Interventions addressing ritualistic child sexual abuse in post-conflict Eastern DRC: Reflections on child welfare policy and programming

Background

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has been branded the ‘rape capital of the world’ and one of the ‘most dangerous places to be a woman or a girl’ (Wallström, 2011: 3). During the last two decades of armed conflicts in Eastern DRC, extreme forms of sexual assault against women and children have been used by the different parties in the battles as ‘weapons of war’ to inflict terror, humiliation, reprisal or massive destruction of the victims (Kaste, 2015). But currently, in the post-conflict period, a disturbing observation is that sexual abuse of women and children may have spread from armed perpetrators to the civilian population – what is particularly known as the ‘civilian adoption of rape’ (Bartels et al., 2010). Despite a recent claim by President Joseph Kabila that ‘DRC was held up as an example of combatting sexual assault’ and a sustained campaign of some governmental structures that cases of rape have fallen by 50 percent over the last 2 years (Maclean, 2016), the prevailing widespread cases of ritualistic child sexual abuse (RCSA) in Eastern DRC are proof of the persisting high prevalence of systematic sexual violence against women and children in the aftermath of armed conflict. For example, from the 13,681 victims of sexual violence documented at Panzi Hospital from January 2008 to December 2015, nearly 3014 (22%) victims were children, among which 522 (17.3%) were less than 10 years and 2492 (82.7%) below 17 years (Panzi Referral Hospital, 2016). In South Kivu province, as many as 82 cases of sexual violence against under-10-year-old girls were reported in 2014 alone (Panzi Referral Hospital, 2014: 19). Similarly, Maclean (2016) reported 49 children below 10 years and one only 18 months old who have been abducted from flimsy houses in Kavumu and systematically raped at night. What is particularly disturbing and new about this epidemic phenomenon is not only that children are being attacked from specific communities by unknown conspirators at night (Naama Haviv, ¹ cited by TheLipTV, 2016), but also the allegations of superstitious beliefs and magical practices pertaining to many such cases. It is argued that the alleged innocence and virginity of children make them more vulnerable to different forms of RCSA in Eastern DRC. Although there is no generally accepted definition of RCSA (Snow and Sorensen, 1990), mainstream views of the phenomenon emphasize its predatory and traumatic nature, the exploitation of the victim using force or grooming, the association of the abuse with religious practice or superstition (Lanning, 1992; Michalski, 2016). For the purpose of this study, RCSA is defined as any form of sexually oriented ill-treatment of a child or group of children based on superstitious beliefs, supernatural and magical practices, occurring in a systematic way (Lanning, 1992). Unlike some generalist perspectives defining ritualistic rape as a ‘normative’ or socially condoned phenomenon in many cultures (Michalski, 2016), RCSA in the context of post-conflict DRC is conceptualized as involving extreme social predation. According to Cooney and Phillips (2002), predatory sexual violence is the illegal or otherwise socially condemned sexual abuse or exploitation of a human being occurring in a unilateral fashion via force and which is often unexpected by the victim. Sexual predators therefore typically intend to hide their activities or carry them out covertly (Michalski, 2016). Renner and Yurchesyn (1994) used the concept ‘sexual robbery’ to emphasize the unconsented and predatory character of RCSA, involving an additional sexual intent, and the force must also be recognized as a means to an end. Similarly, RCSA in Eastern DRC involves wide conspiracy and is generally unacceptable socially, legally and culturally. Thus, RCSA in DRC is neither cultural nor sexual; it is criminal.

In extremely difficult conditions, some agencies offer some therapeutic assistance to the victimized children, including medical care and psychosocial, socioeconomic and legal assistance, but many such agencies lack adequate potential for meeting the best needs and interests of the affected children and their families and communities. The focus of this article is to examine the interventions addressing RCSA in post-conflict Eastern DRC. In the next section, a brief overview of the study approach and methods is provided, while the subsequent sections present and discuss key findings in relation to RCSA and the available interventions to address it in Eastern DRC.

