Women across the Democratic Republic of Congo's war-torn East are living in fear of rape

Doctors who treat the victims, who are often horrifically mutilated, fear that the threat will only grow worse when the fighting dies down and men turn their attention to the defenceless female population. In the town of Rutshuru, Constance, 45, was lying on a thin mattress in her two-room home. She had been raped by a gunman from Laurent Nkunda's rebel army. Two armed men forced open a window and shone torches inside the tiny home, shouting for Constance to open the door or they would break it down and kill everyone inside - including her husband, Jacques, 52, and their six children. "What could I do?" she said, wincing in pain. "I opened the door, they forced us to the ground and put guns to our heads, asking where the money was. I went to the bedroom and gave them $50 which we had borrowed so we could run away from the fighting." Constance's husband was taken out of the house and forced to lie down. Then a gunman returned. "He came back to the bedroom and raped me," said Constance. Doctors have told Constance (not her real name) that she will recover - physically at least. By the terrible standards of Congo's war, she was comparatively lucky, said Joseph Ciza, the director of the HealAfrica hospital, which treats the victims of sexual violence. He said that women were often shot and mutilated after being raped. Past experience suggests that rape becomes more of a danger when an outbreak of violence dies down. "When the fighting is actually happening, the number of cases goes down, because the soldiers are busy. But once it calms down, those soldiers settle into their new bases and start to terrorise the local women. It is a way of showing their power and control," said Mr Ciza. If so, the present situation - where a fragile ceasefire has been in place for almost a week - may set the stage for an increase in sexual violence. The frequency of rape in eastern Congo, which has suffered more than a decade of war, appalls aid workers. Mr Ciza's hospital admits four women on a typical day. In the last five years, it has treated more than 18,000. In neighboring South Kivu province, the United Nations reported 27,000 sexual assaults in 2006. In some villages, every single woman has reported some kind of sexual abuse, usually inflicted by armed men from Congo's shambolic national army or the dozens of local militias and rebel groups. "I've worked in Angola and Darfur and the situation there was horrific, but in Congo the scale and brutality is at a whole different level," said Martin Hartberg, the protection advisor for Oxfam in Goma. "It is as if rape has become ingrained into the culture of these armed groups. This country has to be the worst in the world to be a woman."