The Protection of Life in Pregnancy Act of 2013 was ostensibly going to help secure a woman’s rights, and sparked outrage from Ireland’s pro-life community. But the policy is flawed, according to Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, 47.
“It’s ridiculous,” Gomperts says. “Women are dying and suffering health problems. Human rights are being violated. It was bad before, but now it’s worse. This policy won’t help women.”
Gomperts is the founder and director of Women on Waves, an organization that, among other things, sails a ship to countries where pregnancy termination is prohibited and offers non-surgical abortions beyond territorial waters.
“There is a very dedicated pro-choice community there,” Gomperts says, “and they were very interested in the project.”
The number of women who sought Gomperts’ services exceeded anyone’s expectations. “The groups we worked with said, ‘no woman is going to come to a ship for an abortion’,” Gomperts recalls. “But we had 80 calls immediately, and realized we had not brought enough pills.”
Those who responded included women who had been raped, schoolgirls who could not find a feasible excuse to go to England for a couple of days, mothers who could not afford childcare while away in England, and political refugees who did not have the papers to travel.
In the end, because they did not have two necessary licenses from the Dutch and Irish authorities –one for operating medical facilities and the other for carrying passengers to sea – Women on Waves was unable to distribute the abortion pill.
Regardless, hundreds of Irish women continued to reach out to Gomperts for help.
Non-Surgical Abortion
According to Gomperts, the abortion pill – mifepristone and misoprostol – can be safely used to terminate pregnancies up to 12 weeks at home, without medical supervision.
“The World Health Organisation has published guidelines that say women can do this,” she says. “So there is no need for surgical abortion anymore. The only issue is getting women access to the pills.”
To that end, Gomperts has created an international network to help women around the world find a means of getting the abortion pill. “We are not selling drugs,” she clarifies. “We are a referral service; we help women get a medical abortion at home. But they risk prosecution if it’s illegal in their country.”
And under Ireland’s new abortion policy, punishment has become stricter. “The sentence for such an ‘illegal’ abortion in Ireland used to be three years,” Gomperts says, “and now they have made it twelve years.”
Dr. Gomperts smiles on the telephone during a recent action in Smir, Morocco.Photo credit: WOW Facebook page.
No Link to Depression
The new law also removes the possibility of suicide risk as a means of permitting legal abortions. “Of course it was already problematic if you are forcing someone to say they are suicidal just to obtain an abortion,” she says, “but now even that is not allowed.”
Gomperts strongly opposes claims that abortion can lead to mental distress or illness.
“There have been lots of scientific studies published in major journals,” she says, “that show there is no link between depression or suicide and abortion. None.”
Statistics of women who express regret after terminating a pregnancy can be misconstrued, Gomperts finds. “Our data shows that 1 percent of women regret it,” she says. “But a lot of women mean they regret being in the position to begin with. That’s different.”
A Selfless Decision
Gomperts has encountered many women who have been surprised to find themselves opting for termination. “They tell me, ‘I am against abortion, but my situation is different,’” she says. “It takes a certain degree of empathy to extend that reasoning to other people, or to realize that perhaps you are not against abortion after all.”
People are too judgmental about abortion, Gomperts says.
“For me, it’s obvious that it’s a selfless decision,” she says. “There are women who, if they had the right conditions, may make a different choice. But when women really find they don’t have what it takes to raise a child in a good situation, then abortion is a very moral decision.”
Social Justice Issue
Gomperts, who has two children, says she is a doctor first and an activist second. “As a doctor, I’m here to aid in the well being of people,” she says. “And if you want to make sure that the well being of women is being guaranteed, you have to legalize abortion. For me it’s completely about social justice. The problem with many health issues today, including abortion, is that it comes down to who has the means to access the care.”