Study approach and methods

This article is mainly based on data from an exploratory study conducted by the authors from September 2016 to July 2017: RCSA in post-conflict Eastern DRC. The study was qualitative, based on primary and secondary data collected in Bukavu town and Kabare, Walungu and Uvira territories in Eastern DRC. Using an emic perspective, the study applied multiple techniques of inquiry, including unstructured interviews and focus group discussions (FGDs). These multiple techniques of data collection enabled the researchers to triangulate findings by collecting and comparing information from different sources and locations (Laws et al., 2008). Participants in the study involved 9 children survivors (interviewed through task-based techniques), 13 parents or caregivers of the victimized children (standardized in-depth interviews) and 19 key informants, including presumed perpetrators, child protection officers, health workers and administrative authorities (individual in-depth interviews). It was also deemed crucial to involve other members of the community in the study through FGDs, conducted in Kavumu, Bukavu and Sange in South Kivu province. The study was conducted in line with the ethical principles for research studies involving human subjects. Keen attention was paid to protecting all participants’ identity and to obtaining their consent to research before the interviews. The study strictly observed levels of child-centredness in the study design, data collection and presentation, and paid much attention to principles such as ‘do no harm’, offering, signposting psychosocial supports as key distress management techniques during individual interviews with different categories of respondents, including children, parents and presumed perpetrators. For the analysis, the different interviews and FGDs were recorded on a voice recorder, manually transcribed in word files, translated into English and analysed based on the conceptual frameworks adopted and with respect to the major themes, using content analysis techniques. The long explanations and personal experience of respondents were capitalized for direct quotations and enriching the discussion of key results. This article presents just a small amount of the data from the study.

RCSA as a predatory form of child maltreatment

This study examined four interlinked forms of RCSA in Eastern DRC, including child kidnapping for sexual assault, incestuous sexual abuse, child sexual exploitation and cult-based child marriage. The different forms were considered ritualistic on the basis of two criteria: the magical practices pertaining to the abuse and the superstitious beliefs that surround the perpetrators’ motives in assaulting the victims. Concerning the magical practices, most of the perpetrators gang-raped the victims, mutilated their private organs for blood shedding and extracted some blood from their genitals for dark magical practices. Parents and relatives of the victims in some areas reported having collected a number of artefacts from the places where their ‘destroyed daughters’, as they call them, have been molested and many such artefacts corroborated both the allegations of the abusers’ magical practices and the prevailing conspiracy for RCSA in Eastern DRC. Such artefacts often included small bottles full of blood, handkerchiefs, rubbers and razors, among others. As for the superstitious beliefs, the informants revealed the following three categories of abject beliefs relevant to childhood and virginity: ‘raping a virgin can strengthen the protection charms’; ‘raping a virgin can heal HIV/AIDS and other Sexually Transmissible Infections, STIs’; ‘raping a virgin can provide the rapist with financial and economic power’.

Child kidnapping associated with extreme sexual assault often occurred at night and mainly targeted children below 10 years. It consisted of abducting innocent children from their homes and gang-raping them for magical and superstition-based purposes. Perpetrators of such forms of child abuse reportedly used mystical power to hypnotize the parents and relatives of the victims so that they succeeded to get in their houses at night and abduct the victims:

[…] while we were sleeping at night that day, I realized that one of my little daughters (3 years) was missing in her bed. When I tried to look around, I saw some torch light around the house; by that time the offenders were on their way returning the kid. I cried over them and they dropped the kid outside and run away. We found the child still bleeding. (Parent of a child victim, Kavumu city)

This form of RCSA was also associated with torture of the victims that could be linked to what Bob Passantino (2009) described as ‘contemporary Satanism’. Unlike the other forms of child abuse, this form was often brought to public opinion due to its unprecedented cruel nature.

