Activist Eve Ensler responded to the report with an angry editorial, in which she argues that the time for studying rape in the DRC is over. We already know that the Congo has a rape crisis, she wrote, and should focus instead on ending the violence once and for all.

The desire for action is understandable, but these studies are important for understanding the causes, and thus solutions, of the problems. A growing body of literature suggests that the prevailing journalistic and activist accounts of the nature of rape in the Congo are often incomplete, and, in many cases, simply wrong. While no one disputes that armed men engage in rape against civilian populations, the story of who is raping whom turns out to be significantly more complicated than the popular narrative suggests.

Rapes by non-military actors account for a large percentage of rape cases in the DRC. A 2010 Oxfam/Harvard Humanitarian initiative study found a huge increase in the number of civilian-perpetrated rapes between 2004 and 2008. By 2008, approximately 40 percent of rapes were committed by civilians, they found. The AJPH study found that 22.5 percent of rapes in their study sample were perpetrated by husbands and other intimate partners, not by soldiers sweeping through a village. It also found an extraordinarily high rate of rape in Equateur province, far from the violence of the Kivus and Ituri. This finding suggests that civilian-perpetrated rape is not simply a function of conflict and the presence of multiple armed groups.

We have also learned that not all rapists in the Congo are men, and not all victims are women. A study on mental and physical health in the eastern DRC by Kirsten Johnson et al published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that women are committing acts of sexual violence against other women at a surprisingly high rate. Since there are very few women fighting in Congolese armed groups or even in the national army, this supports the Oxfam/HHI conclusion emphasizing civilian-perpetrated rape.

There are also problems with the "rape as a weapon of war" narrative. Studying rape victims in Ituri, researchers Francoise Duroch, Melissa McRae, and Rebecca Grais concluded that rape is not used as part of military strategy to achieve a particular goal. They also found a significant number of civilian-perpetrated rapes in their sample.

Maria Eriksson Baaz and Maria Stern, who study military involvement in rape, interviewed soldiers for their 2010 working paper, The Complexity of Violence. Baaz and Stern challenge the stereotypes about the role rape plays in the DRC conflicts, including that rape is the main mechanism of violence and that only women and girls are victims of gender-based violence. They also conclude that "while sexual and other violence is often used to humiliate and intimidate, this humiliation and intimidation is much less strategic and much more complex than a combat strategy to further military/political gains."