Yet, as I live my life here in Paris, having completed a Master's degree focusing on human rights at the end of last year while at the same time undergoing a heart surgery, I contemplate what human rights means to me personally versus others. How much overlap is there between developing versus developed nations? How can I fully live within and access my own rights in a country that is not even my own? What I have come up with as I train in the park near my pink cottage, sending resume after resume, networking, flying to Rome to be with my French boyfriend who works for the United Nations and is also seeking long-term employment in his own country, trying to build the rest of a dream after significant resiliency most of my life, is how blurred the line is between those in need of accessing and fully realizing human rights standards. These are the people I love, live near, and work alongside.
The past few days the American news has been shaped by an announcement that AOL had reversed a decision regarding 401ks to its employees after a media frenzy regarding CEO Tim Armstrong's comment that,
Two things that happened in 2012. We had two AOL-ers that had distressed babies that were born that we paid a million dollars each to make sure those babies were OK in general. And those are the things that add up into our benefits cost. So when we had the final decision about what benefits to cut because of the increased healthcare costs, we made the decision, and I made the decision, to basically change the 401(k) plan.
The mother of the "distressed baby," Novelist Deanna Fei, published an eloquent and very brave response to her husband's employer in Slate magazine. Her husband, Peter S. Goodman, is the Executive Business and and Global News Editor of AOL's Huffington Post. The Goodmans are known to me because Arnold and Elise Goodman, the grandparents of the "distressed baby" girl, were the couple who gave me very my first job in publishing when I was nineteen years old. I worked from their home as their Literary Agency Assistant, and the position was a lifelong dream for this rural girl from a chaotic childhood with little resources earning and financing my undergraduate degree in Manhattan. I filed their contracts, letters to their children, answered their phone calls from the authors of the What to Expect When You're Expecting series, sent out rejection letters, and learned about publishing from two people who had made a wonderful life from it. They had a beautiful apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, two wonderful children, and to my young eyes they were living the good life.
Enter the life of their own grandchild. As an advocate for children's health, I was aghast reading the AOL CEO's comment but was not surprised. The state of healthcare in my own country is one of the most brutal abuses of rights in a wealthy and developed nation that exists. So is the cost of education. Enter where I live currently so as to actually complete a Master's degree before I turned 35. When I had my heart surgery last year, I was also a student who paid nothing to have that surgery. I had suffered from supraventricular tachycardia since I was seventeen years old but still went on to race ultramarathons and build running teams in support of women and children's health. But around the end of 2012, as my hormones shifted and I worked freelance while earning my degree and trained teams of ex-pat runners, I began to have heart episodes much more frequently. When my sisters' were visiting me last March and I looked up at my baby sister's worried face sprawled on a Parisian sidewalk in full-on tachycardia, I began to think the time had come to fix my heart. Then I read online that when I am pregnant someday my baby would also go without oxygen and experience the same horrendous effects I did when the tachycardia occurred plus it could affect the child's development; I knew it was time to have heart surgery.
[Editor's Note: This post was written by IMOW Her Blueprint's Senior Editor Kate Stence along with Maura Farrell, a co-editor of the Debating Human Rights blog. The original post appeared onDebating Human Rights.]
In recent weeks, global mainstream media has covered persistent and widespread violence against women in a range of countries.
In India, the gang-rape of a 23-year-old physiotherapy student on December 16, 2012 resulted in public condemnation and outcry from both India’s strengthening middle class and international organizations such as UN Women. Raped and mutilated with an iron bar at the hands of a group of six men while aboard a moving bus, the anonymous victim finally succumbed to massive internal injuries on December 29, after battling for her life for thirteen days in a Singapore hospital.
Rape and rape-related deaths are a national problem in India.
In 2011, India was ranked 134th by UNDP’s gender equality index, highlighting the plight of Indian women and girls, who are under-fed and under-educated relative to males. Dowry violence, marital and in-law abuse, and reproductive sex selection are examples of the pervasive hardships for Indian women created from extreme gender inequalities. Sexual violence in Indian villages is so common that it keeps women indoors after dark, and the migration of rural Indian men to overcrowded slums means that the growing predation goes unchecked. Low persecution and even lower conviction rates for rape and other crimes against women exacerbate the violence.
