In one of the more haunting stories in Christina Lamb’s urgent book, a 7-month-old baby is raped. A mother returns from working in the fields in eastern Congo to find her house ransacked by a militia group and her daughter wailing from pain. The mother notices a red gash on the baby’s bottom and takes her to a nearby medical center. From there, the pair is sent to the town of Bukavu, 160 miles away, to a hospital that has treated 55,000 victims of sexual assault since 1999. Even to the doctor, who has treated many such cases, the assault is shocking: The infant’s anus has ruptured from the force. “I hope whoever did this will go to jail for years,” the distraught mother tells Lamb. Most likely, he won’t.
The atrocities in “Our Bodies, Their Battlefields” horrify, as they should. Lamb, a veteran foreign correspondent for The Sunday Times of London, does society a service by forcing us to look. Rape, she writes, is the “most neglected” war crime of the 1949 Geneva Convention. It’s rarely prosecuted. It’s rarely written about. Here, she provides one of the first exhaustive examinations of sexual violence as a deliberate weapon, used to inflict terror and humiliation. Her book is painful to read but should be required for everyone interested in military and global affairs.
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