In a remote village church hall earlier this year, one of my colleagues in the Red Cross spoke with about 20 men in mismatched military uniforms. They were members of one of the more than 100 armed groups sprawled across the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. This mineral-rich region has been ravaged by conflicts for 30 years.

Conscious of the mood in the room and careful to avoid tension, my colleague, a soft-spoken Congolese man whose identity I’m keeping private for his safety, carefully broached the uneasy subject of sexual violence, which had persisted in the region for decades but surged dramatically as fighting had escalated in 2023.

“At the beginning, they denied it ever happened,” he told me.

As the discussion in this mountainous village progressed, denial gave way to justification: “A man cannot go without a woman,” one man said. And even more troubling: “Women want it — they just don’t know how to ask.” But eventually, the men began sharing real-life situations and debating them. Someone mentioned that local tradition prohibited touching women when going into combat, a phrase my colleague noted, since it offered insight into the culture. He tried to understand what these men believed about sexual violence and use it in his arguments against it.

The conversation was part of a pilot program the International Committee of the Red Cross has been conducting to try to better address sexual violence in armed conflict. Last year, the United Nations recorded a 50 percent increase in verified cases of conflict-related sexual violence. According to the ICRC, over 120 armed conflicts are happening today, a sharp increase from the number at the start of the millennium. And when new wars erupt, gruesome allegations of sexual violence almost always follow images of death and destruction.

Talking about sexual violence in conflict is difficult. For centuries, its stark cruelty has been blurred by euphemisms uttered in hushed tones. Within the I.C.R.C., the minutes of the decision-making bodies mentioned the word “rape” only five times in 100 years. Unspoken and unnamed, sexual violence has too often been tacitly accepted as an inevitable byproduct of war.

It isn’t. Sexual violence is a grave violation of international humanitarian law. But merely breaking the silence isn’t enough to prevent it. How we speak about it to those who carry guns matters just as much.