While urbanization and societal tension may partly explain India’s violence against women, The Economist recently argued that it is India’s growing middle class, united in outrage against the horrible events of December 16, that could provide impetus for the changes needed to bring about an end to violence against women in India. This particular woman’s rape and death provoked such extreme public outcry throughout India because she was part of India’s emerging middle class. Too close to home for many members of India’s middle class to tolerate, this crime resulted in unprecedented galvanization which could be a major turning point with emancipatory potential for India’s women.
In Guatemala, 707 women were murdered in 2012. On January 16, 2013, one month after the gang-rape incident in Delhi, the bodies of two girls, aged six and twelve, were found brutally slain on a street in Guatemala City. That same day, the bodies of two more women were discovered in separate locations.
Amnesty International describes the situation in Guatemala as a “war on women.” “Authorities in Guatemala are putting the lives of women at risk by systematically failing to protect them and ensure those responsible for the hundreds of killings that take place each year face justice.” Although the Guatemalan congress passed a law establishing special tribunals and sentencing guidelines directed specifically at reducing violence against women, this has failed to change the staggering number of killings of women and children reported each month in Guatemala.
Tireless fighting for justice on the parts of family members of women and girls whose murders remain unsolved and insufficiently investigated, and never prosecuted has made the issue one of national scandal for Guatemala.
In Somalia, Nura Hirsi, a young widow living in an internationally displaced persons (IDP) encampment in Mogadishu, claims she was raped by seven government soldiers who forced into her home on December 29, 2012.
Al Jazerra, reporting on the continued vulnerability of women in Mogadishu, maintained that in the wake of two decades of protracted conflict in Somalia, “there’s now a sense of relative calm and security in Somalia,” but that not everyone enjoys these new feelings of freedom. Violence and insecurity are still persistent problems affecting women in IDP encampments. Explaining why the police did nothing and seemed not to care about what happened to Nura Hirsi, she explained: “People get killed in Mogadishu; I didn't die. To them rape isn't so serious. Nobody is ever arrested.”
Posting in New York Times Nicholas Kristof’s blog On the Ground, Lisa Shannon recently urged Secretary Clinton to stand up for rape victims during her first official meeting with the new Somali president, Hassan Sheik Mohamud. Shannon argues that since the Somali government has reportedly harassed advocates thought to be aiding Hirsi, this could undo tireless efforts to shift the stigma toward rape and urge rape victims to come forward. According to Fartun Abdisalan Adan, who co-founded the sexual violence crisis center Sister Somalia with Shannon, “This sets us so far back.”
Shannon writes, “In this fragile moment, the US and other donor nations have a choice: Communicate a zero tolerance policy for this behavior. Or, like Congo, shrug off this crisis as inevitable, leaving sexual violence to fester into a pandemic. Will we again write big checks, while we sacrifice women on the altar of international diplomacy?”
In her remarks on January 16, Secretary Clinton indeed expressed concern about violence against women in Somalia to President Hassan Sheik. “We have particular concerns” she said, “about the dangers facing displaced people, especially women, who continue to be vulnerable to violence, rape, and exploitation.”
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, renewed high-level conflict has resulted in a death toll that is the highest loss of life since World War II, with 5.4 million lives lost in over a decade of war. The prevalence of rape as a weapon of war and intimate partner sexual violence is astronomical. As such, the DRC is often referred to as the “the rape capital of the world.”
In 2011, the American Journal of Public Health (AJPH) released a study confirming widespread rapes throughout the Democratic Republic of Congo. “Approximately 1.69 to 1.80 million women reported having been raped in their lifetime and approximately 3.07 to 3.37 million women reported experiencing intimate partner sexual violence.” Even higher levels of rape were reported within the area of North Kivu, where two months ago the offices of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) said the situation was worsening for vulnerable populations due to recent fighting.
