, following advice received from other men whose wives had been
rape victims in the past:
My husband only adopted the child a few years later, based on the advice he got from
other men, and mainly one of his friends in Kalehe whose wife had been raped and who
had agreed to keep living with her. They encouraged saying that if they had been women,
they would have been raped too, but the luck was that they were men. Hence, we gained
trust from both men and women.
The initial rejection by men whose wives were raped was justified by the fact
that they expected to be more stigmatized than supported by the community
because of the dishonor. Their first reaction was to leave their victim wives. As
mentioned above, it takes collective resilience to face up to a wrong perceived
as affecting the community. The rape survivors also showed solidarity: they
supported each other because they had all gone through the same thing. They
took new victims to treatment centers, gave them advice, visited them, and
helped them during childbirth.In addition to that, medical treatment centers
are a great help with the women’s social reintegration. Some men rejected their
wives not only because of the dishonor, but also because they were afraid of
catching sexually transmitted diseases, due to stereotypes suggesting that any
woman who has been raped has HIV. Mr. CA, for example, said that it was
only after they went to Panzi that he was evidenced that his wife had not been
infected and decided her support after confirmation revealed by medical and
psychological treatment for returning home.
Case of rape occurring before the couple’s marriage
Mrs. CE is the only woman in our study who was raped six months before the
marriage. Despite everything, her fiancé did not abandon her. Here is Mr. CE’s
story:
She was raped when we were still engaged, I loved her and I decided to marry her despite
everything. She was crazy happy; she was so surprised that she fainted. She often tends to
underestimate herself; I tell her to try and talk to me about her problems. In any case, for
now, thanks to advice from my friends, I have no more doubts. In the beginning,
12 C. AGINO FOUSSIAKDA ET AL.
I worried of what everyone might say about me. Before, we were living in the same house,
but we did not have the same opinions. We didn’t even have sex for the fear of sexual
intimacy dominance. We went to a health center where we were diagnosed, and they
found that neither of us had HIV.
Mrs. CE’s behavior might suggest self-victimization. The wife’s fainting was
fueled by the lack of hope in her fiancé to marry her. She told herself that she
no longer deserved to be married, as reported to us. Since she had become
unclean and shameful, she no longer imagined that she could be loved, let
alone married, especially by a man who knew about the rape. Therefore, rape
and couple’s resilience depend on the attitudes of both partners, victim and
her spouse. It is argued that Mr. CE really loved his fiancée and did not have to
be pressured to marry her. He never blamed her for what had happened. In
this district, young men and women often marry spouses they did not neces-
sarily choose for themselves; marriages are often arranged by the parents. Free
choice often occurs when the young men are financially independent: they
have a good job or are landowners so they can provide the bride price without
any help from their parents.
At the time of the interview, Mrs. CE had post-traumatic stress disorder; she
would not agree to have sex with her husband, who, for his part, was still afraid
of getting a sexually transmitted disease. In the case of this couple, the
husband’s support was crucial in developing the victim’s resilience. It was
very clear that this husband was showing love, tenderness, and empathy, which
improved his wife’s self-esteem.
Discussion
When we talk about the social reintegration of rape victims, we postulate
a return to their previous situation and social relations. This study aims at
analyzing strategies used by husband to facilitate the reintegration of survivors
of rape in the family. Our results show that the woman is doubly undermined,
by the dominant patriarchal system and by the rape, which makes her “less
than a woman”; thus, gender relations and socially constructed inequalities are
created that appear to regulate the dominating relationships admitted by the
victim. Bourdieu (1998) states that, when dominated people apply schemas
that are the outcome of domination to what dominates them, their acts of
knowledge are inevitably acts of acknowledgment, of submission. Kaufman
(1999) mentions that in patriarchal societies dominated by men, violence or
the threat of violence is a mechanism used from childhood to establish
a hierarchy. When a man mistreats a woman, it is not because he has lost
control but because he is imposing control over her.
Our results show that couples do not use rational, thought-out strategies that
they planned and then implemented; rather, they display a set of behaviors and
strategies to continue living as a couple and face the dishonor due to rape. Men
JOURNAL OF AGGRESSION, MALTREATMENT & TRAUMA 13
and women in this study were not great strategists, but simply people who had to
cope with the situation life had handed them, with gendered social injunctions
and with their own resources, to manage from day to day. They applied adapta-
tion strategies and cost-benefit calculations and handled numerous contradic-
tions, tension and connections between factors that are favorable (resilience-
related) or unfavorable (risk-related) to reintegration. The couples’ source of
resilience came from without friends and family, children or the church.
A certain temporality is observed regarding to woman’s acceptance within the
couple. The immediate refusal after the rape by the man tends to be justified by
rape with the only possibility of reintegration in case the woman has received
support from friends, family’s advice for the husband to bear the victim.
