01/19/2026
WARNING: This is a hard read:
Accounts from Survivors
In North Kivu, the M23 armed group and the Islamic State-funded Allied Democratic Forces (ADF) have abused women and girls over extended periods in their camps.
In February, after the M23 took control of Goma, North Kivu’s provincial capital, four M23 fighters forced their way into 22-year-old Patience’s house, where she lived with her infant son. The fighters demanded to know if her husband was there, struck her son with a gun, tied her to her bed, and then two fighters r***d her.
They then forced her out of the house, leaving her son behind, and took her to a nearby camp. She spent three days in the camp, during which time multiple fighters r***d her and three other women who had been taken there. She managed to escape across the border to Uganda, where her husband and son met her. When she arrived at a health center in Uganda, she found she was pregnant and had contracted a s*xually transmitted infection.
M23 fighters abducted Justine from her home in Goma in March 2025. Six armed men broke into her house during an apparent forced recruitment operation and demanded to see her husband. After Justine told them that her husband was not home, they beat her and her 20-year-old son and then forced her to walk to their camp near the city. There, two men took her to a secluded area, beat her and r***d her.
Unable to walk, she lay there until the next day, when nearby residents heard her cries and took her to a hospital. Justine arrived at the hospital within 72 hours, but the hospital had no PEP kits. She later fled to Uganda, where tests revealed she had contracted HIV.
Solange, who joined the M23 as a fighter, said that r**e was a “habit” of M23 commanders, one of whom r***d her repeatedly in an M23 camp. She could not complain or refuse for fear of being killed. She said she knew of at least 15 other women who fled the M23 due to abuse there.
The ADF, active in North Kivu and Ituri provinces, has frequently abducted people from villages and fields, indoctrinating them into their version of Islam. The men and boys are trained to be fighters, while women and girls are forced to “marry” fighters and are used as s*x slaves.
When Liliane was between the ages of 14 and 18, from 2020 to 2024, she was held captive and s*xually abused by the ADF. ADF fighters attacked her village in North Kivu. They killed her brother-in-law in front of her, then abducted her and her sister-in-law. The fighters abducted a total of five women and three girls from the village, forcing them to carry the bodies of those the fighters had killed. Liliane remained with the ADF for four years, during which time they forced her to marry a 19-year-old fighter.
“One day he said he would kill me because he wanted to have a child with me and I wasn’t getting pregnant,” Liliane said. He later cut her in the chest with a knife, saying he was punishing her for not becoming pregnant. Liliane managed to escape in May 2024. When Human Rights Watch met with her over a year later, she had serious health problems, including a wound on her leg that had not yet healed and pain throughout her body.
After three years in captivity, Esther and her young child also managed to escape the ADF in 2024, during clashes between the armed group and the Ugandan military. The child’s father was an ADF fighter whom Esther was forced to marry during her captivity.
“My child plays with some of the other children in the neighborhood,” she said. “Some of them call him an ‘ADF baby,’ which causes me a lot of pain. I fear that when he grows up, he will ask me where his father is. I worry how he will deal with that.” There are currently no programs in eastern Congo to help those who escape the ADF to reintegrate into their communities.
In Ituri province, s*xual violence has been a common feature of intercommunal violence. The armed group Coopérative pour le Développement du Congo (CODECO) has been responsible for numerous massacres of civilians and incidents of s*xual violence. The fighters regularly attack villages and camps for internally displaced people predominantly inhabited by members of the Hema ethnic group.
Beatrice, 32, said the fighters ambushed her and 11 other civilians in a field near her village in Fataki, Djugu territory in June. The fighters killed the six men in the group and beat the women with sticks and the flat side of their machetes and then r***d them all. Beatrice said, “The fighters beat us, saying, ‘You Hema think you are too clever. Now you will see.’ After ra**ng us, they stole everything we had and then fled.” Beatrice was six months pregnant when she was attacked. Her baby was born healthy but in addition to the horror of the attack, she contracted an unidentified s*xually transmitted infection.
Agathe, 20, said that about 10 armed men attacked her village in Ituri in April. She is Hema and believes her village was targeted on ethnic grounds: “Two CODECO fighters took me and told me to choose between being killed and being r***d. I didn’t have a choice.” She spent three days walking to Bunia to get health care. Lack of money for transport and constant insecurity on the roads makes it extremely difficult for many survivors to get health care. She arrived too late to use a PEP kit and learned she was pregnant.
Constant insecurity dramatically increases vulnerability for women and girls, who make up the vast majority of reported cases of s*xual violence in eastern Congo. Fleeing fighting and violence, women and girls are often forced to live and work in unfamiliar areas. Many survivors interviewed had been internally displaced.
Esperance was displaced by fighting in North Kivu’s Masisi territory in 2024. Along with her seven children, she fled to an area near a base of the UN peacekeeping force in eastern Congo, MONUSCO. In December 2024, despite the proximity of the base, she and two other women were forced to flee into the bush when fighting neared. There, they encountered a group of seven fighters for the Wazalendo, an abusive militia associated with the Congolese military. One woman managed to escape, but the fighters r***d Esperance and killed the other woman with her.
Women and girls who are attacked while working in farms and fields are often afraid to return to work. Women living in camps for internally displaced people who may have to leave the camp and cross front lines to find food and work are at a heightened risk of s*xual violence.
The Congolese military, who are supposed to protect women from s*xual violence, are among those most responsible for it. Eight survivors interviewed said that they were most likely r***d by Congolese military personnel. While it is often unclear which armed group or force were responsible for the assaults, in these cases survivors were able to identify the attackers by their uniforms or said that they spoke the Lingala language, the lingua franca of the army and of western Congo.
In January, the ADF attacked Thérèse’s village in North Kivu at around 5 a.m. She fled to the bush with her family, but her 70-year-old father stayed behind to secure their house. The ADF killed him and eight other people that day. Thérèse returned to the village the next day and found his body with cuts from a machete on his arms, and a bullet wound in his head. After burying her father, Thérèse went to Beni. Her mother died not long after, and the responsibility to look after her family fell to her. In May, two men in military clothes speaking Lingala r***d her while she was harvesting cocoa. “Since the incident I haven’t gone back to the field,” she said. “I’m scared now. Life has become so difficult.”
The 17-year-old girl who was severely beaten and r***d by four soldiers and left for dead, said: “They said if I didn’t agree to have s*x with them, they would kill me. Some grabbed my arms. They beat me, they had sticks. They beat me with those and with their hands.”
She said she lay for five hours in the bush before gathering the strength to walk home. Her relatives brought her to the local health center, but it had no PEP kits. Afterward, once she traveled to Bunia, she was treated at the SOFEPADI clinic. She said, “When we were in the [internally displaced person] camp in Bunia, I heard about the ‘safe space’ run by SOFEPADI, which has helped me until today. When I came to the safe space, I explained my situation, and they brought me to the hospital. I had [HIV], and they discovered I was also pregnant. I learned how to make clothes, which gives me a bit of money to help my daughter and my family.
STATMENTS FROM ”https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/01/12/dr-congo-surge-in-conflict-related-s*xual-violence