These already harrowing statistics may in fact be conservative estimates. A Guardian article quotes Michelle Hindin, an associate professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and a specialist on gender-based violence, as saying, “because the figures were collected during face-to-face interviews – where women could be less forthcoming – the figures could be much higher.”
In 2012, a more comprehensive study released by two organizations, Sonke Gender Justice Network and Promundo, confirmed that rape in Congo has essentially become “a cultural norm throughout the entire country” and is part of daily life.
Lauren Wolfe, an award winning journalist and the Director of Women Under Siege, an independent initiative investigating how rape and other forms of sexualized violence are used as tools in genocide and modern-day conflict, is known for documenting vulnerable women’s voices who are often silenced by war and rarely exist within mainstream media. The organization argues that the nexus of war and sexual violence for women in Congo is one of the worst that has ever existed. Last year, the DRC ranked last—absolutely last—on UNDP’s Human Development Index, which is essentially a state of reverse development.
In Pakistan, 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai, a well-known activist for girl’s education, was on a bus returning home from a day at school on October 9, 2012, when armed members of the Taliban stopped the vehicle and shot her in the head and chest.
The teenager was treated for extensive injuries as the bullets entered above her left eye, ran along her jaw line, and grazed her brain. Her survival is an act of heroism in and of itself, but Malala has lived heroically for years. In 2009, the Taliban routinely destroyed girl’s schools and attacked women with acid to dissuade them from attending school and attaining an education. Malala posted her diary on the BBC’s Web site, exposing the Taliban’s myriad acts of violence against women. In 2011, she was nominated for the International Children’s Peace Prize and in 2012 was the runner-up for Time Magazine's Person of the Year.
Last week, Malala completed her last round of surgery and will continue rehabilitation at home.
Unlike so many other women and girls who face gender-based violence, Malala won. Her story both brings hope and highlights injustices. Malala’s survival means she will continue to live in a world where a 23-year-old woman risks her life in India by riding a bus.
Success in eradicating violence against women would mean not only a world that no longer accepts rape, gender-based violence, or rampant inequalities as a fact of life, but laws that prosecute those who participate in these crimes. This requires sanctioned and implemented laws, community-based programs, and increased activism.
In 1999, a study released on violence against women found that, around the world at least one woman in every three, or up to one billion women, has been beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused in her lifetime. In the almost fifteen years since that study, after reading these stories, can we honestly say that eliminating violence against women is not one of our world’s greatest priorities?
Today is V-day, a global activist movement to end violence against women and girls spanning over 167 countries. One Billion Rising is their most ambitious campaign to date. Their web site says, “One in three women on the planet will be raped or beaten in her lifetime. One billion women violated is an atrocity. One billion women dancing is a revolution.”
This Valentine's Day rise up against pervasive violence against females. The time to eradicate gender-based violence is now.
Protests in Steubenville, OH. Image courtesy of the CBC.
As the brutal
gang rape of a 23-year old woman on a bus in New Delhi continues to outrage
the women of India, sending shockwaves to the rest of the world, America is having its
own gang rape controversy to contend with.
In Steubenville, Ohio, an old steel town hit hard by the financial
crisis, a group of teenaged football players are being tried for the rape and
kidnapping of a 16 year-old girl after pictures of her naked body surfaced on
several social networking sites. Yet even though the images of the young girl’s
unconscious body, which one of her assailants described
in a video as “Deader than Trayvon Martin,” had spread throughout Twitter,
Instagram, and Facebook, convicting the teenaged boys has proven difficult in a
town that protects its young football stars with blind adulation, with one
local crime blogger being sued by one of the accused students and his parents for
defamation.
This sense of community denial is reminiscent of the Penn
State community’s outrage by the charges
against Jerry Sandusky, the college football coach who was eventually found
guilty in 2011 of 52 counts of sexual assault of young boys over the span of 15
years.
From the Sandusky affair to the Steubenville assaults to the
gang rape on a public bus in India, one thing is clear: the world shares a
common culture; a common community that fails to protect its most vulnerable
and lays the blame and responsibility solely on the victim. This is what second
wave feminists in America call “rape culture,” and its boundaries are
limitless.
