A former student of mine sent me an e-mail this week in which he lamented the lack of U.S. action on the situation in Africa.

“My heart tells me that a genocide should be dealt with, swiftly, and harshly. Heck, most people don’t even know about Darfur, and the other things that are happening in Africa. For example, several years ago I gave a talk about Darfur to a class of college students. I was surprised to find that not only did the students not know anything about it, they had never even heard of it! They did not have a clue there is a genocide taking place. Sadly, some didn’t even know what a genocide is. I blame the news media for not covering it.”

This is what happened in the African country of Guinea this week. On Monday, troops opened fire on crowds protesting against the military leader of the country, Captain Moussa Dadis Camara. Human rights organizations reported that 157 died when soldiers fired at the protesters. Soldiers were raping women in the streets.

Here is another story from the Washington Post sent to me by a former student now working in Washington for a Non-Governmental Organization:

“Women who fled the violence in Sudan’s Darfur region are being regularly raped in refugee camps in neighboring Chad, despite the presence of U.N.-trained forces, Amnesty International said.”

Darfur, the Congo, Somalia, and the crisis in Zimbabwe are all horrific problems. But on a scale of 1 to 10, where is Darfur on the US and the Obama administration agenda? Here is what the list looks like to most people (in order of priority).

 Get the Olympics in Chicago

 Fix health care

 Save the US economy, mortgage and banking crisis

 Create jobs for Americans

 Stabilize and get out of Afghanistan

 Fix Iraq and get out

 Get Iran to stop developing nukes

 Reform the US Education system

 Bring Israel and the Palestinians together

 Launch a new energy policy

 Address global warming and climate change

 Rescue the Big Three US auto industry

However, a story this week that was barely covered by the news media should give us some optimism. On Sept. 30, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted a US sponsored resolution 15-0, condemning sexual violence in war zones. U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton presided over this meeting. The United Nations will now create a special envoy position to address rape as a weapon of war.

Rape is a huge problem. An article by the Associated Press said, “During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, up to half a million women were raped. Some 60,000 rape victims were reported during the Balkan conflicts in the 1990s and in Sierra Leone, incidents of war-related sexual violence from 1991 to 2001 numbered about 64,000.” Anna Portela reports that “as many as 3,000 women in an area of the Congo were raped between 1999 and 2001. Some of the women who had been raped managed to escape and reported being sexually violated along the way by rival militias. Human Rights Watch says that 60 percent of the militiamen and troops involved … are infected with HIV/AIDS.”

The U.S. media covers the 1978 rape case of Roman Polanski all day but hardly gives a pull quote or a 60 second “package” on TV to this rape pandemic sweeping the world.

The UN resolution on rape is only a tiny step in the right direction. Besides words there needs to be severe punishment for the perpetrators, too. It is only an opening in a long and bitter struggle to bring decency, respect and justice to many of the troubled areas of the world.

Steffen Schmidt is a Proffessor of Political Science at Iowa State University. Reprinted with permission from syndication @ www.insideriowa.com, Iowa’s Internet Magazine. ©2009