Rape is “fundamental in destroying communities,” explains Marcus
Bleasdale, a photographer who has spent years documenting
brutalities within the Democratic Republic of Congo. In the
slideshow below, he narrates a stream of images that capture the
bleak lives of women who have been raped in the region. His
photographs, compiled in the book “The Rape of a Nation” (2009),
chronicle a dire and remote world that is all too easily
ignored. They are also quite remarkable to look at. As this
excellent article in this week’s Economist makes plain, rape is
being used systematically as a weapon of war throughout the
world. In sub-Saharan Africa, where most (but not all) of war-
time rape takes place, women are the glue of society, observes
Mr Bleasdale. They nurture and educate the children, they plant
the crops and oversee their harvest; most of the work that takes
place in an African village is done by women. But when they are
raped, as hundreds are every day in the war-torn regions, these
women and girls are tossed o