My grandfather was a professional photographer. We had little choice, growing up, but to let him capture us in rolls and rolls of film. I hated it, and sympathized with people of other cultures who believe their soul is being stolen with each shutter click. On the other hand, there are few things on film so emotionally compelling as a human face.

It’s hard to look away from this photo and others of the violence and displacement going on in the Congo. As kestralwing pointed out a week ago, what is happening there is more than “just” rape. The BBC reports that up to a third of the Congolese rape victims arriving at Panzi hospital, a women's medical facility in Bukavu, need surgery to keep their digestive systems from leaking between their legs, because they have been raped and sexually mutilated. 200,000 women, by some estimates, have been raped, most of them gang raped and many mutilated or kept as sexual slaves, in the past two years. Those women who are not raped have been subject to displacement and starvation as their homeland becomes the battleground over a war over mineral deposits. The U.N., despite having the largest peacekeeping presence in the world in the Congo, with 17,000 soldiers stationed and more on the way, does not seem capable of keeping African women safe.

Al Qaeda has targeted buildings, trains, ships and airplanes (with people in them) as objects of terror, but what about when women’s bodies are objects for inflicting terror on families and villages? How do we fight the “war on terror” when women’s bodies are literally the battlefield? Or, as one documentary filmmaker puts it, rape is cheaper than bullets and with a longer lasting, ripple effect?

In the 1940’s, Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jew and holocaust survivor observed that in the Nuremberg Trials, Nazi leaders could not be charged with the murder of German Jews because for a nation to murder its own citizens was legal. This struck Lemkin as worse than ludicrous, so he created the word and the definition of genocide to describe a special kind of crime against an entire race of people, and founded a Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948. Lemkin was obsessed with the idea of genocide prevention, and yet, as Samantha Powers describes in A Problem from Hell, America and the Age of Genocide, he died destitute, alone, and before the United States agreed to ratify the Genocide Convention’s treaty. It took a U.S. Senator, William Proxmire of Wisconsin, 19 years and 3,211 speeches on the Senate floor, to be exact, before the United States Congress agreed to ratify the treaty, and even then it was with so many caveats that it was close to useless.

There may be as many as four armies in the Congo that are carrying out genocidal violence against Congolese women: Rwandan Hutus, Rwandan Tutsis, the Congolese regular army, and a Congolese special brigade. Even the U.N., in 2005, launched over 150 investigations of U.N. peacekeepers for having coercive sex with women or underage girls. As a marker of how few options women have in this part of the world, one of the teen age girls interviewed remarked that the U.N. soldiers were the “best employer in town.”

I no longer believe that nothing can be done. The United States supplies as much as 25% of the U.N. budget, so despite the disastrous Bush legacy, the Obama administration has clout, should it choose to use it. As for the political will… if the mines were being robbed of their minerals, making them no longer available for consumption, wouldn’t the world find a way to intervene? What is the point of building multimillion dollar holocaust memorials all over the world, with citizens and politicians alike standing, in tears, uttering “never again,” if we aren’t willing to act when actual human lives are at stake? The numbers in the Congo are becoming chillingly close to World War II genocide numbers, with five million dead and counting.

Raphael Lemkin, and Samantha Power argue that “intervention” can take place on a creative continuum. What if the allies had blown up the railroads leading into the concentration camps--when they had the intelligence to know they were there? What if the U.S. had granted amnesty to fleeing citizens of the occupied territories? What if international corporations had drawn up refusals to allow concentration camp labor to fill their factories, or to manufacture their goods?

Or the girl in the photo asks for guns. Maybe we should give them to her.