Quand le présupposé inné devient un défi de survie : résilience des enfants issus du viol à l’Est de la RD Congo

Abstract

In developed countries, “childbirth under X” is becoming widespread and the issue is no longer a problem for morals. The progress of medicine now allows the parent to choose the qualities of his future child. In eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), it is of the order of transgression that a child questions his filiation or imagines the qualities of the parents he would have liked to have. It is unthinkable to be born and exist without a parent. In this patriarchal patrilineal society, individual and collective identity rests on the image of the father. In the same way he attributes his name to his child, he roots him in filiation and above all, introduces him to the society and to his world. Moreover, in a circle of elders, to designate a younger the name “son of such” or “daughter of such” prevails over the first name of birth. Christian religions, which concern more than 90 per cent of the population of the country, insist on marriage as the only means of procreation and, above all, on its unique and indissoluble character. The civil service adds to the customary and religious marriage the civil marriage to formalize, once and for all the framework that leads to the parenthood. Yet, eastern DRC has been at war for over twenty years. Among the most denounced abuses of this war, massive rapes. Their number and the cruelty with which they are executed make us fear its use as a weapon of war. Eventually, many children are born from these forced unions. For the raped woman, rape is a trauma. According to specialists, it is the worst of events in the potentiality to induce a traumatic disease. The particularity of this trauma in the DRC is due to the image created around marriage, virginity, faithfulness, the body of the woman … In this country indeed a woman raped and a prostitute come closer to the eyes of the society. Faithfulness in the couple is at the center of preoccupations in both the traditional and religious worlds. To this is added the representation of sexual relations outside marriage and their traditional consequences. Moreover, tradition, religions and public administration all condemn severely contraception, abortion and infanticide. This complexity draws the still unclear limits of the trauma of a woman raped in eastern DRC. As for the child born of rape, it is a paradox. In the end, he is made responsible for a reality dating back to the prehistory of his history: to be born, child of enemy. Society requires the family to deal with it at the same time as it represents the unspeakable, the shame and a break for that same society. The members of the maternal family take care of them, but in fact nobody - or almost no body- is willing to offer them local identity marks. Putting on them specific traits of culture seems to be a transgression, a risk that no one can or will not take. Doing so is perceived as exposing practices, traditional “faires” to a stranger. Moreover, in order to present these children to a stranger, nicknames cut straight, once again testifying that for them, the social identity comes from the father: “child of the interahamwe”, “snake children”,… On the genogram of the family, the child born of rape represents a rupture, a radical break between the “normal” and the “abnormal” and thus prepares the basis for a Transgenerational trauma. How do the children of rape save their bits of history and fit into history? To form their resilience in this patrilineal patriarchal society, these children develop specific mechanisms, based on their experience of this exclusion from society, which is supposed to be theirs. To prove this, we present the case of Jo. The clinical case presents Jo, a six-year-old boy, consulted in the IDP camp in Mugunga, near the city of Goma. He has been living in the camp with his grandmother for two years. According to her grandmother, her mother was a teenager when the men in arms forced her into the forest, she and her companions in the village. When she managed to escape from this captivity where she had been regularly raped by several men, she was pregnant. Seven months after childbirth, she chose to leave, leaving the child to her mother. Despite the fact that Jo did not really see his mother and that his grandmother is already mourning his daughter, he says that his mother lives in the city X and his father, in the street. He ends up prescribing a duty, that of seeking these idealized parents. The analysis tries to unravel, in this subtle and complex context, what is traumatic about what does not seem to be in Jo's biography. In order to achieve this, we have made a connection between Jo and the example given to us by the neuropsychiatrist, an ethologist and writer Boris Cyrulnik, a Jew who at the age of four knew how to escape death in the south of France where was executed the worst massacre in the history of mankind. We tried to analyze Jo's childhood novel, that real awakened dream by which he created his parents and set himself an objective on which he remained hanging, like a star on the horizon. To apprehend the revivifying function contained in this novel of childhood, we made a bridge between Jo and the Jewish novelist, Aharon Applfeld. At the beginning of World War II, his mother was killed and he was taken to a Nazi concentration camp with his father. At the age of eight he escapes from the concentration camp and crosses Europe, from Ukrainian forests to the port of Italy from where he will leave for Israel. During this long journey, he knew how to hide his origins – Jewish – and his language – German – to survive. In his novel, Histoire d’une Vie, he relates that during this long and tumultuous crossing, one idea had kept him alive: that his parents would come back to look for him. Even though he saw his mother murdered and believed that his father had been gassed, he believed he was hard in his dream and refused to yield either to fear or discouragement until the return was not arrived. The clinic with the women raped and their children in the DRC confronted us with different questions. The one that remained enigmatic and that constantly haunted the organizing framework of care while exposing the fear of the mother to face the future in the company of a “monster child” was: What will I answer him when he asks me who his father is? This question and others have no formal answer yet, but this work is a draft in one of the directions to answer it. In efforts to support these children, it is necessary to identify and invest in the emergence of resilience factors. One of the factors of resilience will be their integration into Congolese society. To “humanize” the children and “purify” their mothers, a rite would be created. Traditional and religious actors should federate their points of view on the form to be given to this rite so that it is strong of meaning and re-enter into morals.