According to Kavita Krishnan, Secretary of the All India
Progressive Women's Association, the conviction rate for rape prosecutions in
India has fallen from 46% in 1971 to 26% today. Social critic Naomi
Wolf notes, however, that this rate is higher than the conviction rates in
the UK, Sweden and the US, respectively.
Little wonder, when the legal system in America is so
disturbingly flawed, seeped in archaic notions of women as property. For
instance, just last week, a man in Los Angeles who infiltrated a woman’s
bedroom and had sex with her while she was sleeping was found
not guilty to rape charges because the woman was unmarried. The court cited
an 1872 law that states:
"[a]ny person who fraudulently obtains the consent of another
to sexual relations escapes criminal liability (at least as a sex offender
under tit. IX of the Pen. Code), unless he (or she)...masquerades as the
victim‟s spouse ..."
Therefore, the law will protect a female rape victim…just so
long as she is another man’s property. Such is the state of the “justice”
system in America.
In a rape culture, as previously stated, victims of sexual
assault are held responsible for the actions of perpetrators. Signs of victim
blaming are everywhere in India (see: spiritual leader Asaram
Bapu, who said of the bus gang rape: "Mistake is never from one side
alone").
In Steubenville, assistant coach Nate Hubbard provides a
classic victim-blaming stance. He told
the New York Times:
"The rape was just an excuse, I think...What else are you going to tell your parents when you come home drunk like that and after a night like that?"
In fact, the 16-year old victim had no knowledge that she
had been violated, because she was drunk to the point of being unconscious, until
the pictures started to surface. But this is beside the point.
Other examples of victim blaming are more subtle. Across the
United States, universities hold rape
aggression defense (“RAD”) courses for students, rather than providing
outreach and awareness programs for would-be perpetrators. Although a program that assumes rape is a very real danger and prepares young people for it is
commendable, pouring college resources into possible victim education without
possible perpetrator education could send a societal message to young people.
Education on all fronts should be a major step in
eradicating rape culture. Another should be community involvement in protecting
its citizens, since law enforcement officers and the justice system more broadly
can never guarantee safety for a society’s most vulnerable.
Many in the US may have wondered, as I did when I heard
about the New Delhi rape, why the bus driver didn’t act to protect the young
woman as she was being beaten with a metal rod, brutally raped, and left for
dead.
As Steubenville Police Chief William McCafferty said of the
local gang rape that happened on his watch:
“The thing I found most disturbing about this is that there
were other people around when this was going on…Nobody had the morals to say,
‘Hey, stop it, that isn’t right.’”
The protests
in India and Steubenville
may help bring awareness of rape culture to their respective communities who
have been torn apart by these unspeakable acts of violence. But the culture
that binds us all should not be overlooked.
The week before Christmas, many of us were picking our outfit for the upcoming parties. In Delhi, however, lay a 23-year student fighting for her life after a brutal gang rape. She died yesterday. Her crime: taking the bus home after watching a movie. Her rape has set India on fire, and protests are rampant. It seems that the public is no longer willing to sit back and accept the government's complacent policies towards women.
Delhi, the capital of India, has one of the highest rape rates in the country. India has been deemed by some surveys to be one of the most dangerous countries to be a woman. Sexual harassment on buses and the streets is widespread. Lack of protection for women traveling and walking the streets is further impacted by corrupt police and government policies that fail to protect women. In this case alone, when a Magistrate went to the hospital to take a statement from the hospitalized victim about her horrific ordeal, the Magistrate reported repeated inference from the head of police. Indian Government also actively ignores the safety of women. A report in the Guardian newspaper told of Indian men who had been accused of sexual harassment (and in some cases rape) who had been allowed to stand in Indian elections. Bribery is rampant, the Police turn a blind eye, and politicians blame women and Western culture for provoking men. In a city of 20 million, 80% of women complain of sexual harassment.
