One of the most important things is recognizing it as a problem, so it's encouraging to hear you bring up the issue, which is very important.
It also begs the broader question of how to provide effective health and medical services in DRC, which is in dire need, and possibly providing HIV care as part of more integrated health services.
I know that many NGOs do remarkable work providing health services in collaboration with the national government.
HIV is especially interesting because I think there is actually broad recognition of the threat of the disease. It can often create a rather perverse situation where people assume that survivors of sexual violence have AIDS—all of them—and that it's guaranteed and inevitable.
This definitely feeds into the stigmatization and ostracism of women who have been raped, which is unfortunate since, on one hand, you want a recognition of HIV as a problem, but you also want people to recognize that it's not an inevitable outcome of rape. So there is a need to temper recognition by providing services, but also realizing that we need to reduce the stigma of the fact that women and girls are susceptible to this.
It's encouraging that the Congolese government is aware of the issue and I think that there needs to be a bit more attention on the ground to voluntary counselling, testing, and prevention of mother-to-child transmission, and provision of antiretroviral therapy.
These are all important efforts that could actually be strengthened.