Must we see rape in Britain to understand rape in Congo?

[xchrom]

http://blogs.reuters.com/africanews/2011/09/30/must-we-see-rape-in-britain-to-understand-rape-in-congo/

I was left somewhat traumatised after going to see a screening of a controversial new Hollywood-backed short released this week, aimed at highlighting the link between minerals mined for British mobile phones and the use of rape and murder as weapons of war in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The highly graphic campaign video – appropriately called Unwatchable – starts with a little English girl picking flowers in the garden of her family’s multi-million pound mansion in a picturesque Cotswolds village.

This tranquil scene is shattered in an instant when armed men descend on the house, gang-rape her sister on the kitchen table and then murder her parents. It ends five minutes later with the girl running for her life.

“We placed it in a sort of cliché idyllic countryside, and tracing it back to mobile phones would make it relevant to people on the street,” Marc Hawker of production company DarkFibre told AlertNet.

[xchrom]

1. kick

[seabeyond]

2. rape as entertainment. keep feeding it to us so we can all be immuned, desensitized... nt

[MountainLaurel]

3. Interesting approach

And sometimes such tactics are the only way to get people's attention to things outside their immediate purview.