Jina Moore on Rape in the DRC
The only way, apparently, to make it clear how bad rape in Congo is is to turn it, by metaphor, into cancer. In that part of the press-release-mimicking-news-journalism in which an outside expert’s voice legitimizes the point being made, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative Director (and MD/MPH) Michael VanRooyen says, “Rape in the DRC has metastasized amid a climate of impunity, and has emerged as one of the great human crises of our time.”
I’ve learned, in part from some of HHI’s staffers, that there are important public health effects of mass sexual violence on communities. But “metastisized”? Why not “rape in the DRC takes place amid,” or “rape is committed in” or even the admittedly more “advocerial” “rape benefits from”?
Is this another fussy quibble? Maybe. But the rape-as-cancer metaphor seems to me to subtly reinforce the idea that Congo, by which most readers ultimately targeted by this press release will understand “allofAfrica,” is a diseased place — contaminated, dirty, terminal. I doubt that’s what the authors of the press release (or VanRooyen himself) were going for, but at the risk of repeating myself, language has consequences.
Via a summary shared by ericmortensen.