Incestuous sexual abuse was also considered as a significant form of RCSA. Unlike some psychological critiques that link incestuous child abuse to mere obsessive paedophilia (Lanning, 1992; Snow and Sorensen, 1990), some cases of incestuous child sexual abuse in Eastern DRC were linked to dark rituals, magical practices and superstitious beliefs among the offenders. The following extracts best highlight the point:

Sometimes you miss the genital blood from a virgin girl requested by the witchdoctor to strengthen the protection charm and in this case, you can even get it from your own kids, provided that everything takes place in extreme privacy. (Presumed perpetrator, Kabare Prison)

Child sexual exploitation mainly involved grooming, where offenders offered some goods such as food, snacks or toys to the victims in exchange for sexual gratification. Like the first two forms of RCSA, many cases of child sexual exploitation were also based on different superstition, particularly the belief that ‘having sex with a virgin child can heal HIV/AIDS and other STIs’ or the belief that ‘raping a virgin can provide the rapist with financial and economic power’. Thus, many perpetrators used gradual grooming and offering, to successfully perpetrate the abuse on the child. The extract here below illustrates the point:

I and my little sister used to go in the house of our neighbour who was a ‘Major’ (deputy military officer) in the National Army. One day, we arrived there after school, while that man was alone in the house, he gave us some spaghetti and fish. After eating, the man asked both of us to go in his bedroom and bring him a cup of water. We brought him water in a plastic cup which he refused. He asked us to go back in the room, find a good glass and bring him water. When we went back in the room, he appeared naked, closed the door and started lying on both of us in his own bedroom. He also told us not to tell to anybody about what he had done to us or he would shoot us and everyone in our family using his guns. (Child victim, Bukavu town)

It is worth mentioning that the survivor here above (9 years) was infected with HIV/AIDS on that occasion and she is now undergoing anti-retroviral treatment.

Finally, cult-based child marriage was also reported to be an acute form of RCSA in Eastern DRC. When asked about this, the FGD participants in Kavumu argued that apart from various socioeconomic and cultural drivers of this phenomenon, certain emerging religious beliefs are among its forefront drivers:

In this community, a new religious confession named ‘Synagogue Umoja’ was created a few years ago and since then, it is ultimately promoting the marriage of girls as young as ten years to adult men in exchange of USD 100 paid to the families of the girls by the church leader. That church is located in Karhanda village and gathers some Christians who flee the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant church. (FGD participants, Kavumu city)

Respondents also revealed that Synagogue Umoja has branches in Bukavu town, in Walungu territory and other neighbouring villages. Girls in all branches of the ‘Synagogue’ are compelled to have sexual relationships with different adult men as part of the religious rituals, and the mode of baptism used by the religious leaders is sexual intercourse between the baptizer and the person being baptized. The motivation behind child marriage in this ‘Synagogue’ was an alleged inspiration that its spiritual leader claims that he had obtained from his ‘Lord’, revealed the respondents in the study. After they had been married in that context, many girls ‘either passed out or run mad in case they attempted to desist from the Synagogue and its rituals’, reported the FGD Participants in Kavumu. When asked about the allegations of child marriage and sexual abuse in their church, a member of the Synagogue interviewed in the study replied

[…] that is total nonsense my dear! In fact, getting married at an age below 18 years is not a problem in my opinion. For example, my own mother, who also got married at 14, is she no longer a woman? If she wouldn’t have married at that age, maybe she wouldn’t have given birth to me. (A member of the Synagogue Umoja, Karhanda village)

It goes without saying that RCSA in post-conflict Eastern DRC takes multiple forms. There are as well many factors associated with the phenomenon, including socioeconomic factors, political instability–related factors, developmental factors and drug abuse–related factors. However, this study indicated that magical practice and superstitious beliefs were the key triggers of many cases. Research evidence proved that the basic motivation for many perpetrators was to defile the victim, get the genital blood associated with the defilement and mix it with some traditional herbs to solve specific life problems. For example, during the prosecution of some perpetrators in December 2017, a witch doctor associated with RCSA conspiracy in Kabare acknowledged having been using ‘the blood from defiled virgin girls and sperm from innocent boys to strengthen the power of his protection charms’ (Kavumu Prosecution Office, 2017).

