Robinson pleads for support to tackle rape crisis

FORMER President Mary Robinson has appealed to the Irish public to champion the protection of women in the developing world from an increasing wave of rape and violence.

Ms Robinson, who now travels the globe as a human rights campaigner, said aid agencies and the ordinary people who supported them needed to view violence against women as just as critical an issue as famine and refugee crises.

She said the problem of rape of women and young girls in the Darfur region of Sudan had worsened over the past year and it had become a serious concern in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

“Terrible things have been happening in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” she said. “I would say as we speak, on the ground probably many hundreds of women are being raped.”

Ms Robinson was in Ireland to review the work of a consortium of 13 Irish aid agencies who have been working for the past year with the official Irish Aid programme and the defence forces to bring violence against women to the fore in their work in developing countries and conflict zones.

As a result of the initiative, which was prompted by the atrocities in Darfur, all 1,790 Irish peacekeepers on duty abroad this year received specialist training on the subject and are now training peacekeepers from other countries.

The aid agencies have also pledged to tackle the problem through measures like placing more local women in positions of power in the countries where they work and pursuing all cases of violence against women with local law authorities.

Minister for Overseas Development Conor Lenihan backed the initiative and said Ireland was taking an international lead in highlighting the problem.

“We will not be people who hide and fail to confront serious issues when they present themselves,” he said.

Ms Robinson said the rape of vulnerable women and girls not only resulted in physical injury, sexually transmitted diseases and sometimes death, but also unwanted pregnancies and a stigma that often resulted in further violence and rejection by the victim’s family.

In Darfur, where the refugee camps house mainly women and children, families went hungry because the women were too afraid to venture out for firewood to cook their food aid rations, and even in countries that were relatively conflict-free, sexual violence caused turmoil in communities.