Between 2021 and 2022, the number of reported cases of gender-based violence doubled from 40,000 to over 80,000 in the DRC.

War. She put the word ‘trauma’ in my life, and I carry her around like a suitcase full of memories. I've been asked to shut up so much that the day I decided to come out of silence, the world was too stunned to hear me.

My name is Marie*, a young Congolese girl living in a village in the east of a wartorn country. Violence and conflict have been part of daily life for people in North Kivu for over a decade. I can no longer remember the day when everything changed, and it hurts that I can no longer remember the taste of happiness or the smell of freedom. When did my tears start to seep into my skin? When weren't they able to stop?

One day, as I was walking home from school, I was abducted by a group of soldiers and taken to a nearby field. There I was brutally raped and beaten. I was traumatized by the experience. I have often been told about gang rape, the pain that women endure, the unspeakable horrors that happen to them, and the torture that continues despite the unspeakable pain. I uttered so many inaudible cries, my mouth open, my eyelids closed, and my fingers clenched. I screamed out until my throat was sore, praying for a miracle. Yet no sound came out, and no one ever knew. No one ever knew how much pain I was in, how much pain I suffered from every instrument inserted into my genitalia, and how much I wished it all would stop.

I was then taken to a military base and raped by a commander who made me his sex slave. The doctors at the military camp told me that with excellent medical care, I will not have scars from my injuries. They didn't think about what was in my heart. 

Torn away from my family, I no longer wanted anything, not even to breathe. I did not see the point of it after having discovered weeks later that I was carrying HIV/AIDS and pregnant at only 13 years old. How can I describe my pain, like a stain that does not wash away, a shadow that I cannot get rid of, a weight that makes my back bend, a wound that never stops bleeding?

I am one of those who oscillate between light and darkness, of those who capsize between laughter and tears. I lack oxygen, I suffocate, and it hurts so much to feel like I'm out of the air, to no longer be able to breathe normally. I question myself, often, all the time, to better adapt to the environment in which I am drowning.

*This story was told to Sabrina; it is not Sabrina’s story. Names have been changed.