"they got me... i was 9 when they raped me."

Wayne Drash, of CNN, released a story today detailing a photographer's interview with a young Congolese girl, the victim of a gang-rape when she was just nine years old. The story's release is timed perfectly with the efforts of US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today, as she pressures the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo to do something about the country's out-of-control violence against women and children. (Read one reporter's take on her efforts here.)

Sherrlyn Borkgren, a photographer and freelance journalist, spent a month in DRC last year. There, she met a young, timid girl who bravely spoke up about her gang-rape by a group of Congolese soldiers. Borkgren told CNN, "These two soldiers nabbed her, put a bag over her head and pulled her into the bushes. She explains it as, 'They got me'."

According to the article, the United Nations estimates 200,000 women and girls have been raped in Congo over the last 12 years, as rape became a weapon of war when civil war broke out in Congo. A senior researcher with Human Rights Watch is quoted as saying, "It is one of the worst places in the world to be a woman or girl. These are often soldiers and combatants deliberately targeting women and raping them as a strategy of war, either to punish a community, to terrorize a community or to humiliate them." She goes on to say that rape, often perpetrated by two or more men, is sometimes carried out in front of the victim's family, in front of other children.

Drash highlights other key points in the Congo rape crisis, aided and abetted by the violence between Congo and Rwanda, quoted directly as follows:

• According to the United Nations, there were 15,996 new cases of sexual violence registered throughout Congo in 2008. Nearly two out of every three rapes were carried out against children, most of them adolescent girls, the Human Rights Watch report says.
• Aid groups have started to see an uptick of rapes of men this year, although women and girls remain the primary targets.
• One 15-year-old girl who was held in a hole for five months and gang-raped nearly every day. She had gone out shopping when soldiers approached. "They asked me to take off my clothes, and I did. There wasn't much I could do," the girl [said]. "They took me into the bush. I stayed for five months with these people, and when I came back, I was five months pregnant."
• Congo has taken some measures to try to curb the sexual violence. In 2006, its parliament passed a law criminalizing rape, with penalties ranging from five to 20 years. Penalties are doubled under certain circumstances, including gang-rape and if the perpetrator is a public official. (Ummm, does that mean rape WASN'T a crime until 2006?!)
• On her travels throughout Congo, Borkgren says she once came face-to-face with soldiers when she was shopping at a market by herself. One of the men said he wanted to "take me up to his camp." She still can't shake the looks of the local women who were there. "That was interesting," she says. "When the soldiers were harassing me, the women looked ashamed of the soldiers. And when they saw me tell them, 'No, go away,' the women looked at me quite surprised."

When Borkgren found the little girl whose story would move her so deeply, they got along instantly. Her father, however, was hesitant to let the photographer into their home; he told her that, after the rape, he had gone to authorities but had received no help or even recognition. Borkgren recalls that the young girl, so innocent, was sometimes unable to describe what had happened to her. "She would say, 'I don't understand what it is, and I don't know what words to use.' It just turned my heart to think that here's this little girl who doesn't even have the words to describe what happened to her, and has to live her life having had this violence put upon her. Just this thoughtless violence that she didn't deserve or ask for. It's so inhumane."