The posters in Marie Pacu­riema's otherwise-bare office are cheerful, with smiling cartoon characters standing upright and proud. Women in the Democratic Republic of Congo have rights, they declare. Together we can make a difference! Violence against women will stop!

Ms. Pacuriema sighs as she looks over her paperwork, the noise of motorbike taxis and street vendors flowing through the open door. She gestures to the mud porch, where young women – some carrying babies – are bent over an old sewing machine. They are all rape survivors, Pacuriema says, and many have been shunned by their families. The sewing work, which Pacuriema arranged, is their only income.

"I try to help these women understand that they have rights, and these rights must be respected," Pacuriema says. "But it is difficult."

For seven years now, Pacuriema has been on this mission – trying to convince her fellow Congolese of the sentiments expressed in her posters, struggling all the while against the realities brought on by war.

Eastern Congo has experienced atrocious levels of sexual violence over the past nine years – first during a five-year war that ended in 2003 and killed 4 million people from violence and hunger, then during continued instability and ethnic fighting. Human Rights Watch, the United Nations, and many other organizations have decried the mass rapes here; most estimates put the number of Congolese rape victims in the tens of thousands.

During the war, most women were raped by militia members, who wielded sexual violence as yet another weapon. Today, women and girls are more likely to be assaulted by the low-paid Congolese soldiers, who regularly extort and terrorize local villagers.

Scores of aid organizations continue in their efforts to aid rape survivors.

But more and more, there are also people like Pacuriema – local women simply trying to help. They have formed organizations throughout eastern Congo, working with scant resources to arrange housing for survivors, persuade husbands to stay with their raped wives, and to find work for women supporting babies they never wanted.

"The Congolese themselves are really trying to do something," says Madnodje Mounoubai, spokesman for the UN peacekeeping force in Bunia. "But most of the time, they only have their goodwill."

Pacuriema, who once held a job as an outreach worker with a local radio station, formed her first women's club in 2000. Traveling to rural villages for her radio job, she had been shocked to meet women who had never been to school and who looked at her with awe for speaking in public. She wanted to teach them to read and write, and wanted them to realize that under Congolese law they were equal to their husbands.

But as the violence increased, her focus shifted. Her hometown, Bunia, is the capital of Ituri Province, a mineral-rich but infrastructure-poor region that is still considered the least stable area of Congo. Toward the beginning of the war, fighting ravaged the Ituri countryside, and hundreds of women fled to this city. They slept under trees and bridges. Some wept constantly, Pacuriema recalls. Others did not talk at all.

Pacuriema and some friends decided they needed to do something to help these refugees. So they created a new organization that would give some assistance itself – funded in part by modest local donations, in part by NGOs – but would also try to coordinate the various women's associations that are sprinkled across this region. They called their group "Forum des Mamans de Ituri" or Ituri Women's Forum.

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