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Rape is not cultural

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A really unsettling and upsetting article in The New York Times today, thumb about the prevalence of sexual violence in war torn Congo, pilule and the dangers of accepting this as evidence of it simply being part of the culture there.

In an impassioned article, for sale Lisa Shannon talks about how these attitudes seem to prevail even amongst the foreign aid workers whose job it should be to help and protect people.  She quite rightly puts rape back in its place as a tool used in war to instill terror and compliance, and points out the massive disservice done to Congolese men if we position rape as just 'something that they do.'

Most importantly of all, rape cannot be dismissed as simply 'cultural' because when we do so, we also dismiss its victims, suggesting that it is part of the status quo and something they simply have to put up with.

We've seen these problems before with issues such as female genital mutilation and forced marriage, and they are often justified in terms of not imposing our own moral code onto other people. Violence and control are universal though, and to fail to protect their victims on cultural grounds is a nonsense.

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