It is no wonder that both men and women took to the streets to protest India’s complacent attitudes to women, particularly rape. The victim was traveling on a private bus after seeing a movie with a male friend. She was brutally attacked by six men on the bus and subjected to horrific abuse. Her companion was beaten with iron rods. Both were dumped on the side of a street after the ordeal. Her injuries were so severe that she had to have part of her colon removed. She was on a ventilator in critical condition for days and was flown to Singapore for specialist treatment. This woman died--all for traveling on a bus.
The protests following her story are not a reaction to her specific case. Rather, they are an accumulation of anger and frustration at numerous attacks on women which have been ignored by the authorities. Earlier this year, there was public outrage after 12 men outside a bar assaulted a teenage girl. The attack was filmed by an off-duty TV journalist for 45 minutes. The girl later asked, “Why did no one help me?” The public protesting are rightly asking why it is not safe for women to walk the streets. Their anger highlights corrupt police and a government that for too long has swept this epidemic under the carpet.
The people of India have spoken. It is time for the government to act.
If you visited the Middle East, you'd no doubt notice that migrant domestic workers--who represent a vulnerable group, whose rights are often ignored, in contravention to international conventions and standards--are incredibly prevalent.
Mainly from Asia and Africa, they comprise nearly 1.5 million of the workforce in Saudi Arabia, 660,000 in Kuwait and more than 200,000 in Lebanon. With hopes of escaping poverty or conflict in their home countries, many travel under false pretense and find themselves hungry, subjected to poor working conditions, unpaid salaries, abuse and conditions akin to slavery.
In response to widespread abuse and mounting reports of withheld salaries, several labour sending countries issued bans restricting female migrants from seeking employment abroad due to the alarming rise in the number of suicides. However, this has only made them more susceptible to traffickers and employment agencies working the black market.
According to the International Labour Union, there are more than 22 million migrant workers--a third of whom are women--currently in the Middle East. Currently the ILO is advocating the drafting of specific labour legislation for domestic workers that extends legal protection in a systematic and comprehensive manner.
Originally from Madagascar, Dima 19, escaped from her employer after being sexually abused several times. She tells her story to Her Blueprint:
"I come from a poor family in Madagascar and before leaving I was told that I would find good employment in Lebanon, and that my situation and that of my family would improve. I wasn’t happy to leave my country and my family but I needed to change our situation so I agreed to take the employment.
The male employer picked me up from the airport and when we arrived to the home he told me to take a bath. He insisted that I leave the door slightly open but I felt uncomfortable about it and pleaded that I close the door but he kept insisting that it was for my own safety just in case something were to happen. So finally I agreed and while I was in the bath he entered and raped me.
While it was happening he kept saying how he had never been with a Black woman and wanted to have a taste. For me, it was humiliating, and I felt empty inside. Afterwards, I was told to get dressed and take care of my household duties, as if nothing had happened. I felt trapped and had no one to help me. When I was able to speak with my family I had to tell them that everything was okay because it would kill them to know that I was suffering.
Some time passed and nothing happened but then one day the Madame said that she was going out and that I should stay but I insisted on not being left in the house with him. Always I tried to make sure I was never left alone with him but she gave me no choice and it happened again. Except this time, he spread my legs apart and tied my hands and legs to the bed and repeatedly raped me. Then he invited two male friends over and they also took turns raping me.
Afterward, I was destroyed and could only think about how I could get away because I couldn’t bear living like this anymore. Luckily I had met another Madagascan woman in the street and she told me the number of the community leader and that if I had any problems, she would help me. So almost a month later, while the family was getting into the car I started running as fast as I could so that they didn’t catch me. Eventually I managed to get far enough that I stopped and went to a pay phone and called the number and the woman told me to take a taxi to the consulate and that they would pay for it once I arrived.
I was told at the consulate that they could help me find new employment but all I wanted to do was leave because maybe I would have the same problems with a new employer and I didn’t want to take the chance. I just wanted to be with my family. I would prefer to live in poverty than to continue suffering in this way."
