Victims, Perpetrators, or Moral Agents: Children and Youth Survivors of the War in the Democratic Republic of Congo
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the pervasive use of sexual violence as a weapon of war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), highlighting its devastating impact on women, children, and communities. Drawing on interviews with survivors, former Mayi Mayi combatants, and local advocates in Kamina, the study documents the intersections of rape, food scarcity, displacement, and child soldiering within Congo’s protracted conflict. Particular attention is given to the psychosocial consequences of rape witnessed by children, the culture of silence and shame that stigmatizes survivors, and the ways in which violence is entangled with economic and political systems of exploitation. Yet the analysis also foregrounds the moral agency of Congolese children, adults, and communities who resist cycles of violence through survival, education, peacemaking traditions, and grassroots advocacy. Initiatives such as the Ambassador Girls’ Education Program and agricultural rehabilitation projects demonstrate how local resilience is sustained through both indigenous practices and international solidarity. The article argues that responding to gender-based violence in the DRC requires not only direct attention to survivors but also systemic rebuilding of food, health, and social infrastructures. In doing so, it reframes children not merely as victims or perpetrators but as agents of resistance and hope in the midst of war.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".