“Please help us.”

Those were the first words that my client, Gulnaz, said when I met her inside the Kabul prison that was home to hundreds of women, many of whom, like her, were locked away for so-called moral crimes — adultery or running away from home. The frail 20-year-old clung to her baby, who was conceived through rape and born on the prison floor, where mother and child had lived for nearly two years.

Tearfully, Gulnaz recounted the story of the assault that took place in 2009. The attacker, nearly twice her age, pinned her down, tied her up and then savagely raped her. She described going to the police with her disabled, widowed mother to report the rape. There she was instantly imprisoned for reporting the crime. With no male head of household present, the two women were not taken seriously.

After years of advocacy by human rights groups and other activists, and a decade of war by the United States and its allies — a war in which the need to uphold the rights of women has often been invoked — Afghan women remain trapped in a legal system that often punishes them for being the victims of brutal crimes.

My illiterate client told me of her experience going to court with her illegitimate daughter and not understanding the legal process. She was forced to represent herself after her Afghan lawyer failed to show up, yet the judges who presided over the case refused to allow her to speak. Instead, they berated Gulnaz for lying, insisting that women cannot get pregnant by having sex just once. This assertion was the basis for the 12-year sentence that was imposed, with a wrenching caveat: Marrying her attacker would allow her to be “free.”

Unfortunately, Gulnaz’s case is not an anomaly but represents the situation that more than half of the imprisoned women in Afghanistan find themselves in — locked up for moral crimes, according to a recent studyby the United Nations.

I submitted a pardon application for Gulnaz, accompanied by a petition with more than 6,000 signatures. She had no family willing to take up her cause, but the world, as we discovered, supported her release.

Standing up for the rights of women like Gulnaz was part of the reason the United States went to Afghanistan in the first place. In 2001, one of the key political arguments that President George W. Bush’s administration used to support the military deployment was stopping the terrorists, for whom “the brutal oppression of women” was “a central goal.” In November 2001, Congress passed a bill noting Taliban oppression of women and stressing the need for Afghan women and children to have better access to health care and education.

International attention to the fate of women in Afghanistan has been an issue throughout the war. In 2009, the Afghan government focused on violence and human rights when it passed the Elimination of Violence Against Women Law. Though this measure garnered substantial support worldwide, oversight has been limited. The law is largely ignored in Afghanistan’s justice system, and abused women are routinely imprisoned as a result. While Gulnaz’s case brought international media attention to the plight of Afghan rape victims, inside Afghanistan, gross violations of basic human rights are often business as usual.

In Gulnaz’s case, after we submitted the pardon application, President Hamid Karzai formed a judicial committee with members from the Ministry of Justice, the Supreme Court and the attorney general’s office. They were to investigate Gulnaz’s case and, reportedly, the cases of all other women imprisoned in Kabul. The formation of this committee was an unprecedented step for the government: It was directly confronting the realities of women imprisoned for moral crimes.

Ultimately, Karzai’s investigation found that Gulnaz’s conviction was based on oppressive, misogynistic interpretations of Islamic sharia law. These views were in part remnants of the Taliban regime’s swift and unforgiving justice system. A more contemporary interpretation of sharia law, Afghan laws and international conventions supported her exoneration.

On Dec. 14, 2011, Karzai acted upon the pardon application and exonerated Gulnaz. He acknowledged that the charge of adultery against her was a “misjudgment” and that the cultural norms leading to her imprisonment were long overdue for an overhaul. This decision has the potential to set a precedent for other rape victims seeking justice and is a significant recognition of the persecution that Afghan women have long endured under the veil of cultural appeasement.

After 10 years of foreign assistance, it should not have taken the president of Afghanistan to overturn the decisions of three Kabul courts that receive vast amounts of international funding. It should not have taken international media attention to embarrass the Afghan government into finally doing the right thing. And it should not have taken a Western lawyer to give Gulnaz legal representation to achieve exoneration.

According to an October report by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, which works to monitor aid spending there by various U.S. governmental agencies, almost $73 billion has been appropriated to Afghanistan since 2002. This money needs to be used more wisely.

Rule-of-law initiatives, particularly on women’s rights, have a better chance of success if the international community exercises more oversight and makes a greater effort to understand how the Afghan justice system really works. At present, I am the only Western lawyer in Afghanistan taking on such cases. Gulnaz’s case came to me through concerned people who knew of the miscarriages of justice that she endured. I took it to advocate for her and other women in Afghanistan’s legal system.

Although her case has a suitable ending, it took agitating for attention at the highest levels in the country to get a rape victim out of prison. The laws intended to protect her, and the international initiatives meant to do the same, did nothing.

Clearly most of the responsibility should lie with the Afghan government. Prosecutors and judges perpetuate human rights abuses on women, especially in cases involving domestic abuse, with little to no accountability. Because the justice system has failed to deter people within the government from committing human rights abuses, more than half of the women imprisoned in Afghanistan continue to be prosecuted for moral crimes.

The government should establish a standing committee within the attorney general’s office and the judiciary to ensure that cases of women charged with moral crimes never make it to court — or at the very least, that women are not prosecuted for being victims of violence. From one “misjudgment” could come a real chance to save other women from similar suffering.

I realize that it may take years, if not generations, for significant improvements on women’s rights in Afghanistan. I am optimistic, however, that Gulnaz’s case can serve as a turning point to encourage changes that can protect other women enduring her same plight.

One pardon, one release, one woman, is not good enough.

The story of Gulnaz, a young Afghan woman who was raped and then jailed for having sex out of wedlock, has once again drawn international attention to Afghanistan’s legal system and its institutionalized discrimination against women.

After giving birth in prison to her attacker’s child, Gulnaz, who goes by a single name, was eventually pardoned, perhaps because news of her plight was reported by a documentary filmmaker. But to win her freedom, she had to agree to marry her rapist.

Even with that condition, which some reports say won’t be enforced, Gulnaz’s escape from a lengthy prison sentence is a welcome departure from the injustices imposed on abused Afghan women. Half of Afghanistan’s female prisoners are jailed for zina, or moral crimes, and most of them stand little chance of being pardoned.