Gender, as a dynamic process, is at work in the movement between the
resistance of culturally and socially rooted hierarchies, inequalities and resis-
tance as stated by Bereni et al. (2008). These factors and movements are visible at
every level of social reality in our results: in the woman’s conceptions, attitudes,
and behaviors; in her husband; in the close family; in relations among survivors;
and in relations with the extended family, the community, local authorities, and
important people, including religious authorities, and outside players (medical
personnel) regarding rules, laws and beliefs. Men developed several strategies,
starting from their dominance, to facilitate the women’s reintegration into
married couple after rape for example: polygamy, which provides the physical
presence of another woman to take care of the children, in the absence of the first
wife; the reduction in virility following the men’s physical and sexual emascula-
tion, which makes them more supportive of their wives; the counseling by
friends and family, community, and mainly the church, of both men and
women; the symbolic acceptance of children of rape by the husbands of the
rape victims for reasons of individual interest, including cow herding by boys
and housework by girls.
Polygamy appears to be a kind of symbolic violence (Bourdieu, 1998), which
is legitimized by the women themselves as a sort of pardon granted by their
husbands. It is a harmful effect of male domination, but in Africa this kind of
marriage is also, as Kakassa (2018) points out, rooted in traditional customs and
in the imaginative world, and is explained as enabling the survival of clan, family,
or community. In the imagination, it spawns the representation of a loving
relationship that is fragile, that faces the permanent risk of breaking up but that
must, in this ideal vision, be freely granted, including by the woman who
undergoes it. This is very different from a modern couple for whom similar
tensions would lead to divorce. From these results, it is clearly stated the
intersection of social relations related to gender and class. Rural women experi-
ence both economic and intellectual vulnerability, which reinforce social
inequalities and keep them inferior to men. They remain under male domina-
tion and are not well informed of their rights and remain under the yoke of
custom and religion.
14 C. AGINO FOUSSIAKDA ET AL.
Men who were financially and sexually emasculated seemed to be more
supportive of their wives. In fact, deprived of their dominance, they were unable
to marry second wives or separate from their first wives, whom they were no
longer able to satisfy sexually or materially. The men’s loss of virility reduced
their domination over women. They became less than men, or even feminized
men (Sivakumaran, 2007), especially in a society where sexual relationships
appear as a relation of social dominance constructed based on the fundamental
division between male (active) and female (passive) principles (Bourdieu, 1998).
As a result, it was difficult to reach conclusions in our study regarding whether
this category of men had a real strategy for supporting their wives who had
survived from rape. These devalued men appearance to be supportive but, they
no longer had sufficient means to dominate their wives.
An interesting finding of this work was the revelation of a certain solidarity
among different stakeholders in the social system. For women, it was clear that
there was solidarity among victims, but not necessarily among all women. As
mentioned above, some community members, particularly the victims’ neigh-
bors, insulted the children born of rape, which hurt the parents of these
children, especially the mothers. It believed that some women were defendant
to the concept of man dominance while others are attributing dominance to
other women. Even though they recognize the weight of discrimination they
themselves are the victims of, they support the argument that explicitly con-
tests discrimination for fear of betraying their culture and damaging family
and social cohesion. They are afraid of being suspected of having “Western
morals,” associated with perversion (Pambè & Sawadogo, 2017).
Gender in action through societal norms imposes uniform femininity on all
women. There are good women, who fit into the established norms, and bad
women, who do not fit the norms, whether due to constraint or by choice. As
this study found, a woman raped is a bad woman, because she dishonors her
husband and the whole community. The latter no longer meets the criteria for
positive womanhood. According to these norms essentially made of
a scoreboard for women dominance, women are categorized into two groups:
Good, who are likely to accuse and judge women and Bad woman. This refers
both to Bourdieu’s (1998) concept of symbolic violence and to the dimension
of gender as a social construction. Note that the fact that one of the women
respondents gave herself sexually for the first time to her husband mitigated
his anger and facilitated her reintegration into the couple. Virginity is
a cultural value; it is a symbol of the man’s honor and shapes the value of
women in several areas in the DRC.
As for men, we can see a major division into two positions. On one hand,
according to our investigations, those who had been direct or indirect victims
of rape in the past encouraged their counterparts to support their wives
through this ordeal and not to abandon them. On the other hand, another
larger category of men advised their counterparts to repudiate their wives. It is
JOURNAL OF AGGRESSION, MALTREATMENT & TRAUMA 15
interesting to note that men in the first category became resilient, since they
benefited from support and coaching from community members and advice
from parents-in-law, friends, and medical personnel.