Cases like Dima are all too common in a labour sector where abuses remain invisible because these women suffer in places that are hidden to the public's eye such as in private homes.
Passport confiscation and the Kafala or sponsorship system, which binds migrant domestic workers to a specific employer excludes them from protection and left in the hands of individuals who have complete control over their lives.
Recently, the ILO set up a website with the aim of promoting decent work for domestic workers and supporting initiatives worldwide by sharing information related to working and living conditions of domestic workers, policy issues and challenges in domestic work, country experiences and knowledge, and practical tools on how decent work may be advanced in domestic work.
If a decision made last week by the Pakistan Supreme Court is upheld, five men convicted of gang rape in 2002 will be released back to the village where the crime took place, and the life of an international women's rights leader will be in danger.
Nine years ago, Mukhtar Mai was ordered by a tribal council in Pakistan to be gang raped in her home village of Meerwala in retaliation for an adultery accusation. The accusation, made by a rival clan, claimed that Mai's then-12 year-old brother had sex with a woman from the higher-caste Mastoi tribe. Outside investigators would later find that her brother had been molested, and that the Mastoi were trying to cover it up.
Mukhtar Mai's rape case gained international attention when she refused to do what most Pakistani women would do in her position -- commit suicide. Instead, Mai waged a legal battle against the five men who had attacked her. She would then go on to form Mukhtar Mai Women's Welfare Organization, to support and educate Pakistani women and girls; and have her story retold in Nicholas Kristof's Half the Sky, as well as in an upcoming feature film.
According to the Aurat Foundation, nearly 1,000 women were raped in Pakistan last year, while 1,500 were murdered and 2,000 were abducted.
Human Rights Watch called on Pakistan's government to petition the full court to review the case and asked authorities to protect Mai, who now fears for her life. Human Rights called the case "one of the most important tests of women's rights in memory."
Mai, now 40, plans to file a petition against the acquittal in a few days.
The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is said to be the most dangerous place to be a woman. Every week over 150 Congolese women are raped as a weapon of war. In fact, hundreds of thousands of Congolese women have been raped for the past 15 years because conflict has enveloped the region. Death tolls range between three to five million people.
The reason? The NY Times says the DRC's conflict is exceptionally stunning in its complexity, which, frankly, it is. In consequence, enter the creation of Congo NOW!, a coalition of NGO’s and grassroots organizations ranging from Oxfam International to Save the Children that are joining together in order to campaign for the safety of Congolese women and children.
The International Rescue Committee, a member of the coalition, recently sent out a field report about the Congo emergency and highlighted "typical" rape victims' experiences.
I was out in the field farming when several soldiers approached me. I was dragged out of the field against my will. I was held captive and raped repeatedly for days. When I was released, I had nowhere to go to get medical care for my injuries. My family and friends shunned me as a disgraced woman.
How many Congolese women and children have to be victimized before there is a solution to stop mass rape?
1. Stop natural resources fueling the conflict. 2. Address the devastating causes and consequences of the conflict and sexual violence particularly for women and children 3. Protect civilians from violence. 4. Promote nonmilitary and regional solutions to the conflict.
"We have launched the campaign," Kate says, "by starting with an action focused on sexual violence. The action is an e-action targeting Lynne Featherstone, International Violence Against Women champion."
As mounting protests sweep through Egypt and tensions rise across the Middle East, last weekend Bloomberg published U.S., Afghan Study Finds Mineral Deposits Worth $3 Trillion highlighting that the initial deposit of minerals in Afghanistan thought in June 2010 to be worth $1 trillion dollars now totals $3 trillion. The New York Times also reported United Nations and Afhanistan officials were signing a formal agreement to end the, “recruitment of children into its police forces and ban the common practice of boys being used as sex slaves by military commanders.”
