War's other victims

摘要

From Bosnia's rape camps and the horrors of Rwanda's genocide in the 1990s to the atrocities being perpetrated daily in northern Congo and Sudan's Darfur region, the tally of body bags runs alongside another grim body count: the numbers of women and girls, but in some places men and boys too, subjected to rape and other forms of sexual violence. Reliable and comprehensive figures are hard to come by: victims are often too traumatised or too fearful to speak out. But a report on "Sexual Violence in Armed Conflict" by the Geneva-based Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (dcaf) picks its way as systematically as it can through conflict after conflict, in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and the Middle East, piecing together the evidence.