Along with outrage, stories about Gulnaz’s situation have sparked the usual orgy of self-satisfaction on this side of the globe. A reader’s comment posted online in response to Friday’s New York Times article about Gulnaz’s pardon is typical. After expressing disbelief at the subjugation of women in “most of the Muslim world and large parts of Africa,” the reader added: “By the way, I must once again say how much I love America. We have our problems but boy, we do it right!!!!!!!!!!!!” Even the liberal Daily Kos observed, “We could never imagine anything like this happening here.”

But before we get too smug, we should recognize that our legal tradition has roots that are not all that different from those we condemn, and you don’t have to look too far back in history for outrageous examples. For example, it was only in 1980 that the California Legislature made it illegal for a husband to rape his wife. As late as the 1950s, the right of a husband to take his wife by force was enshrined in the laws of every state. As legal authority Rollin Perkins put it in 1957: “A man does not commit rape by having sexual intercourse with his lawful wife, even if he does so by force and against her will.” Shocking, yes, but that had been the law for millenniums. When a woman said “I do,” she was deemed to have given lifetime consent to her husband’s sexual demands.

Rape has always been difficult to prove in court, especially when the man claims the woman consented. Although there is little to emulate about Afghan justice, at least the authorities there accepted that Gulnaz’s child was the result of forced sex. By contrast, early English courts took pregnancy as proof that the sex was consensual. The idea was that both the man and the woman needed to experience sexual pleasure to conceive a child, so a pregnancy showed that the woman enjoyed the encounter. And this contemptible theory is not found only in history books. In 1995, North Carolina legislator Henry Aldridge, when arguing against a law to aid pregnant rape victims, said: “The facts show that people who are raped, who are truly raped, the juices don’t flow, the body functions don’t work, and they don’t get pregnant.”

Particularly galling to Western readers of the Gulnaz story was the idea of pushing a rape victim to marry her ravisher. But the Afghan judge who told her she could escape from jail by marrying the rapist was in line with Judeo-Christian tradition. Deuteronomy 22:28-29 lays out how if a man meets a virgin who is not betrothed and “seizes her and lies with her,” then “she shall be his wife.” The Afghan judge would also have found friendly company in the courts of Renaissance Italy, which viewed rape as a kind of mating ritual. In one case in Venice, a rapist was given the choice of going to jail for six months, paying a fine or marrying his victim. The man chose marriage.

Gulnaz’s imprisonment after suffering a rape was wrong on every level. But the plight of women in Afghanistan and other countries is no cause for Western arrogance, especially when spousal rape was legal here so recently. The rights of American women have been hard won and could be easily lost. To view the Gulnaz case as anything other than a further call to action would be to disrespect her and victimized women everywhere.

Readers of this column will remember that when Dominique Strauss-Kahn was taken off an Air France flight in May just as it was about to vamoose for Paris, I was suspicious. The story and circumstances of his adventure with the chambermaid, Nafissatou Diallo, in the Sofitel hotel kept changing. In the meantime, he was accorded the indignity of the “perp walk.” He was sent to Rickers Island, a veritable hellhole. He got up on the morning of May 14 as one of the world’s most distinguished public servants. He was head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and apparently about to become the Socialist Party’s front-runner for president of France. He retired that evening a convicted felon in the eyes of almost anyone familiar with his story, and I suspect he slept badly.

Yet a handful of us were holdouts. We said he was, according to American legal standards, innocent until proven guilty. Well, now charges against him have been dropped. He is a free man, and he and his wife flew back to Paris on Air France Flight 007. There was a smile on his face, but I wonder what was going on behind that smile. The devil-take-the-hindmost Frenchman was still facing civil charges here and possible rape charges in France. Moreover, he was unemployed, out on his ear at the IMF and an unlikely Socialist candidate for anything at home. As Chantal Brunel of President Nicolas Sarkozy’s party told Agence France-Press, Mr. Strauss-Kahn “is going to be an indelible stain on the Socialist Party.” She speculated that he “will harm the chances” of his party’s presidential candidate.

Actually, at France’s Charles de Gaulle Airport, there was a mad crush. His fans were there with his enemies, the press, the police and a singer. Yes, one fellow made a scene by singing Verdi. I wondered about him. What aria did he sing? Is there one about a rake accosting a chambermaid or, even better, a chambermaid deflowering a statesman? That would make a great modern variation for Verdi. And how good a voice did the romantic fellow actually have?

There were many idiotic assessments of DSK, as he is called in France in a sobriquet that summons up the initials JFK to Americans. Is he that charming? He looks a little dumpy. Francois Pupponi, a friend, ally and the mayor of the Paris suburb of Sarcelles where Mr. Strauss-Kahn, too, served as mayor, spoke personally and with the wide world in mind. He told LCI television, “Let’s not put pressure on him. He needs to rebuild himself. What’s important is that he is back in France. He’s going to be able to think about the future with clarity.” And Mr. Pupponi added some claptrap about Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s value to France, to Europe and to the world.

Pierre Muscovici, another friend, added that Mr. Strauss-Kahn “will be useful to his country, useful to the left, and his recognized skills will find a new use.” Which skills Mr. Muscovici was referring to is unclear. But perhaps not to former Socialist Prime Minister Michel Rocard, who noted that Mr. Strauss-Kahn “obviously has a mental illness, trouble controlling his impulses.” Mr. Rocard was talking about women.

What are French women going to say about Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s liberation? Anne Mansouret, the mother of a woman who has accused him of attempted rape, says the media hubbub surrounding his homecoming was “indecent.” Socialist leader Martine Aubry said Tuesday, “I think the same as many women about the attitude of Dominique Strauss-Kahn to women.” She is hostile, though she is not barring him from a future post in government.

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, an independent French journalist who has been covering the Strauss-Kahn adventure, has said it represents a huge turning point in French society and in French politics. Up until now, his behavior was accepted. From now on, non plus. Having a reputation like Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s will cook a politician’s goose – perhaps in a nice orange sauce. I am not so sure.

In one of those ironies that novelists relish, the on-again-off-again rape prosecution of the former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn seems to have gravely damaged the political careers of both the prosecutor and the defendant.

Mr. Strauss-Kahn, who was once the likely Socialist challenger to Nicolas Sarkozy in the next French presidential election, returns home seen, in the best light, as a self-confessed cad who had sex with a hotel maid just before lunching with his daughter and flying back to his wife.

The Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance Jr., appears to have severely antagonized women’s groups and many African-Americans by his unwillingness to pit the word of a poor black woman against a powerful white man, and has also raised general questions about his competence for not sussing out problems in his case earlier. (In an odd twist for the son of a former secretary of state, Mr. Vance also made diplomatic waves, by infuriating many French with his undignified treatment of Mr. Strauss-Kahn, who was trotted before cameras, unshaven and handcuffed.)

The political dust will settle where it may. But as a professional matter, both as a former prosecutor and current criminal defense lawyer, I give Mr. Vance passing grades. The most dubious decision he made was to bring an indictment so quickly, rather than taking more time to investigate. But even there, New York law forced his hand somewhat. Mr. Strauss-Kahn was in jail and Mr. Vance had five days either to seek an indictment or let Mr. Strauss-Kahn go. In hindsight, Mr. Vance should have tried to work out an arrangement with defense lawyers so that he could fully examine the background of the hotel maid, Nafissatou Diallo, especially since the wealthy Mr. Strauss-Kahn was bound to hire a team of investigators to exhaustively scrutinize her life.

But beyond a mistake due in part to being cornered by the law, I think Mr. Vance performed well. The collateral damage to the career of Mr. Strauss-Kahn, who resigned in disgrace from the I.M.F., was clearly unfair, but that was caused largely by his sensational arrest, which Mr. Vance had no choice about effecting. The prosecutor had received allegations, seemingly corroborated by the brief investigation at the crime scene, of a violent felony allegedly committed by a man about to fly overseas and place himself beyond the reach of any United States court. Any responsible law enforcement professional would have detained Mr. Strauss-Kahn and sought to question him and gather evidence, including DNA.

Given the attention paid to Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s arrest, Mr. Vance deserves enormous credit for pulling the plug on a highly publicized prosecution, especially since he could foresee the political damage to himself. I was one of the lawyers in a case involving two men whom prosecutors held on death row for years long after another man had confessed to the murder. That is not atypical. Prosecutorial intransigence, a galling inability to acknowledge that initial judgments were incorrect, is the hallmark of almost every wrongful conviction case I am familiar with. Mr. Vance is entitled to kudos for not turning a failing case into a travesty.

And the standard that Mr. Vance and his assistants employed in deciding to dismiss the case is noteworthy and laudable. “If we do not believe her beyond a reasonable doubt,” the prosecution wrote in its motion to dismiss, referring to Ms. Diallo, “we cannot ask a jury to do so.”

This is not the bar all prosecutors set in deciding whether or not to go forward. Ethical rules prohibit lawyers from calling a witness whose testimony they know to be false; but the rule is not the same when the testimony is possibly true but dubious. Particularly in urban criminal courts, where caseloads tend to be overwhelming and the police sometimes push cases aggressively, prosecutors are often not convinced beyond a reasonable doubt about the truthfulness of particular testimony. Frequently they leave it to jurors to determine the credibility of a particular witness. In trying to talk prosecutors out of weak cases, I have been told more than once, “I wasn’t there, man, and neither were you. Let the 12 of them figure it out.”

In practice, this means that even defendants who are probably innocent must endure the anguish of trial. I once represented a young man in a gang murder case who had been arrested and indicted along with eight other people, even though his name was never mentioned in the grand jury testimony. Although it seemed clear that the police had mistaken this young man for his brother, both the prosecutors and the judge told me to “put it on,” meaning go to trial; the client sat in court for several days, in jeopardy of a lengthy prison term, before the case against him was finally dismissed.

Given these realities, the ultimate test of equality in Mr. Vance’s office will be whether his prosecutors universally apply the demanding, but appropriate, standard they used to decide whether to proceed with the Strauss-Kahn prosecution. Let’s hope they do, in fact, require themselves to be convinced — beyond a reasonable doubt — in all of their future cases, a vast majority of which will involve defendants who don’t have the power or eminence of Mr. Strauss-Kahn.

Watching Dominique Strauss-Kahn plummet from managing director of the International Monetary Fund to criminal defendant, one could be forgiven for believing that diplomats do not get away with crimes committed in the United States. But one would be wrong.

Strauss-Kahn had functional immunity as head of the IMF, so only acts that fell within his official duties were covered. But if Strauss-Kahn had been a diplomat, even a low-ranking attaché, this story might have been quite different.

Envoys posted to the United States, like their American counterparts posted abroad, enjoy full diplomatic immunity under the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. But in almost all cases, this immunity translates into impunity when those diplomats commit crimes. Nowhere is that impunity more apparent than in abuse of foreign nationals brought to the United States to work as servants in diplomatic households.

Diplomats serving in the United States can bring domestic servants into the country on visas available only to diplomatic personnel. And while the diplomats sign contracts with the workers promising compliance with all U.S. labor laws, gross violations are not uncommon.

The Freedom Network, a coalition of anti-trafficking organizations, reports that dozens of domestic workers employed by diplomats in the United States have made allegations of rape, sexual assault, forced labor, involuntary servitude, labor law violations and human trafficking against their employers. The Government Accountability Office cited 42 abuse cases in a 2008 report while acknowledging that the cases were probably underreported. The ACLU filed a petition in 2007 to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights on behalf of six domestic workers who alleged their diplomat employers abused them in the United States.

None of these cases can be found on a criminal docket. In each instance, the diplomat has walked.

Take the case of Badar Al-Awadi, formerly the third secretary at the Kuwaiti Mission to the United Nations. He and his wife brought an Indian domestic worker to the United States in 1996 to care for their children and serve as a housekeeper. In a civil complaint filed in federal court in New York, the domestic worker alleged that she ran away after enduring four years of forced labor, rape and mistreatment by her employers. The plaintiff first filed in 2002, and the court dismissed her case without prejudice in 2005 because of diplomatic immunity. She refiled in 2006, and the case is still pending.

Al-Awadi did not face prosecution in the United States; nor was he punished by his employer. Rather, the Kuwaiti government hired a prominent law firm to defend him in the civil case — in court filings, he has denied the allegations — and then promoted him. He is currently Kuwait’s ambassador to Cuba.