Concerning the link between the different forms of RCSA described here and the recurrent armed conflicts in Eastern DRC, many cases documented in the study were committed by armed perpetrators, militiamen and former combatants who had served in different rebel groups during the war. Many such rebel groups had developed the belief in magical rituals and superstition for the protection of their respective militiamen, especially the belief in a magical power that could make them invisible to the enemies during the battles or that could protect them against live bullets fired by their enemies during the war. Other cases were perpetrated by civilians who had experienced extremely traumatic experiences during the war. Based on the stressful background and the adverse forms of abuse they had experienced during the war, many such perpetrators developed criminal personalities that induced them to perpetrate RCSA in the post-war period. In addition, no specific intervention has focused on the resocialization of the former militiamen when they were demobilized and reintegrated in their communities or when they were integrated in the national army or the police. Thus, it is more likely that they will keep on perpetrating different forms of criminal acts in the aftermath of armed conflict, as a result of similar acts they learned and experienced during the war. With respect to this, many categories of perpetrators were mentioned by the study participants and identified in the local correctional facilities (including elements of the national army and police, civilians and other local militiamen). But militiamen of the rebel group named ‘Jeshi ya Yesu’ (Army of Jesus) were revealed as the key presumed perpetrators of RCSA for alleged reasons of protection rituals. The ringleader of this militia and some of his militiamen (including a presumed witch doctor who advised the militiamen to rape very young girls to be assured of having supernatural protection and invulnerability to live bullets during the battles) were arrested in June 2016, convicted, and sentenced to life imprisonment over RCSA, in the Kavumu Prosecution Office in December 2017.

The factors associated with this practice are elaborated in a separate article on RCSA abuse in post-conflict Eastern DRC (Kasherwa and Twikirize, 2018). The next section discusses the current responses to RCSA undertaken by both the governmental and non-governmental actors.

Interventions addressing RCSA

The interventions addressing RCSA in Eastern DRC mainly involve governmental mechanisms, non-governmental frontline services and indigenous self-help mechanisms.

The government of DRC has ratified international treaties and frameworks for the protection of children, including the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC); the African Charter on the Rights and Welfare of Children; the Additional Protocol of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights; the Pact on Security, Stability and Development in the Great Lakes Region; and Resolution 1325 of the United Nations Security Council UNSC. At national level, on 10 January 2009, the government enacted the Child Protection Act No. 09/001 of 2009. Other relevant policies have also been developed for addressing different forms of violence and exploitation of children, including the 2006 law on sexual violence (Loi sur les violences sexuelle, 2006), which provides guidelines for identifying and responding to violence of a sexual nature. The government also launched in 2013 a zero-tolerance policy for cases of sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) and President Kabila appointed a special advisor on SGBV in 2014. However, although the government has adopted and ratified all these legislations, little has been done to translate them into practice. The prevailing weak capacities of governmental structures as well as the culture of corruption and impunity are just a few of the many challenges impeding the governmental efforts for curbing RCSA. For example, when asked about governmental assistance they had received since their children were abused, a mother of a victimized child reported that

[n]obody from the government has come to help us. Sometimes we hear them saying on the radio that they’ve given the victims this and that, but we’ve never had anything, so we don’t know where the money is going. (Mother of a child victim, Kavumu city)

There is increasing recognition that the role of governmental structures such as the police, the probation and welfare officers, and other local leaders at community level is limited by resource-based constraints. To start with the police, the head of the child protection and the fight against SGBV police unit in South Kivu province explained that the unit had no budget for expenses, had limited stationery and had no computer. Officers had to ask victims to provide their own paper to document the cases and the unit did not have a dedicated vehicle, which prevented staff from transporting victims to the police station and to and from hospital (Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund [SCIAF], 2008). In addition, the unit lacked forensic equipment and training; it had no equipment for collecting DNA or even for taking fingerprints. There was no formal victim and witness protection scheme, and intimidation of victims was common, as was the traditional way of settling disputes by exchanging money or goods (SCIAF, 2008). Likewise, some parents of the victimized children reported that

