DNA Edit: Most prize-worthy – Peace Nobel is timely recognition of their work

The 2018 Nobel Peace Prize has recognised a scourge that cuts across boundaries. In the course of its distinguished 117-year-old history, the prize has gone to several statesmen, activists, men and women from diverse fields and other luminaries. But this year, the recognition accorded to Nadia Murad and Denis Mukwege for fighting sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflict could not have come at a more opportune moment. Mukwege, a Congolese doctor, and Nadia Murad, a Yazidi rape survivor who suffered abuses by ISIS, have won the award for their “efforts to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war”. That the committee decided to award the two against a total of 331 individuals and organisations that were nominated, shows how the world is now beginning to react - even if belatedly - to sexual violence against women. 

Both, the Congolese medic and the Yazidi rape survivor have come to represent the struggle against a global affliction that goes well beyond any single conflict, as the ever-expanding #MeToo movement has revealed. Mukwege, 63, was recognised for two decades of work to help women recover from the violence and trauma of sexual abuse and rape in war-torn eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. He has treated tens of thousands of women, children, even babies just a few months old, all victims of rape at the Panzi hospital, which he founded in 1999 in South Kivu. Twenty five-year-old Murad, an Iraqi woman from the Yazidi community, was kidnapped by Islamic State militants in 2014 and endured three months as a sex slave before managing to escape. 

It is fitting too that the #MeToo movement is showing signs of life in India, a country where rape and sexual assault, particularly of disadvantaged women, is threatening to reach epic proportions. In an oblique way, this award is a recognition that the world cares for women, whether in Iraq, Africa or India.