Or consider the case of Alan S. Mzengi, the former minister plenipotentiary for consular and social affairs at the Tanzanian Embassy in Washington. In a lawsuit filed in federal court, a young woman alleged that Mzengi trafficked her into the United States for forced labor. Upon arrival, her complaint stated, she was stripped of her passport, forbidden to leave the house and subjected to 16-hour days as a nanny/housekeeper without any payment. The Justice Department did not pursue the case, but even if it had, Mzengi’s immunity protected him from prosecution.

I serve as pro bono counsel to the victim in the Mzengi case. She obtained a $1 million default civil judgment against Mzengi and his wife, after both defendants failed to respond to the lawsuit. A federal judge, after hearing the victim testify, called the Mzengis’ conduct “heinous” and found that the victim was “a prisoner” in the defendants’ home. Mzengi — who tried to reopen the judgment and denied the allegations — simply left the United States. According to Time Magazine, Mzengi now serves as an adviser to the president of Tanzania.

While the U.S. government can request that the diplomat’s home government waive immunity, such requests almost never occur. On the rare occasions they do, the other state declines.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton raised the issue of diplomatic trafficking in a Cabinet-level meeting Feb. 1. She declared, “Whether they’re diplomats or national emissaries of whatever kind, we all must be accountable for the treatment of the people that we employ.” As a start, the State Department should suspend certain governments from the privilege of bringing domestic workers into the United States.

The Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008 requires the secretary of state to suspend countries from the special visa program if there is credible evidence of abuse of domestic workers, and where the mission is found to have tolerated abuse. Tolerance is left undefined in the statute, but multiple allegations in one mission speak volumes. Kuwait faces three federal civil lawsuits alleging trafficking, forced labor, physical abuse and exploitation of domestic workers by diplomats. Two of those cases involve allegations of rape.

The judgment against Mzengi, the Tanzanian diplomat, remains unpaid. Earlier this year, the Tanzanians made a settlement offer designed more to mollify the State Department than to compensate the victim.

In short, tolerance of abuse remains the norm, and Tanzania and Kuwait fall squarely under the 2008 law. Both should be suspended without delay. Like the victim alleging sexual assault in the Strauss-Kahn case, women abused and exploited by diplomats serving in the United States deserve justice. While a wrist slap to their embassies through visa suspension is hardly an end to impunity, it is a good place to start.

Thousands of men blocked the road, surrounding the S.U.V. of the chief justice of Pakistan, a national hero for standing up to military rule. As a correspondent for The Chicago Tribune, I knew I couldn’t just watch from behind a car window. I had to get out there.

So, wearing a black headscarf and a loose, long-sleeved red tunic over jeans, I waded through the crowd and started taking notes: on the men throwing rose petals, on the men shouting that they would die for the chief justice, on the men sacrificing a goat.

And then, almost predictably, someone grabbed my buttocks. I spun around and shouted, but then it happened again, and again, until finally I caught one offender’s hand and punched him in the face. The men kept grabbing. I kept punching. At a certain point — maybe because I was creating a scene — I was invited into the chief justice’s vehicle.

At the time, in June 2007, I saw this as just one of the realities of covering the news in Pakistan. I didn’t complain to my bosses. To do so would only make me seem weak. Instead, I made a joke out of it and turned the experience into a positive one: See, being a woman helped me gain access to the chief justice.

And really, I was lucky. A few gropes, a misplaced hand, an unwanted advance — those are easily dismissed. I knew other female correspondents who weren’t so lucky, those who were molested in their hotel rooms, or partly stripped by mobs. But I can’t ever remember sitting down with my female peers and talking about what had happened, except to make dark jokes, because such stories would make us seem different from the male correspondents, more vulnerable. I would never tell my bosses for fear that they might keep me at home the next time something major happened.

I was hardly alone in keeping quiet. The Committee to Protect Journalists may be able to say that 44 journalists from around the world were killed last year because of their work, but the group doesn’t keep data on sexual assault and rape. Most journalists just don’t report it.

The CBS correspondent Lara Logan has broken that code of silence. She has covered some of the most dangerous stories in the world, and done a lot of brave things in her career. But her decision to go public earlier this week with her attack by a mob in Tahrir Square in Cairo was by far the bravest. Hospitalized for days, she is still recuperating from the attack, described by CBS as a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating.

Several commentators have suggested that Ms. Logan was somehow at fault: because she’s pretty; because she decided to go into the crowd; because she’s a war junkie. This wasn’t her fault. It was the mob’s fault. This attack also had nothing to do with Islam. Sexual violence has always been a tool of war. Female reporters sometimes are just convenient.

In the coming weeks, I fear that the conclusions drawn from Ms. Logan’s experience will be less reactionary but somehow darker, that there will be suggestions that female correspondents should not be sent into dangerous situations. It’s possible that bosses will make unconscious decisions to send men instead, just in case. Sure, men can be victims, too — on Wednesday a mob beat up a male ABC reporter in Bahrain, and a few male journalists have told of being sodomized by captors — but the publicity around Ms. Logan’s attack could make editors think, “Why take the risk?” That would be the wrong lesson. Women can cover the fighting just as well as men, depending on their courage.

More important, they also do a pretty good job of covering what it’s like to live in a war, not just die in one. Without female correspondents in war zones, the experiences of women there may be only a rumor.

Look at the articles about women who set themselves on fire in Afghanistan to protest their arranged marriages, or about girls being maimed by fundamentalists, about child marriage in India, about rape in Congo and Haiti. Female journalists often tell those stories in the most compelling ways, because abused women are sometimes more comfortable talking to them. And those stories are at least as important as accounts of battles.

There is an added benefit. Ms. Logan is a minor celebrity, one of the highest-profile women to acknowledge being sexually assaulted. Although she has reported from the front lines, the lesson she is now giving young women is probably her most profound: It’s not your fault. And there’s no shame in telling it like it is.

What does the financial reform package recently signed into law in the US have to do with preventing mass rape in Africa? Quite a lot, it seems, but one has to search deeply within the 2,300-page document to find Section 1502, which focuses on “conflict minerals”. Conflict minerals help finance fighting and sexual violence on an unprecedented scale in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The US Congress and President Obama have shown great leadership by including this amendment in the final law. It is now time for Europe’s leaders to step up to the plate, as a sign of universal resolve to protect the most vulnerable.

