DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO

The DRC's eastern provinces — North Kivu, South Kivu, Ituri — represent the world's longest-running humanitarian crisis, and the men in these regions have experienced a quarter-century of continuous conflict. Sexual violence against men in the DRC is an underreported atrocity: armed groups use male rape as a weapon of war, destroying men's masculine identity and community standing in cultures where such victimization carries unbearable shame. The men who survive this violence rarely speak of it, and the few organizations that address it — like the Panzi Foundation — note that male survivors are even more reluctant to seek help than female ones.

The cobalt mining crisis connects the DRC's male crisis to every smartphone in the world. An estimated 40,000 children and hundreds of thousands of men mine cobalt by hand in tunnels that collapse regularly, breathing toxic dust that causes fatal lung disease. These men produce the mineral that powers electric vehicles and laptops for a few dollars a day, while the companies that profit from their labor — and the consumers who use their products — remain conveniently distant. This exploitation is not accidental; it is the continuation of a colonial logic that treats Congolese male bodies as raw material. King Leopold's ghost still haunts the mines, and the men who enter them each morning know that their country's wealth is the source of their poverty.