From: United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary
Testimony of Lisa F. Jackson Documentary Maker and Director of “The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo”
Before the Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law Committee on the Judiciary United States Senate
“Rape as a Weapon of War: Accountability for Sexual Violence in Conflict”
April 1, 2008
Chairman Durbin, Ranking Member Coburn, and Members of the Subcommittee, I am honored to be asked to come before you to describe from my own perspective some of what I witnessed and heard in the months that I spent in the Eastern DR Congo in 2006 and 2007 shooting a documentary film. During that time I interviewed many women and girls who had survived sexual violence. I talked with peacekeepers, priests, doctors, activists, international aid workers and, most chillingly of all, with a dozen self-confessed rapists, uniformed soldiers in the Congolese army who boasted to my camera about the dozens of women they had raped. What I heard in the Congo has altered the course of my own life, and I hope I can convey to you here today even a small sense of the profound impact that the women – and men -of the Congo had on me.