In eastern Congo there are villages where almost every woman has been raped, where women have been forced to have sex with their sons, where wives have been sexually assaulted in front of their husbands, and where even babies aren't spared, Britain's Guardian newspaper reports in a feature on the horrific scale of attacks against women in the conflict-ravaged country.

"Since they raped me nowhere in my body feels right. I have problems with my womb, back and stomach. The rebels took my daughter and now I'm looking after my four grandchildren. I have to sleep in the church because I have no house," Madame, 70, told the paper.

The troubles in Congo were claiming lives long before the recent international focus on its spiralling chaos, and they will go on claiming lives long after our attention has moved on, an editorial in the paper says.

Much more must be done to help the countless victims of rape and sexual violence, including strengthening the country's court systems, supporting women to bring charges, and bringing an end to the culture of impunity surrounding militia and government forces.

"But it is also important to begin to understand the pathology of sexual violence in warzones," the paper says.

"Rape can be a weapon of control for the young soldiers who make up the militias, often little more than children themselves, brutalised by their commanders and seeking, however fleetingly, to control their environment. That means providing schooling and skills for them - and for the children born from rape. Otherwise they will become the next generation of soldiers, and the next generation of rapists."

International greed for the country's vast mineral resources, has also played a critical role in turning the country into a colossal "rape mine" according to an Inter Press Service (IPS) article.

"Rape is being used as a deliberate tool to control people and territory," Eve Ensler, a U.S. playwright and activist, told the news service.

The war in eastern Congo is an economic war where terror is used to ensure warlords control regions where international companies mine for valuable metals like tin, silver and coltan, or extract lumber and diamonds, according to Ensler.

The international appetite for these minerals, along with the gross indifference of the global community, has helped to fuel the enormous scale of sexual violence in the country, the article says.

"The failure of the international community has created a catastrophe in the DRC," Stephen Lewis, former U.N. special envoy for AIDS in Africa told IPS.

Meanwhile, for David Scheffer, writing in the International Herald Tribune, more must be done in general to ensure that the strategic use of mass rape in modern warfare is prosecuted as genocide under international humanitarian law.

"In the 1990s I met scores of rape victims from atrocities in the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Uganda and eastern Congo," Scheffer writes. "In most cases their experiences were so devastating to their character, their ethnic bonds and often to their health that the logic of how mass rape can destroy a substantial part of a group and thus constitute genocide seemed clear."

The way that rape has been used as a weapon by government forces in Darfur, is a good example of this. Those loyal to Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir have forcibly driven substantial numbers of ethnic groups into camps for displaced persons and then inflicted rape and other forms of severe sexual violence on them, Scheffer writes.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is currently considering whether to issue an arrest warrant for Bashir on the grounds that he masterminded a campaign of murder and rape to destroy three ethnic groups in Darfur that have challenged his power.

"There is no shortage of actions, including repeated mass rapes, from which to infer genocidal intent," Scheffer says.

"If the judges can continue their review and find reasonable grounds to charge rape as genocide, thousands of women and girls attacked by rapists as a means of decimating their ethnic groups will share a small measure of justice and peace."

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