[w]henever you go to the police for help in case you are attacked at night, they ask you for fuel to put in their cars so that they can come at your home for assisting you. In other cases, you only find one or two policemen at the police station and they tell you that they cannot leave the post alone just for helping you. (Mother of a victim, Bukavu)

Sometimes, when you come to report the case to the police at night, they alternatively take you and the victim in a dungeon for alleged investigations and ask you to pay some money before they can allow you to take the victim to hospital after long hours of detention. This often exacerbates the victim’s physical and psychological lesions. (Father of a child victim, Kavumu)

As for the other local authorities such as the probation officers, the prosecutors, the territorial administrators and the traditional leaders, they play an important role in documenting cases of RCSA, convicting and prosecuting the presumed perpetrators. However, the role of such administrative authorities for fighting RCSA is limited by different issues, including corruption, resource constraints, political interference and the lack of formal evidence for RCSA. For example, when asked about his response on RCSA, the prosecutor at Kavumu court reported that

[o]ne of the main challenges faced by our services is the lack of formal evidences on the basis of which presumed perpetrators can be convicted. In fact, while some perpetrators are indeed recognized guilty and convicted, in many cases we release some presumed perpetrators since we do not find the required physical evidences for sexual assault. We cannot convict somebody on the basis of mere presumptions. (Prosecutor, Kavumu court)

In contrast to the above allegations, civil society activists and parents of the victims revealed that the administrative authorities are ineffective in prosecuting the presumed perpetrators of RCSA because of practices around corruption, political influence, and tedious and costly judicial procedures. The following extract illustrates the point:

A former prosecutor based in this community until 2016 was nicknamed by the local population ‘Mr. Cent dollars’ (Mr. USD 100) as he used to help the arrested presumed perpetrators of RCSA and other criminals to find their ways out of jail after they had paid him a bribe up to USD 100. In other cases, he also arrested the parents or relatives of the victims who came to report cases of RCSA and demanded them to pay some money for being released. (Civil society activist, Kavumu city)

Concerning the non-governmental structures, they include both national frontline structures and international agencies intervening within a wide spectrum of interventions addressing SGBV. In extremely difficult conditions, such agencies play a crucial role in monitoring and denouncing cases of child abuse, providing remedial care and case management to the victims, linking the victims to the available medical services for appropriate treatment, counselling, and legal assistance to the victims and advocacy for prosecuting perpetrators of SGBV. For example, Panzi Hospital and the Panzi Foundation (the main referral structures for survivors of SGBV in Eastern DRC) have developed a comprehensible care model named ‘One Stop Center’ for survivors of war-related sexual violence. This holistic model includes medical care, psychological care, legal assistance and socioeconomic assistance. The medical assistance component focuses on the physical lesions and health problems directly associated with sexual assault such as fistulas, ² prolapses, HIV/AIDS and other Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs). Psychosocial assistance involves dealing with the immediate mental health disorders among the victims such as trauma, stigmatization and poor self-esteem. The socioeconomic assistance component generally offers the victim basic assistance such as school fees, clothing, loans and some capital for starting an income-generating activity. The legal assistance component is all about a legal clinic attached to the Panzi Foundation that plays an important role in monitoring cases of sexual abuse and advocating for the prosecution of perpetrators. The following extracts describe the survivors’ points of view on the assistance received from non-governmental structures:

Of course we had received some help from two main structures, the Panzi hospital and Coopera. From the two structures, the victimized kids had received medical and psychosocial assistance and some of them are still receiving some school fees from the Coopera NGO. However, there are many other local NGOs whose agents come here only for asking us questions but whenever they get some funds for helping us, they never come back to our community. (Parent of a child victim, Kavumu)

