The Kailahun-based GBV team quietly kept up pressure on the reluctant magistrate. Photo: Ann Jones

This time, Natsnet Zerizghi, GBV Startup Program Manager in Kailahun, went to visit the magistrate in his chambers to let him know that IRC GBV was concerned about the case.  At the same time, rumors came to IRC that the perpetrator’s mother was spreading money around.  She was said to be “well connected” to the magistrate.  Natsnet and other GBV staffers made another courtesy call.So the dance went on—and off—for months.  Any mother, trying to bring a case before the court, would have been forced to quit long before by the sheer unaffordable cost of hiring a ride on a motorbike to get from Koindu to the court in Kailahun. The round trip costs more dollars than this mother sees in weeks.  But in this case, IRC kept coming up with the fare.  And Natsnet and others from the Kailahun GBV team kept going to visit the magistrate who seemed to suggest, more and more strongly, that there was little evidence against the confessed perpetrator.Then, just the other day the case was called again.  The mother came from Koindu, again  at IRC’s expense, and this time she brought her 7-year-old daughter, the rape victim.This time the GBV team asked many other women from the local Women’s Action Group to come to court.  Men sympathetic to the issue came to court too. They sat there—ordinary women and men—filling the benches of the courtroom, and among them sat a 7-year-old girl.  Mary Sheku, the GBV social worker, observed that the magistrate seemed terrified.  All these women were watching.

Natsnet Zerizghi from Eritrea, Startup Program Manager in Kailahun, snapped this photo of thewomen and men who packed the benches of the magistrate’s court to show support for the raped child. Photo: Natsnet Zerizghi

Within minutes the magistrate found ample cause to refer the case to the High Court in Kenema for judgment—as he should have done months before.  The judge of the High Court in Kenema is a woman who doesn’t mess around.  It’s now likely that the confessed perpetrator will serve some real jail time, and that everyone in Koindu and the surrounding area will hear about it.  This case will serve as a precedent—and a warning.  It has already made big news in Koindu.This result was brought about by mainly by one brave, persistent mother and the terrifying presence of women, watching, in the courtroom.  Women who, by the way, duly noted the effect of their solidarity on the judge.  They’ll use that power again. So there’s the success story.  Small.  But still reverberating—and making women in Kailahun District “plenty, plenty gladdy.”More from Ann 

“He [George Clooney] presented himself and his father as journalists. He explained to the people who he met that he was there to hear their story, that he was concerned about their plight and that he wanted to retell their story back in the United States and around the world.”

- Melissa Winkler, IRC emergency communications director, on The Fabulous Picture Show on Al Jazeera, referring to actor and director George Clooney’s IRC-sponsored trip to Sudan and Chad with father, Nick, in 2006.

“I’m here to see my children happy and laughing, I want them to drink orange juice in the morning. In Baghdad they smelled and drank smoke and rockets.”

- Nazar Joodi, an Iraqi refugee resettled by the IRC with his family in the Washington D.C. area, speaking with The Washington Examiner.

“No post-conflict country can truly ‘recover’ or ‘develop’ while its women and children still suffer. After all, if women and children really counted, they’d have to count as the overwhelming majority of human beings on the planet. Most of the world’s children are in the care of women. As women fare, so fare children. As children fare, so fares the country in the future. That’s why GBV is so important. It’s not a ‘women’s issue’—not some incidental add-on to the ‘real’ business of relief and recovery. It’s the best possible investment in a better world.”

- Ann Jones blogging from Sierra Leone on an IRC gender-based violence (GBV) program that puts cameras in the hands of women in conflict zones and helps them make their voices heard.

“If we don’t make our best-faith efforts, with the best methods available, we’ll get back to the bad old days when someone makes up a number … and [the number] is going to get perpetuated.”

- Richard Brennan, IRC senior health director, speaking with The National Journal for an article about accurately counting refugee flows or deaths caused by war and famine. A new IRC survey has found that 5,400,000 people have died from war-related causes in Congo since 1998 – the world’s deadliest documented conflict since WW II.

“I don’t think I have ever worked so closely with the private sector.”

–Pam Flowers, IRC country director in Azerbaijan, interviewed by The Christian Science Monitor for an article about community projects in Azerbaijan created by the oil company, BP.