During the tribunal set up by Genocide Watch, Soyinka heard searing testimony, he says, from "witnesses flown out from southern Sudan, people whose families had been killed, or who had been raped or seen relatives raped or maimed - some broke down.
For example, altruistic behaviour towards relatives, infidelity, rape and murder are all widespread in the animal kingdom.
During the trial, the prosecution team said MLC committed "widespread rapes" in parts of the country where it operated, attacking people in front of their family or ordering relatives to rape someone in their family.
Girls, their mothers and grandmothers (and sometimes male relatives too) raped at knife- or gunpoint, the weapons then used to inflict mutilation.
Last night the house of one of the Chinese staff members of the university was broken into and two of the women, his relatives, were raped.
At age 7, Peñaloza says, a relative began raping her regularly.
Once abducted, the young woman is taken to the family home of the would-be groom and subjected to psychological pressure by his female relatives and even rape by the man until she agrees to the marriage.
In each case he reported – Claus Von Bulow, the parricidal Menendez brothers, the Greenwich, Connecticut murder of a teenage girl allegedly involving a Kennedy relative, the Florida rape acquittal of William Kennedy Smith, and the OJ Simpson double murder acquittal – Dunne broke American journalism's rules by openly rooting for the victim and/or bereaved.
They were deprived of sleep, forced to endure extremes of heat and cold, chained in crouching positions for 18 to 20 hours at a time, told that their female relatives would be raped, that they themselves would be killed, and on and on.
However, at age seven, while visiting relatives, Miller was raped by a family friend, leaving her not only traumatized but also with gonorrhea, a disease that at that time was treated with invasive procedures that she endured with some regularity through adulthood.
Which is why a female relative victim of rape reflects so acutely on the males.
