The making and re-making of the ‘rape capital of the world’: on colonial durabilities and the politics of sexual violence statistics in DRC

This article examines the production of knowledge about sexual violence in the postcolonial warscape of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), with a particular eye on the politics of statistics. Over the last decade, ‘hard numbers’ have become central to ‘knowing’ sexual violence in conflict, including in DRC. Statistics depicting the exceptional scale of sexual violence in DRC were core to its making as the ‘rape capital of the world’. Given the challenges of quantifying this sensitive issue, sexual violence statistics are nevertheless imbued with striking, if misleading, reliability. In this piece, I explore how sexual violence statistics in DRC are produced and consider what they can and cannot convey. Subsequently placing DRC in historical context, I highlight eerie resonances of this contemporary emphasis on sexual violence with the country’s colonial past. Doing so, I join postcolonial scholars in calling attention to colonial durabilities that shape the knowledges that are not only accepted, but perhaps expected, in a region long cast under a deeply and intimately sexuo-racialised gaze. Notably, this gaze is one that depicts the ‘Congolese woman’ as always-already a victim, and the ‘Congolese man’ as always-already defined by presumed ‘perpetratorhood’. Affirming the importance of such analytical vigilance vis-à-vis sexual violence statistics in particular, this article concludes by calling for concurrent authorial vigilance on the part of critical scholars. Indeed, we must ensure that efforts to complicate dominant narratives of sexual violence in DRC do not undermine, silence, or deny the experiential realities encoded in the knowledges we critique.