How a journalist chases a monster, Part 1

The first in a series that pulls back the curtain on seven years of reporting.

A view out the car window in Bukavu.

It was in a sickly green, fluorescent-lit meeting room in Bukavu, in eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, seven years ago that someone whispered to me that babies were being gang-raped in a nearby town. I’d been there for many hours listening to the stories of rape survivors for an unrelated article when a resea…