Photos courtesy of Melanie Blanding

Nabintu, 43, of Kaziba, South Kivu, Congo, was attacked by three Interahamwe rebels in 1996 while she was traveling just outside the village. She resisted the rebels until they cut her deeply with a knife. Nabintu said that when her husband came to search for her, the rebels killed him. She has not remarried and continues to care for their six children.

A friend braids Madeleine's hair while she cares for another woman's child one morning at Panzi Hospital. Most women suffer severe psychological trauma after the attacks. Madeleine spent time cradling other women's babies every day before her surgery, which may have been a response to the loss of her only child while she was captive in a rebel village.

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• See more of Melanie Blanding's photos

Blanding's work

• An exhibit of Melanie Blanding’s photographs will be on display at the O. Winston Link Museum in Roanoke from March 9 to April 30. For more information, visit linkmuseum.org
• The documentary “Women in War Zones: Sexual Violence in the Congo” — produced by Scott Blanding and Brad LaBriola — will be released later this spring.
• For more information about the General Referral Hospital of Panzi and its work with victims of sexual assault, visit panzihospitalbukavu.org/.

About Congo

• A 2006 report issued by the U.S. State Department classified the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire, as a centralized republic with a population of approximately 60 million.
• It is the third-largest country in Africa, but for more than a decade it has been torn apart by civil war, political rebellion, conflicts over natural resources and the fallout of the vast flood of refugees who fled the genocide in neighboring Rwanda.
• The International Rescue Committee estimates that, since 1998, 5.4 million people have died as a result of the fighting in Congo. This marks the largest combat-related death toll since World War II.

Not long after she arrived, she woke to the sound of a woman's screams.

It was 1 or 2 in the morning, and the shrieks reached into her room in the guarded guest house at Panzi Hospital.

Melanie Blanding didn't know what was happening. She imagined that someone outside the gates needed help, or that the complex was under attack.

But the screams, she later learned, came from the hospital's female patients, who were dreaming of the trauma they'd endured, of past horrors which left them suffering still, crying out even in safety.

"I heard screams like that over a period of days," she recalled. "You would hear people screaming, and it was normal."

This was the summer of 2006, and Blanding, a photographer from Roanoke, was in the Democratic Republic of Congo to take a series of portraits of women scarred by war. The women are victims of violent, often monstrous sexual assaults, and their numbers appear to be growing.

'Get close'

Picture a photographer in Africa to document wartime casualties and you might envision a strapping, grizzled veteran loaded down with cameras. But that's not Blanding.

The Cave Spring High graduate, who is 24, has a deep, precise voice and a confident intensity, but physically she cuts a small and rather mild figure.

She started out a writer, and in high school worked for the student paper. But reporters had to take their own pictures, and she soon began shooting football games with her parents' Minolta. Her mother, Susan, gave her advice about framing and composition, but it was her simplest suggestion that really took hold.

"She told me to get close," Blanding recalled. "The excitement was that I was down on the field ... instead of sitting on the sidelines. I realized how much more I enjoyed photography instead of writing."

At Western Kentucky University, she studied photojournalism. In 2005, she spent a week in Congo, which for more than a decade has been racked by civil war, rebellions and reverberations of the genocide in Rwanda.

As part of her research for an outreach group, she met rape victims and learned of the mass sexual assaults occurring around the country.

"I was under the impression that things in that area were peaceful again," she said. "After being on that trip, I wanted to go back on my own. I really wanted to do something to raise awareness for these women. I wanted to be a conduit for help."

So in 2006, funded by grants from photography organizations, she went back. Her younger brother, Scott, a film student at Temple University, and his production partner Brad LaBriola went along to shoot a documentary.

Melanie was 22, Scott was 19. Neither they nor LaBriola had ever been abroad without an established group. They had a contact at the hospital but not much else, and none of them spoke any language other than English.

"Really up to the day before, we were just crossing our fingers and hoping everything would work out," she said.

"Ignorance was our greatest thing going into the project," Scott said. "If we'd known what we were getting into, maybe we wouldn't have done it."

A modified perspective

In 2006, UNICEF reported 18,000 cases of rape in eastern Congo alone. According to a U.S. State Department report, "Transitional government security forces, armed groups and civilians perpetrated widespread rape against women and girls."

Blanding believes the assaults, which often occur in public and involve multiple victims, are largely strategic. The rapes damage the family and community structure, she said, which also affects the economic structure.

Women told of being attacked while collecting water or firewood. They said they'd been raped in front of their families and neighbors, and subsequently outcast. In some cases women were subjected to gang rapes, mutilation, forced incest and murder. Blanding said a teen she met had been raped with sticks. The wood penetrated the girl so deeply it lodged in her uterus and had to be surgically removed.

"Families are reluctant to send their girls to school or to work if there's no protection for them," Blanding said. Many women have to choose between safety and leading productive lives.

It hasn't been easy to track the extent of the violence. According to a 2006 report by the United Nations Human Rights Integrated Office, "Victims of rape are reluctant to report the violations, due to the dysfunctional nature of the judicial system and the stigma of rape." The report determined that an insignificant number of perpetrators had been brought to justice.

The siblings said they encountered real danger only once during their trip, when a drought forced them to seek water at a pond near the Rwandan border.

"There were maybe 100 women already lined up and ... six or eight men with machetes who were managing it," Melanie Blanding said. "They told us they would attack us."

Scott Blanding was filming the exchange.

"These guys suddenly came up to us with machetes and told us to turn the camera off," he said. "Normally I would never turn the camera off."

They left without water but with a modified perspective.

"We didn't learn until later all the insults that these men were saying to the women," Melanie Blanding said.

Sharing scars

Blanding hoped she would be able to produce a portrait series on the physical effects of violence.

But she wasn't sure how the women would feel about sharing their emotions with a stranger.

During her stay, Blanding met with a group of about 40 victims at a hospital a few hours from Panzi, but said, "I wasn't sure how they'd feel about sharing their scars with me."

One woman stood up and began to talk about why she was there and what had happened to her. As she talked she unwrapped her clothes to reveal her scars.

The young photographer asked the women how many of them had similar wounds.

"Almost every one of them raised their hands," she recalled.

She found a room with a window; she put paper over the glass to soften the sunlight, and for about two hours, she took portraits of 11 women.

She also documented the recovery of a 17-year-old named Madeleine who said she had been kidnapped, kept as a sex slave by rebels and impregnated. According to Madeleine's account, as she went into labor, the father killed the baby. She escaped and made her way to Panzi, where she had surgery to repair injuries to her urethra and cervix.

The photographs Blanding took will be part of a new exhibit at the O. Winston Link Museum. It opens March 9.

"It is certainly the most modern show we've had," said museum director Kim Parker, adding that the photographs would be displayed to let viewers draw their own interpretations.

"We're not in the business of creating opinions," Parker said. "We create dialogue."

Dialogue is exactly what Blanding hopes to spark.

"As a photographer, I've been more of an activist than just relating the news," she explained. "Imagining myself in their position, it was devastating. I couldn't not do something. These women shouldn't be forgotten or ignored."