We no longer wish to talk to anybody from an NGO concerning what had happened to our kids in this community. Some NGOs’ workers have been coming here asking us different questions about what had happened to our ‘destroyed daughters’. Most of them had promised us important things such as jobs, school fees and dresses for our children but years are now passing and they never come back and the phone numbers they left to us never go through. (FGD, Kavumu)

Other victims’ parents in Kavumu suspected some non-governmental structures to be secretly supporting the militiamen and perpetrators of RCSA in that community in order to justify the persistence of the problem for receiving additional funds from their backers. Because of this, journalists, NGO (non-governmental organization) workers and researchers coming to collect information on this phenomenon are very often locked up and submitted to serious questioning by the community members before being allowed an opportunity for interviews. The following extract illustrates the point:

You see, many NGOs had deceived us here and we now behave like mad people. I remember, one day we had locked up a white staff member of an International NGO in a house here because he just came asking us questions without leaving us some money or any tangible solution for our victimized daughters; yet they are allegedly the ones secretly supporting the RCSA conspirators in this community. We locked him up and had decided to kill him to revenge our destroyed daughters. Later on, he paid us some money for being released. (FGD, Kavumu)

Finally, some indigenous mechanisms for coping with RCSA were also implemented in some communities. In Kabare territory, for example, a civil society activist reported that

[w]e have launched an alternative mutual protection mechanism named ‘Ngwasa!’ (call for rescue!). This basically means that in the dead of the night in case somebody is attacked, he/she may just shout ‘Ngwasa’ and all neighbours must wake up for their rescue. We think that in case the local population widely adopts this mechanism, we may succeed to catch the conspirators at community level and seriously punish them. (Civil society activist, Kabare)

It goes without saying that the ‘Ngwasa’ mechanism is a mutual protection system among members of the community, based on the concept of ‘African solidarity’. Prior to this system, every adult person at community level should feel responsible for protecting any unaccompanied child whether the latter belongs to him or not. According to the informants, the concept of solidarity as promoted by the local communities in rural Eastern DRC is deep-rooted in the ‘Ubuntu’ notion and conveys the idea of humanity, compassion and goodness as fundamental communitarian mechanisms for addressing RCSA. Some respondents highlighted this point using the following proverb from the Mashi language:

‘O’muntu baba bantu’ (a person is made of other persons); it is due to the cohesion we are now developing in our community here that we shall overcome RCSA in our community. Since we decided to create an association of victims’ parents, we had achieved a lot of positive results, including the conviction of the main perpetrators. (FGD, Kavumu)

It is worth mentioning that the above self-help associations for victims’ parents work together with the civil society activists and other SGBV taskforces to advocate for the rehabilitation and protection of their children as well as for effective prevention of RCSA at community level.

Reflections for child welfare policy and programming

Child welfare encompasses a variety of policies, programmes and services designed to ensure that children are safe and that families have the necessary support to care for their children successfully. Following the Child Welfare Information Gateway (2012), child welfare agencies typically support or coordinate services to prevent child abuse and neglect; provide services to families that need help for protecting and caring for their children; receive and investigate reports of possible child abuse and neglect; assess child and family needs, strengths and resources; arrange for children to live with kin (i.e. relatives) or with foster families when safety cannot be ensured at home; support the well-being of children living with relatives or foster families, including ensuring that their educational needs are addressed, and often work with the children, youth and families to achieve family reunification, adoption or other permanent family connections for children and youth leaving foster care.

In post-conflict DRC, although many supporting programmes are in place to address sexual abuse of women and girls from a generalist point of view, no such programmes have thoroughly focused on the particular needs of children survivors. The different interventions are based on a remedial care model, providing almost the same services to both adult women and children survivors of various forms of rape; they lack a child-centred perspective.

