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Sexual Assault And Rape

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I. Description of the Research Topic
Sexual assault and rape culture have become a predominant issue around the world. Ranging from college campuses to small villages in Rwanda, women are being taken advantage of for the benefit of men. Sexual assault detrimentally affects women and their way of life. In the following paper, I will discuss political violence through sexual assault in two countries, The Democratic of Congo, and Darfur the region in Sudan; the statistics of sexual assault on college campuses in the United States; laws, policies, procedures, and human rights developed to address sexual assault and how they affect women; sexual violence in the workplace; and current events about sexual assault and the effect on women today.
II. …show more content…
The Kivu Conflict, which began back in 2004 and remains current between the military of the DRC and the Hutu power, which was backed by Rwanda rebels. The biggest issue that was raised during this time was the use of rape as a weapon of war. The mass raping that occurred was stated as politically strategic weapon used by militias and military with the aim to destroy society (Trenholm, Olsen, Ahlberg, 2009, pg. 141). These rapes presented a regression in women’s economic status, taking away the ability to work, increasing poverty, and having a tsunami of HIV/AIDs flow through the Congo, which could be claimed as the “gender-based murder of women” (True, pg. 71). There were similar catastrophes that took place in Darfur. The soldiers raped women in public, beat them, and left injuries to last a lifetime and was not only considered a weapon of war, but also an act of genocide (Corcoran, 2008, pg. 206,211). In both of these countries the women are not brought justice and the men, if not killed from the war, are able to walk freely. Women are not as capable or trained, especially in the DRC and Darfur, to be able to protect them from sexual assault based on the political state, environment, and economic …show more content…
Many countries, such as the DRC and Sudan, do not prosecute sex crimes therefore I will focus on the laws and process in the United States and in Spain. I have personal experience in dealing with the legal system and the process of pressing charges against a man who raped me, which I was almost apart of the over 90% of women who do not report sexual assaults in college, but instead I chose to be apart of the 10% of women who do report their sexual assaults. I was provided facts about Title IX from my university, but had no other support, but my case is different because I was raped out of the country in Spain. In Spain, women are highly valued, which is different from places such as Darfur. This past December, even though women are highly valued in Spain, they did not side with my case and found my rapist not guilty of the crime he committed against me over a year and a half ago. Although some people may believe I would have let that get me down, I did the exact opposite of being down after I found out the results of my trial. I have not started advocating about sexual assault and telling my story to others to bring awareness to the topic. What was difficult and what made the process completely different for me was that my rape happened in another country. Where I didn’t speak the same language and

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