Like many other regions of Africa, countries in the Great Lakes region are exposed to many human rights violations due in part to decades of successive cycles of violence, most of them ethnically based. In the case of the DR Congo, human rights violations are mainly structural. There is a lack of health, food security, public order, access to justice, secondary and higher education, insufficient job creation for the poorest, etc. Then there is the endemic physical violence, whether in urban neighbourhoods, on the roads or as a result of armed conflicts that have displaced more than seven million people. The primary victims of this violence are women and children.