More than 200,000 rapes have been reported since war began in the Democratic Republic of the Congo more than a decade ago. The eastern part of the country has been labelled the rape capital of the world. Control of Congo’s natural resources and minerals has always been contested, and these vast riches have fuelled the country’s conflicts. They have helped enrich militant groups, who have employed sexual violence as a tactic of war. One such resource, coltan, is so widely used in mobile phones that it has been said that we are all carrying a piece of the Congo in our pockets. But conflict minerals cannot be allowed to continue fuelling conflict and the consequent sexual violence. Although it is complicated to track conflict minerals, this cannot become an excuse for not trying. After all, neither American nor European consumers want their MP3 players and mobile phones to be funding gang rape in Africa.

The newly adopted US financial reform law stipulates that any company doing business that involves minerals must disclose annually whether conflict materials originating in the DRC or an adjoining country were used in the process. This applies not only to electronics companies, but to all publicly traded US firms that use gold, cassiterite, tungsten or coltan in their products. Companies are required to exercise due diligence on the source and chain of custody of these materials, and measures to ensure oversight shall include an independent audit of the report.

Within 180 days, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and USAID chief Rajiv Shah have to submit to the US Congress a strategy to address the linkages between human rights abuses, armed groups, mining of conflict minerals and commercial products. This strategy is expected to include a plan to promote peace and security in the DRC as well as adjoining countries. It is also expected to comprise efforts to develop stronger governance and economic institutions that can facilitate and improve transparency in the cross-border trade involving the natural resources of the DRC. In this way, these resources can finally be used for the betterment of the people of Congo.

Furthermore, Clinton is expected, in accordance with the recommendation of the UN group of experts on the DRC, to submit a “conflict minerals map” to Congress. This map must clearly show mineral-rich zones, trade routes and areas under the control of armed groups in the DRC and adjoining countries, and will be made public. This is a very important initiative, which I welcome as the UN special representative on sexual violence in conflict. It indicates a firm resolve and commitment to tackle the causes of the conflict at its roots.

Clinton must report back to Congress before Christmas. In the meantime, I urge European legislators and governments to follow the lead of the Obama administration and the US Congress and work to pass a comprehensive package pertaining to the trade in conflict minerals.

This issue touches us all directly in terms of our daily lives and conveniences, and as such there is no place to hide from our collective responsibility. And neither is there any time to lose, when the lives of so many are at stake, and the bodies of women and girls continue to be used as fodder in a war fuelled by mineral resources.

I was just raped.

Not just, as in recently, though sometimes it feels like yesterday, but just as in only. I was only raped, not mutilated. I did not have a bottle or stick or gun shoved into my vagina, twisted to inflict maximum injury. Though damaged, I did not have my breasts lopped off, nor did I lose a limb. I was left intact, though far from whole.

I did not feel lucky 4 1/2 years ago, when I was raped, but I do feel lucky today as I read about the unfathomable violence that is being unleashed against women and girls in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

I struggle to understand how the word “rape” can describe what happened to me and be used to describe what is happening to them. My mind skitters in a thousand directions when I try to force myself to think about it. Is it shameful to think that I share something with these women? Is it wrong to think that I don’t?

I do not believe that being raped gives me any moral authority on the subject. I don’t pretend to know what other women experience or how they cope or fail to cope. I only know that following my rape, I suffered from depression, a profound need to be alone, denial, guilt and a distorted desire to prove that I was, in fact, worthless. I suffered from post-traumatic stress syndrome, triggered by, among other things, airports, eye doctors and, well, almost anything that brought on a sense of helplessness.

Therapy, family, friends, faith, time, distance, medical care and more have helped bring me back from the brink of despair. I am a strong person in my own right, but I am certain that I could not have pushed through without that support. What chance, then, do the girls and women of Congo have, lacking many of these resources?

Despite international attention, including visits from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and U.N. officials, and a recent “60 Minutes” report, Congo remains the most dangerous place on Earth for girls and women. Hundreds of thousands of women and girls are victims of unimaginably horrific gender-based violence. In just the first six months of 2009, the United Nations reported close to 7,000 victims of sexual violence in Congo, a number that is significantly underrepresentative. It does not include, for example, the women who do not live to tell their tales of assault, or those who are too ill, too ashamed or too afraid to come forward.

In some cases, women and girls, butchered from the inside out, suffer from traumatic gynecologic fistula. This means that they have been raped so violently, sometimes by as many as 10 men, that the tissue between the vagina and the bladder and/or rectum is torn, causing them, among other things, to live in a constant state of filth from their own feces and urine. They reek of it. And then they are ostracized.

I know what it is like to feel dirty after a rape. I cannot imagine what it is like to have these agonizing psychological scars so physically, publicly manifested, reinforcing the darkest feelings of self-loathing triggered by the rape itself.

The United Nations’ latest report on Congo, published this week, paints a devastating picture of complicity among the Congolese Army, rebel groups and neighboring forces in Burundi, Uganda and Tanzania. It examines the role that foreign governments and international businesses, including a Nevada-based company, play in perpetuating the violence, much of it driven by greed for gold and conflict minerals, minerals that are used in cellphones, DVD players and video games.

Trying to decipher all of it is overwhelming, but that is no excuse for inaction. There is nothing morally complicated about mass rape. Congo is a world away, but its gold ends up around our necks, its minerals in our pockets. We are contributing, knowingly or unwittingly, to the misery of its people.

Two bills before Congress would help to make the conflict-minerals market more transparent and thereby undercut the funding of the groups who are destroying Congolese women. They are H.R. 4128, introduced by Rep. Jim McDermott (D-Wash.), and S.891, introduced by Sens. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) and Russ Feingold (D-Wis.).

Write your representative and senators and demand that they push for passage. Educate yourself and others about conflict minerals; learn which businesses are involved. (Lists of electronic industry leaders can be found at http://www.raisehopeforcongo.org.)

Start a letter campaign, demand conflict-free products, contribute to the training of Congolese counselors. Sponsor a woman who suffers from traumatic fistula, and cover the cost of an operation to repair the damage (on average, $450, a pittance for many Americans). Two organizations that provide these operations, and crucial supporting services, are Heal Africa and the Panzi Hospital.

