Add your name to this petition to ask our next president to announce his administration’s initial plan to end the scourge of violence against women and girls in eastern Congo on International Women’s Day on March 8, 2009, and then report back on his progress toward this goal one year later.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo is host to the world’s deadliest conflict since World War II. Congolese women and girls in particular bear the vicious brunt of this crisis. Eastern Congo right now is perhaps the worst place in the world to be a woman. Used as a weapon of war, rape in Congo exists on a scale seen nowhere else in the world.


Often successful in its intent to destroy and exterminate, rape as a weapon of war is causing the near total destruction of women, their families, and their communities. Efforts to protect women and girls in the Congo are failing spectacularly. It is time to get serious about ending the conflict and protecting and empowering Congo's women.