As has been already stated, the governmental mechanisms are extremely weak in effectively addressing the prevailing forms of RCSA. In addition, the governmental structures hardly participate in the coordination of the interventions addressing SGBV, mainly funded by international donors, because of their weak capacities and distrust (Douma and Hilhorst, 2012). Apart from the incapacity of the governmental authorities to enforce perpetrators of RCSA due to the prevailing culture of corruption, impunity and political interference, there is also critical disagreement between the governmental and non-governmental agencies on the statistics of sexual violence cases. For example, while the governmental authorities claimed that such cases in 2016 had decreased by about 50 percent over the 2 previous years, many frontline service providers reported that the situation was rather going the other way. ³ Branded the ‘World capital of rape’ in 2010 by Margot Wallström, the former special representative of the UN Secretary-General on sexual violence in conflict zones, the DRC has been trying to get rid of this moniker ever since (Maclean, 2016).

Concerning the non-governmental frontline agencies, it was noted that services are financed within a wider spectrum of interventions addressing SGBV in general. Following Douma and Hilhorst (2012: 9), such interventions have in recent years mushroomed to incorporate an estimated 300–400 Congolese international and community-based organizations in the North and South Kivu provinces. Although this appears to be helpful in a context of multiple post-war issues, it raises a number of critical challenges relevant to child protection. First, the approaches of many such organizations do not take into account the particular needs, interests and contextual background of the victimized children. Not only do many such structures lack adequate social work expertise, but also most of them are scattered around a number of other complex post-conflict issues, including ex-child soldiers, street children, humanitarian aid to Internally Displaced People (IDPs) and communities affected by armed conflicts, and female empowerment, with the possibility of being extremely overloaded.

Second, the basic referral system for addressing SGBV lacks effective coordination networks and there is little willingness among the agencies to collaborate. For example, the agencies that specialize in foster care have their own protocol and standards, as do the agencies that specialize in medical care or counselling. Moreover, the different agencies focus on remedial and humanitarian care models, and they all lack sustainable prevention and outreach components. These coordination-related problems among the agencies have led to duplication, fragmentation and deficient accountability among the structures; all programmes remain available in big cities and hardly reach the victimized children in remote areas. The other challenge is the presence of many opportunistic organizations that lack concrete expertise and mainly have an interest in securing funding. For example, despite US$86.4 million sexual violence-labelled funds from multi-donor trust-funds (MDTF, Pooled Fund) and some other bilateral donors in 2010 alone (Douma and Hilhorst, 2012), very little attention has been paid by the different agencies to the particular needs of survivors of RCSA. Also associated with this is the lack of a coordinated evidence-based approach among the different interventions and referral systems; this particularly exacerbates the scarcity of reliable data and evidence associated with RCSA, as every agency provided different statistics of cases. After the case is reported to the police, the victimized children are conducted to nearby health facilities which are supposed to provide them with first aid and refer them to Panzi Referral Hospital for advanced treatment. However, it is very hard to find exhaustive evidence of the abuse, including statistics and physical evidence, after the victims have been conducted to the different facilities since none of the different structures track such evidence due to limited equipment and forensic expertise.

Third, although the different agencies provided counselling as a basic psychosocial support to the survivors, their staff have not been adequately prepared for providing sound case management since the outbreak of the war. For example, a UNOCHA (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) supervised evaluation carried out in December 2005 concluded that many psychosocial activities undertaken by national associations do more harm than good, and recommended the closure of several counselling centres, including some supported by international NGOs (Rodriguez, 2007). The different services were also based on Western counselling models and seldom complied with the survivors’ sociocultural backgrounds. Many such interventions tended to treat the child victims in isolation from their community and family context, with the possibility of re-victimization by the time the children were reunited with their families. Fourth, although there is an increasing consensus that RCSA may lead to critical long-term effects on the victims, such as complicated childbearing, perverse sexual arousals, increased post-partum depression, obstetric complications and many others, the different programmes on the ground focus on treating the immediate short-term effects of the phenomenon, including fistulae, HIV/AIDS and traumas.