Being raped was for me, as it is for so many women, an intensely private agony, something I’ve discussed with very few people. My privacy, however, is a luxury I can no longer afford. Do something, anything, because to do nothing in the face of this evil cannot be an option.

Just over a year ago, in answering whether sexual violence in conflict was an issue that the U.N. Security Council should take on, then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice proclaimed, “I am proud that, today, we respond to that lingering question with a resounding ‘yes!’ ” With this statement, and with the cooperation of other power brokers at the table, the Security Council unanimously adopted Resolution 1820, which finally recognized sexual violence as a widely used strategy of warfare and cleared the path for the council to respond to it worldwide.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is to report to the Security Council today on implementation of Resolution 1820. What will we learn? A year after adopting the resolution, Congo remains the worst place on the planet to be a woman. Over 12 years, in a regional economic war for resources, hundreds of thousands of women and girls have been raped and tortured, their bodies destroyed by unimaginable acts. The Security Council’s implementation of Resolution 1820 in Congo — the very place that inspired it — has been an utter failure.

Rape as a weapon of war has increased in eastern Congo since June 2008. In January, military operations were launched in North Kivu with the supposed goal of arresting the rebel leader Laurent Nkunda and neutralizing his National Congress for the Defense of the People (CNDP) troops as well as the FDLR, the former Rwandan Hutu genocidaires. Even now, with Resolution 1820 in place, no one considers the women. Anneke Van Woudenberg of Human Rights Watch, just back from the front lines in both North and South Kivu, told me Monday that in nearly all the health centers, hospitals and rape counseling centers she visited, rape cases had doubled or tripled since January.

Rapes continue to be committed with near complete impunity. While the number of criminal prosecutions has risen marginally, only low-ranking soldiers are being prosecuted. Not a single commander or officer above the rank of major has been held responsible in all of Congo. Rapes by the national army are increasing, too. MONUC, the U.N. peacekeeping mission, is not only allowing perpetrators to go unpunished but is also providing logistical support to them for their movements in the field. A blacklist of war criminals and rapists who were commanders in current operations was shown to the Security Council, which gave it to President Laurent Kabila. Despite incriminating evidence, none of the commanders was removed. Resolution 1820 was supposed to make the United Nations more sensitive to the issue of sexual violence. How is it possible that in the past year, the United Nations became complicit in supporting rapists as commanders in its operations?

The U.N. spin on operations in the Congo is upbeat. The secretary general lauded their success in a March 8 commentary in the International Herald Tribune. Successful for whom? Chantal, a 3-year-old who was raped so brutally by militia soldiers that she died on the way to the hospital? All her sisters were raped, too.

Resolution 1820 must be enforced with seriousness by the Security Council and the secretary general. Arrests need to be made immediately of known rapists and war criminals at the highest levels. The United Nations must stop supporting military actions, because they are doomed in Congo. And the root economic causes of the war need to be addressed with the leaders of countries in Africa’s Great Lakes region who commit violence to reap benefits from Congo’s minerals, as well as their Western corporate partners. They, too, are liable for these atrocities.

President Obama and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice should send a very clear message to the world. It is within U.S. power, as a member of the Security Council, to push for measures to end impunity and to carve out an enduring peace through careful diplomacy for the people of Congo.

A few days ago, I sat in a dark shack with 30 survivors of rape. These women had fled their villages after being brutally terrorized and had randomly found each other. They banded together to form a grass-roots group called I Will Not Kill Myself Today. The women of eastern Congo are enduring their 12th year of sexual terrorism. The girl children born of rape are now being raped. What will it take for the United Nations to finally do something meaningful to stop the violence? The women are waiting.

Every two minutes, someone is raped in the United States. Every year, more than 200,000 rape victims, mostly women, report their rapes to police. Most consent to the creation of a rape kit, an invasive process for collecting physical evidence (including DNA material) of the assault that can take up to six hours. What most victims don’t know is that in thousands of cases, that evidence sits untested in police evidence lockers.

The backlog of untested evidence gained national attention in 2001 when Debbie Smith, a rape victim, testified before Congress. The Debbie Smith DNA Backlog Grant Program was started in 2004 with the goal of processing the nearly 400,000 untested rape kits nationwide. But the program has been expanded to allow states to test backlogged DNA evidence from any crime. Even as the proportion of rape victims who report their assaults is increasing, the processing of rape evidence is still backlogged — and the arrest rate of rapists is decreasing.

The House passed its reauthorization of the program last week, and the Senate is expected to do so soon. If Congress is serious about eliminating this backlog, lawmakers should amend the reauthorization bill to prioritize the testing of rape kits and remove controversial amendments that seek to create DNA profiles of all felons and certain arrestees who haven’t been convicted of crimes.

Rape kits can help identify unknown assailants by matching DNA profiles obtained from evidence to profiles in the FBI‘s national DNA database. The kits can confirm the presence of a known suspect’s DNA, corroborate a victim’s version of events or exonerate innocent suspects.

Most states are not required to notify victims if their evidence has not been tested, so people usually have no idea whether their kits have been processed. Many victims assume that silence from the police means that their kit did not yield helpful information. A much-delayed National Institute of Justice report on the state of the rape-kit backlog is due to be submitted to Congress in the fall; experts on the crime expect it to show that a significant backlog remains.

States had long claimed that money was the obstacle to processing more rape kits. Over the past four years, Congress has allocated hundreds of millions of dollars for states to conduct DNA testing on evidence from rape crime scenes. Last year, 46 states, the District and Puerto Rico received grants totaling more than $43 million. But the backlog stems from more than a lack of money. The dynamics that contributed to the backlog, chiefly a failure to treat rape as seriously as other violent crimes, have been re-created in the way states spend the grants.

In reports to the Justice Department from 2005 to 2007, half the states receiving grants indicated that they were not spending all the money, and those that were did not indicate whether they were prioritizing backlogged rape kits. States are not required to specify how many rape kits they process, and most reports say only how much DNA evidence was tested with the funding, not the types of cases to which the DNA was connected. Thus, evidence from homicides and other violent nonsexual crimes is regularly processed, while rape kits remain untested.

With a few simple changes, however, lawmakers could ensure that this program fulfills its original mission. Congress should require states that receive grants to use at least 30 percent of the money to pay for testing backlogged rape kits. It should build in accountability by requiring that states report how many rape kits are tested annually. Lawmakers should also lift restrictions against states using the grants to pay private labs for DNA testing; crime lab directors across the country have cited this as a reason that they have not applied for or been able to fully spend their grant money.