A vast swath of minerals and resources. War. Child soldiers. Is this Congo or Afghanistan? Women for Women International’s Factsheet for the upcoming 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day cites that 75% of civilians killed in war are actually women and children. Yet, Women for Women International (WfWI) exists to help women and children survivors of war rebuild their lives and has been on the ground in Afghanistan and Congo implementing programs since 1993. This year the organization is hosting their second call to action in a campaign called Join Me on the Bridge. Held on March 8, 2011 to mark the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day, women will gather all over the world on bridges in that shared call for peace.
This year also marks the ten year anniversary of September 11, 2001, the day which provoked the War on Terror and initial invasion of Afghanistan. Late last year, after Afghanistan elections took place and the US announced plans for a 2011 slowdown and 2014 pullout, myriad articles focusing on Afghanistan were published by mainstream news sources reflecting life for the Afghanistan women and children who remain alive.
In Nicholas Kristof's What About Afghan Women?, the New York Times reporter and human rights advocate shares that although less women wear the full burqa, they keep them on hand “just in case.” Kristof also shares that most women he interviewed, “favored making a deal with the Taliban — simply because it would bring peace. For them, the Taliban regime was awful, but a perpetual war may be worse.”
“Oppression,” Kristof says, “is rooted not only in the Taliban but also in the culture.”
Nancy Hatch Dupree, cofounder of The Louis and Nancy Hatch Dupree Foundation, which is dedicated exclusively to “nation building through information sharing and to raise awareness and broaden knowledge about the history and culture of the people of Afghanistan throughout the United States,” has spent most of her life studying Afghan culture.
Recently honored as archivist of the year, Dupree was quoted in 2009 by the Global Post commenting on the U.S. Military and diplomatic approach in Afghanistan. “They make strategies for people who they don’t talk to... They sit behind the fortress with razor wire walls... They don’t seem to realize the strategy has to be about the people,” Dupree said from her home in Kabul.
Last November, Canadian Journalist Sally Armstong’s To the Women of Afghanistan made an outright call for Afghanistan women to push for rights.
Women of Afghanistan, it is time to go to the barricades.
Now is the hour to claim your rights. Negotiations are under way in earnest; the Taliban are at the table, so are the warlords and bandits, tribal elders and the president. There’s not a woman in sight. Yet everyone knows you are the ones who can yank Afghanistan into the 21st century.
You’ve been denied everything from human rights and jobs to health care and education. You refer to your illiteracy as being blind because as one woman said, “I couldn’t read so I couldn’t see what was going on.”
Education of children in Afghanistan has been vehemently disrupted by the war as well as Taliban violence. According to It Takes a Village to Raise a School, published last September, New York University Professor Dana Burde cited a CARE report that shows community-based schools are less terrorized than the 1,000 schools bombed since 2006 that have left less than one percent of Afghan girls in some southern provinces in school and active education. Suicide bombers target girl's schools more often.
In December, National Geographic’s Afghan Women posed the questions: “Why do husbands, fathers, brothers-in-law, even mothers-in-law brutalize the women in their families? Are these violent acts the consequence of a traditional society suddenly, after years of isolation and so much war, being hurled into the 21st century?”
Last week in London’s Tate Modern, I was just as enthralled with their collection as always, but it was Magda Cordell’s Figure (Woman) pictured here, that I kept returning to because the plaque beside the painting shared that although her work was originally seen as a “break with traditional representations of women,” more recently, it has been regarded by critics as “images of heroic femininity with the distortions signifying the resilience of the human body against injury and change.”
Those last words have run through my head many times this week as I heard radio reports and read CNN and BBC articles reporting “allegations of rape as a weapon of war” in the Congo and the UN’s and major politicians, hopefully, mounting response. These women and children are resiliency. Their bodies and beings have been pushed far past that word’s very definition.
According to Feminist News, on August 13, Margot Wallstrom the UN’s Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict, stressed in an interview with reporters that sexual violence during war is, “one of the greatest security risks of our time,” and she cited it “no more acceptable nor inevitable than committing mass murder.”