Considering attachment to children, whether they were the couple’s or just
one partner’s, is a key factor in married life. Yet, men remained in the couple
for fear of having to look after their children alone since, in our study area,
children remain with their fathers in case of divorce. This attachment to
children is ambiguous in the case of children born of rape. For this category,
it appears a priori that girls are favored over boys. In fact, in absolute terms,
the children’s status is different: girls have instrumental value and boys have
symbolic value (Bereni et al., 2008). These two kinds of value are hierarchically
ordered: symbolic value is considered superior to instrumental value. But in
the case of children of rape, girls represent a material advantage while boys
represent a danger to the community of men. Acceptance by the stepfather
and siblings are due to gender in action. From this perspective, women must
do housework, while men guard the cattle – the symbol of wealth. The
existence of children of rape in the families of rape survivors makes it more
difficult for these women to reintegrate since, in addition to constituting
evidence of the rape, they are symbols of their biological fathers and constantly
remind the family of the traumatic event.
Furthermore, the position of girls is even more difficult in a family where they
are not considered full-fledged family members, but rather objects to be used. In
a study of the challenges facing foster families in eastern DRC, Foussiakda and
Kasherwa (2020) found that, in the city of Bukavu, some girls who were living in
the street or experiencing other difficulties and who were placed in foster
families ran the risk of sexual abuse by their foster fathers. Girls who were the
outcome of rape were also subject to such abuse. Nevertheless, in our study, girls
appeared to be better accepted than boys, probably because they provided free
housework and family care and gave their fathers a chance to acquire material
goods through their bride prices. Their duties included getting water, cooking,
and farming, while the boys were herders.
Finally, in the case of the rape happened before marriage, the husband’s
support seems to have been crucial for developing the victim’s resilience. The
husband’s story was a manifestation of love, tenderness, and empathy, which
enhanced his wife’s self-esteem. This result is like those of Koudou et al. (2016),
who observed the same phenomenon in numerous rape victims in Côte d’Ivoire.
This couple deserves to be valued by their community and could serve as a model
for other couples living through similar problems. In the eyes of the community,
this kind of man is considered to bear his wife’s dishonor and his masculinity is
reduced; paradoxically, this strengthens his resilience and consolidates the cou-
ple, as he builds solidarity with his wife to overcome the community’s challenges.
Similar cases are mentioned in Skjelsbæk’s (2006) study, in which some men
were able to support their wives: instead of avenging their male honor on them,
16 C. AGINO FOUSSIAKDA ET AL.
they protected them from society. Overall, our results showed that even when
wives were physically reintegrated back with their husbands, they underwent
a second wave of violence, the outcome of hegemonic masculine socialization
and the patriarchal foundations of their home community.
Conclusion
Several mechanisms are used by husbands and their wives to facilitate the
reintegration of rape survivors into the marital relationship. These mechan-
isms range from acceptance of polygamy to real support from husband to her
wife. Many couples stay together because of their children, but child born from
rape is a disruptive element in the marriage.
Men marry second wives because they are no longer able to have sex with rape
survivors whom they consider impure, unclean, and likely to have contracted
sexually transmitted diseases. Moreover, having a second wife is a kind of punish-
ment for women who are now considered prostitutes, unfaithful and dishonor-
able. In fact, men accept to stay in a married couple because they have lost the
power of domination. Indeed, they have been emasculated economically and
sexually. Other men and women stay in the marital relationship because they are
not able to care of their children individually. In a patriarchal system, women are
more responsible for children than men who are viewed as responsible to family
financial support. The reintegration of women who have children born from rape
is advocated as child gender based. Indeed, in on side, girl is more likely to be
accepted by the father who uses her in the household work and hopes to receive
the dowry when she gets married. The boy, on the other hand, is seen as a rapist
and is perceived only as a worker who will take care of animals, for example.
Finally, our results show that the social organization favors the maintenance of
women in their conjugal couples. The villages are organized into clans, and the
men are under pressure from their relatives (brothers, fathers-in-law, fathers) and
receive advice on how to stay in their marriage. As for the women, they receive
support from their sisters, who are sometimes organized into an association of
survivors with the support of civil society organizations and the church.
Therefore, psycho-social support for survivors of rape is important to facilitate
their reintegration into the marital relationship.
Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful for the grant funding provided by the Centre d’Excellence Denis
Mukwege of the Université Evangélique en Afrique.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
JOURNAL OF AGGRESSION, MALTREATMENT & TRAUMA 17
Funding
This work was supported by the Centre d’Excellence Dénis Mukwege
Ethical standard and informed consent
The present study was approved by the National Committee of Health Ethics under the
number CNES001/DPSK/177PP/2020. All participants provided informed consent before the
discussion to be done.
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