The House version of the reauthorization risks diluting the program’s effectiveness by requiring states to expand their DNA databases to include all felons and certain arrestees. Adding people who have not been convicted of any crime to DNA databases raises civil rights and civil liberties concerns, adding unnecessary controversy to the program. Such a practice could also contribute to the backlog by diverting money that could be used to pay for testing to instead cover the significant costs of collecting and developing these DNA profiles. Congress should remove this amendment.

In 2004, Congress saw the rape kit backlog for what it was: a symbol of the criminal justice system’s continuing failure to take rape seriously. It is time to realize the promise of the Debbie Smith Act and amend the related grant program so that states prioritize the testing of rape-kit evidence. This is the least we can do for rape victims who submit to invasive exams in the hope of bringing their assailants to justice.

This Memorial Day, as an ever-increasing number of mentally and physically wounded soldiers return from Iraq, the Department of Veterans Affairs faces a pressing crisis: women traumatized not only by combat but also by sexual assault and harassment from their fellow service members. Sadly, the department is failing to fully deal with this problem.

Women make up some 15 percent of the United States active duty forces, and 11 percent of the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nearly a third of female veterans say they were sexually assaulted or raped while in the military, and 71 percent to 90 percent say they were sexually harassed by the men with whom they served.

This sort of abuse drastically increases the risk and intensity of post-traumatic stress disorder. One study found that female soldiers who were sexually assaulted were nine times more likely to show symptoms of this disorder than those who weren’t. Sexual harassment by itself is so destructive, another study revealed, it causes the same rates of post-traumatic stress in women as combat does in men. And rape can lead to other medical crises, including diabetes, asthma, chronic pelvic pain, eating disorders, miscarriages and hypertension.

The threat of post-traumatic stress has risen in recent years as women’s roles in war have changed. More of them now come under fire, suffer battle wounds and kill the enemy, just as men do.

As women return for repeat tours, usually redeploying with their same units, many must go back to war with the same man (or men) who abused them. This leaves these women as threatened by their own comrades as by the war itself. Yet the combination of sexual assault and combat has barely been acknowledged or studied.

Last month, when the RAND Corporation released the biggest non-military survey of the mental health of troops since 2001, it unwittingly reflected this lack of research. The survey found that women suffer from higher rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression than men do, but it neglected to look into why this might be, and asked no questions about abuse from fellow soldiers. Terri Tanielian, the project’s co-editor, told me that RAND needs more money to explore these higher rates of trauma among women.

As the more than 191,500 women who have served in the Middle East since 2001 return home, they will increasingly flood the Veterans Affairs system. To ask those who need help for post-traumatic stress disorder to turn to a typical Veterans Affairs hospital, built in the 1950s and designed to treat men, is untenable. Women who have been raped or sexually assaulted often cannot face therapy groups or medical facilities full of men.

At the moment, the Department of Veterans Affairs operates only six inpatient post-traumatic stress disorder programs specifically for women. And although all 153 department-run hospitals will treat women, only 22 have stand-alone women’s clinics that offer a full range of medical and psychological services.

This number of clinics may seem adequate for the 1.7 million female veterans currently at home, especially since they represent only 7.2 percent of all veterans at the moment, but it isn’t. Many clinics are miles from where soldiers live, and many more are open only a few hours a week and lack staff members trained to deal with sexual assault, let alone assault combined with combat trauma.

The Department of Veterans Affairs says it plans to open more clinics for post-traumatic stress disorder, but how many will be only for women remains undecided.

Women are the fastest-growing group of veterans, and by 2020 they are projected to account for 20 percent of all veterans under the age of 45. Not all of these women will have suffered sexual assault, but many will have medical or psychological needs that conventional department hospitals cannot meet.

The Department of Veterans Affairs must open more comprehensive women’s health clinics, designate more facilities for women who have endured both combat and military sexual trauma and finance more support groups specifically for female combat veterans. The best way to honor all of our soldiers is to do what we can to help them mend.

“A court in country X sentenced a black man who had been severely beaten by white men to six months in jail and 200 lashes.”

How would you react if you read that in a newspaper? Shock, horror, anger at the regime in country X, no doubt. And once you learned that punishing blacks for associating with whites is routine in country X, you might even get angrier. You might call for sanctions, you might insist that country X not participate in the Olympics. You might demand that country X be treated like apartheid-era South Africa.

In fact the sentence is real — almost. When originally published on the CBS News Web site last month, the story concerned a woman, not a black man, and country X was Saudi Arabia.

Here is the real quote:

“A Saudi court sentenced a woman who had been gang raped to six months in jail and 200 lashes.”

True, this extraordinary case, in which a rape victim was condemned for associating with a man not her relative, did create a small international echo. Hillary Clinton led a chorus of Democrats condemning the ruling, and a few editorials condemned it, too. It wasn’t much, but it mattered: Thanks to international pressure, the Saudi king has pardoned the woman. And now? In Saudi Arabia women still can’t vote, can’t drive, can’t leave the house without a male relative. No campaign of the kind once directed at South Africa has ever been mounted in their defense.

The comparison of Saudi and South African apartheid, and the different Western attitudes to both, has been made before. Recently the journalist Mona Eltahawy argued that while oil is a factor, the real reason Saudi teams aren’t kicked out of the Olympics is that the “Saudis have succeeded in pulling a fast one on the world by claiming their religion is the reason they treat women so badly.” Islam, she points out, does take other forms in Turkey, Morocco, Indonesia and elsewhere. But Saudi propaganda, plus our own timidity about foreign customs, has blinded us to the fact that the systematic, wholesale Saudi oppression of women isn’t dictated by religion at all but rather by the culture of the Saudi ruling class.

I think there is another explanation, too. As a nation, we are partial to issues that seem familiar, and the story of apartheid South Africa had echoes in our own civil rights movement. It wasn’t that big a leap for Jesse Jackson to support the anti-apartheid movement when it was at its peak in the 1980s, but it wasn’t that hard for college students then, either: We had been taught about institutionalized racism in school.

