Compared to some victims, Vincienne has been lucky. She had counselling and help with getting medical treatment from the listening centre at Walungu.

Compared to some victims, Vincienne has been lucky. She had counselling and help with getting medical treatment from the listening centre at Walungu, about 50km south-west of the provincial capital of Bukavu, which is funded by the Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund (SCIAF). She spent five weeks in hospital for internal injuries caused by the rapes. Even so, she looks haunted. Her clothes do not fit. Despite the poverty here, women take great pride in their brightly coloured wraparound pagne dresses. Vincienne wears a man's shirt. Her clothes have been donated by local parishioners and she does not use her real name, fearing the men could return.

"I live as a refugee," she says. "I am being punished for what happened to me. I feel like my mind has been changed, that I am not the same. At first I could not sleep. I jumped when I heard the slightest noise. Everything sounded like gunfire. But talking to the counsellors has helped."

In South Kivu, a province in the east of the DRC with a population of just 1.5 million, 14,000 rapes were recorded last year and there is no evidence of the violence abating. In the first three months of this year there have been 4013 cases. To put it in context, Scotland, with a population three times greater, last year recorded 1123 rapes. The actual figures in South Kivu are thought to be far higher because many victims never tell. The attendant stigma means they face being cast out by the community.

"This is not about raping women for pleasure - it is a strategy for destroying a people," says Father Justin Nkunzi Baciyunjuze, head of CDJP, the justice and peace commission that runs the listening centres and lobbies for peace. "After raping them they even cut off their breasts or put sticks in their sexual organs. It is a strategy of war. They know that one of the most effective ways of humiliating a man is to rape his wife.

"Many of the women who have been raped have HIV or are left unable to have children. Without children there is no society. Everything disintegrates. Now it is not just the militias, it is a cultural problem. We have to rebuild the community. Removing the Interahamwe will not solve the problem."

Many have left and live as refugees in neighbouring countries like Tanzania. For those who remain, says Sifa Judith Mudekeneza, 19, "there is nowhere safe to go".

"This is not peace," she says. "One day is quiet, the next it is war. Women who have not been taken wait and hide. They know that tomorrow it could be them."

A decade ago, when the main threat of sexual violence came from the FDLR and other militias, women felt safer moving away from the forest and towards larger settlements like Bukavu. Where once they feared only the roaming militias, though, now they know there is no escape - even from those supposed to protect them, including the police, the Congolese army and the UN.

What began as a form of warfare has become a way of life: more than 14% of rapes are now committed by civilians. In the village of Bumbalali, South Kivu, the locals live so close to the FDLR they are suspicious of strangers in a country renowned for its friendliness. The FDLR come down the Kahuzi mountains and raid the villages with impunity, raping, looting and killing. Their presence hangs over the people here like the mountain mists.

Nineteen-year-old Sifa once lived in Bumbalali, but she is an outcast now. Her crime is to have been abducted and forced to live as a sex slave to the FDLR - she was later diagnosed HIV positive. She takes long strides through the viscous, clinging mud of the highlands where the air smells of fresh mint. It is mukabambasi, a wild herb the villagers use to ward away poisonous bugs. This morning she has walked the 10km from Walungu, where she ekes out her existence as a refugee.

Sifa tells how she was just 14 when she was first raped. It happened right here in this compound, where the only protection is the homemade wooden fence encircling the four adobe huts. It was New Year's Day, 2003. She remembers the rattle of machine guns waking her family and the sound of her brother being shot. Her shoulder still bares the scars of where they beat her.

"We hid under the beds and tried to stay silent but they smashed down the door and pulled us out by our arms and legs," she explains. "They tied us up with ropes, beat people and looted everything from the houses and then they marched us away into the forest. We walked for two days. I was passed to one man who raped me again and again and forced me to be his wife. They kept watch on us and forced us to cook and collect water and firewood. After five months there the Congolese army attacked. I ran away."

Sifa had been at school, hoping to train as a nurse or doctor. Instead she became a mother with no hope of a husband because of the stigma of rape. Months later she gave birth to Pascal. She says she loves him greatly, even though his father was a rapist.

"Even after I escaped they sent notes, threat-ening me and warning that they would come back and take the child," she says. "They came again but we hid in the bush so they did not find us. Instead they burnt down our house."

The jungle here works so fast to reclaim its land there is not even a charred mark where the house once stood. "My family sent me to stay with a relative in Bukavu where they thought it would be safer," says Sifa. "I started again. I was selling clothes to make money. Then one night bandits broke into the house. There were six men. Two of them raped me. I was so angry and upset. It was as if they raped my mind as well as my body."

Sifa was left pregnant again. Pascaline, her daughter conceived during the second attack, is now nine months old.