Regarding key policy recommendations, the study commends the efforts of the different stakeholders for addressing SGBV against women and children from a generalist point of view. However, given the fact that RCSA is a particularly challenging child protection problem, the different actors need to address it from a child-centred perspective rather than viewing it through the wider SGBV lenses. Beyond mere policy adoption or ratification, the government of DRC should clearly acknowledge RCSA as a child protection problem of crucial significance with critical effects and address it through specific governmental programme implementation and appropriate budget allocation. As for the different NGOs and donors, they should consider designing comprehensible interventions that take into account the particular needs of the affected children and those at risk. It is important that the different agencies adopt specific child-centred therapies such as play therapy, cognitive-behavioural therapy, stage-specific model, child-friendly occupational therapy, narrative therapy, mutual support and self-help groups and many others. Effective prevention and response also require a functioning cooperation between the different frontline agencies. Through this concerted and coordinated approach, child protection services, heath structures, local and international NGOs, counselling agencies, human rights and similar human services structures should all be part of a national taskforce for addressing the root causes of RCSA and mitigating its effects. With respect to this, the already existing efforts, such as SOS jeune fille en danger, V-men, Trial and many others, need to be commended and strengthened.

As for the implications for social work training and practice, it is worth mentioning that the social work profession is mandated to promote social justice, human rights, social cohesion and social development to enhance people’s empowerment and liberation. Social workers therefore operate at the point where social forces and individual behaviour meet and work to improve the consequences of both human choices and social disadvantages (International Association of Schools of Social Work [IASSW] et al., 2014). Social workers are also expected to apply theories of human behaviour and social systems to intervene at the points where people interact with their environments to bring about the desired changes (Sossou and Yogtiba, 2009). A post-conflict setting is a particularly complex environment where professional social work interventions are crucially needed. Apart from the direct and indirect victims of RCSA in DRC, there are many other particularly vulnerable groups that deserve social work and social development interventions, for example children on the streets, former child soldiers, orphans, victims of domestic violence and persons with disabilities (Bazilashe et al., 2018). Despite this, in post-conflict DRC no professional social work workforce exists, and the social work field is still filled by non-social workers. Likewise, no formal social work programme was offered at university until 2013, when the Université Evangélique en Afrique (UEA; Eastern DRC) launched a 5-year BA programme in social work. The first cohort of this programme will graduate in 2018, and it is expected that the new social work taskforce will bring more innovations to the social work field. Therefore, there is a crucial question of integrating the efforts and rich experience of the non-specialists and the academic knowledge of the new social work graduates. It is also crucial that the trained social workers consider gathering into professional taskforces to strengthen their voice and share experiences of the interventions on the prevailing social problems in the aftermath of armed conflict. Through this approach, professional social workers and the social work departments in DRC should consider developing important collaborations with the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW), the IASSW and other associations of social workers around the globe.

Concluding remarks

In this study, it has been argued that RCSA is a child protection problem of crucial significance in post-conflict Eastern DRC. From a more ‘emic’ perspective, the study has revealed that RCSA is not socially or culturally condoned at the community level in Eastern DRC. But the interventions on the ground lack adequate potentials for effectively addressing the prevailing forms of RCSA. The Congolese government has adopted and ratified different national and international child protection-related policies but never follows through on the implementation of tangible programmes or plans for preventing and addressing child sexual abuse; meanwhile the approach of non-governmental structures addressing the issue under a spectrum of generalist programmes for women survivors of SGBV remains remedial. This generalist framework of responding to violence against children neither takes into account the best interests, needs and contextual background of the victimized children, nor does it treat the long-term effects of the phenomenon on the victims. The lack of effective coordination, collaboration and referral systems among the different agencies as well as the prevailing shortage of local expertise in social work are just a few of the challenges faced by the different non-governmental agencies for worthily preventing and responding to RCSA in post-conflict Eastern DRC. Finally, the article suggests that the government of DRC and the different child protection taskforces invest in real child-centred programmes for effective prevention and supportive services to the families and communities that are unable to meet the responsibility of protecting their children from violence, neglect and exploitation.