By contrast, the women of contemporary Saudi Arabia need a much more fundamental revolution than the one that took place among American women in the 1960s, and it’s one we have trouble understanding. Unlike American blacks, American women have not had to grapple with issues as basic as the right to study or vote for a long time. Instead, we have (fortunately) fought for less fundamental rights in recent decades, and our women’s groups have of late (unfortunately) had the luxury of focusing on the marginal. The National Council of Women’s Organizations’ most famous recent campaign was against the Augusta National Golf Club. The Web site of the National Organization for Women (I hate to pick on that group, but it’s so easy) has space for issues of “non-sexist car insurance” and “network neutrality,” but not the Saudi rape victim or the girl murdered last week in Canada for refusing to wear a hijab.

The reigning feminist ideology doesn’t help: The philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers has written, among other things, that some American feminists, self-focused and reluctant to criticize non-Western cultures, have convinced themselves that “sexual terror” in America (a phrase from a real women’s studies textbook) is more dangerous than actual terrorism. But the deeper problem is the gradual marginalization of “women’s issues” in domestic politics, which has made them subordinate to security issues, or racial issues, in foreign policy as well.

American delegates to international and U.N. women’s organizations are mostly identified with arguments about reproductive rights (for or against, depending on the administration), not arguments about the fundamental rights of women in Saudi Arabia or the Muslim world.

Until this changes, it will be hard to mount a campaign, in the manner of the anti-apartheid movement, to enforce sanctions or codes of conduct for people doing business there. What we need as a model, in other words, is not the 1960s feminism we all remember but a globalized version of the 19th-century feminism we’ve nearly forgotten. Candidates for the role of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, anyone?

Cuando François D´Eaubonne inventó en 1969 el término falocracia para hablar de la dominación simbólica y política del falo en la cultura occidental, no hubiera podido imaginar que ese mismo falo era en realidad objeto de una intensa vigilancia y que se convertiría en el centro de una creciente normalización biopolítica. Entre mediados del siglo XX, cuando el psiquiatra Harry Benjamin descubre el efecto de las hormonas sexuales sobre la respuesta genital a la excitación, y los albores del XXI, cuando los laboratorios Pfizer, Bayer y Lilly se disputan, bajo los nombres Viagra, Levitra o Cialis, la comercialización de una molécula vasodilatadora capaz de provocar y mantener la erección, la masculinidad deja de ser un coto cerrado de privilegios naturales para convertirse en un dominio de capitalización e ingeniería política.

La primera década de este nuevo milenio ha sido un momento sin precedentes de ansiedad política y especulación económica en torno al pene. Hoy, más que de falocracia, habría que hablar de falocontrol: de un conjunto de dispositivos políticos que luchan por diseñar los límites de la nueva masculinidad.

La intención del presidente francés, Nicolas Sarkozy, hecha pública el pasado mes de agosto, de crear una ley que prescriba la utilización de terapias de castración química para tratar a los delincuentes sexuales es un eslabón más en la escalada de los poderes políticos por producir y controlar la sexualidad masculina.

Cabría preguntarse: ¿cuáles son los procesos de transformación corporal que desatan realmente la llamada castración química? ¿Cuándo, cómo y sobre qué cuerpos han sido ya utilizadas medidas similares de gestión farmacológica de la identidad? ¿Cuáles son las ficciones políticas de masculinidad y de feminidad que subyacen a dicha proposición de ley y qué tipo de sujeto pretendemos producir colectivamente?

Rastreemos nuestro archivo farmacopolítico: la llamada castración química consiste en la administración de un cóctel más o menos cargado de antiandrógenos (acetato de ciproterona, progestágenos o reguladores de la gonadotropina), es decir, de moléculas inhibidoras de la producción de testosterona.

Si bien es cierto que uno de los efectos de los antiandrógenos puede ser la disminución del deseo sexual (siempre que se piense el deseo sexual en términos de excitación y respuesta eréctil), lo que no se señala a menudo es que los efectos secundarios de estos fármacos son la disminución del tamaño del pene, el desarrollo de pechos, la modificación del volumen muscular y el aumento de la acumulación de grasas en torno a las caderas. Se trata de un proceso de feminización hormonal. Por ello, no deberíamos extrañarnos al descubrir que fármacos de efecto antiandrógeno semejante sean utilizados (de forma voluntaria) por transexuales que desean iniciar un proceso de feminización y cambio de sexo.

Cuando exploramos la historia política de este fármaco, aprendemos que fue usado en los años cincuenta como parte del tratamiento contra la homosexualidad masculina: esa fue la terapia aplicada por la justicia inglesa a Alan Turing, uno de los inventores de la ciencia computacional moderna que, acusado de “homosexualidad, indecencia grave y perversión sexual”, se vio obligado a someterse a una terapia hormonal que probablemente le llevó posteriormente al suicido.

Paradójicamente, y como prueba de una cierta confusión científica, el mismo fármaco forma parte de los actuales experimentos con la llamada “bomba gay”, un compuesto molecular a base de hormonas con el que el ejército norteamericano pretende transformar a sus enemigos en homosexuales.

Lo que estos datos dejan al descubierto es que la castración química (o la feminización hormonal) es un dispositivo farmacopolítico destinado no tanto a la reducción de las agresiones sexuales, sino a la modificación del género del presunto agresor. Valga señalar que tales terapias están únicamente pensadas en función de la figura masculina de lo que Sarkozy llama el “predador sexual”.

El modo de castigar y controlar la sexualidad masculina es transformarla simbólica y corporalmente en femenina. Se produce así un doble efecto del que, lamentablemente, ya conocemos los resultados: la criminalización política de la sexualidad masculina y la victimización de la sexualidad femenina.

La erección y por extensión la masculinidad, pensada como un impulso involuntario que debe ser políticamente controlado, es siempre efecto de una regulación química: producida o aumentada a través de vasodilatadores (no olvidemos que François Evrad, sujeto frente al que se desata la polémica de la ley francesa, llevaba pastillas de Viagra en el bolsillo en el momento de la violación) o controlada y reprimida en el caso de la castración química. De forma paralela, la sexualidad femenina se construye como territorio pasivo sobre el que se ejerce la violencia de la sexualidad masculina.

Pero seamos conscientes, no hay aquí destinos biológicos, sino programas farmacopolíticos.