It was an approach to women’s wrongs indebted to radical feminism’s insistence on the profound estrangement of women from men. In the United States, the modus operandi of the personal as political had allowed feminism to kick open the door of the family jurisdiction to investigate private activity that was sometimes criminal activity, as in domestic abuse, incest, and marital rape. Nowhere else in the world was that investigation so thorough as in American circles in the late 1960s and early ’70s; nowhere else did it cut so deep into the tissue of human relations usually seen as formed from love. Yet by the same token, the American project of ending violence against women was, by 1980, effectively cut off from struggles for economic and social improvements in women’s lives; indeed the most vociferous wing had veered into the fight to abolish pornography. The attraction to hyperbolic renditions of male abuse, decontextualized, meant that American-driven analyses marched across continents, indifferent to differences between political regimes, social classes, and economic systems, precisely those distinctions that provide clues about the exact nature of the violence women face and, even more important, where they can find remedies.
The designation of violence spread outward, an oil slick of male evil. “Crimes against women,” which at the 1976 Brussels conference comprised Third World poverty, domestic violence, pornography, and discrimination against lesbians, had metamorphosed by 1983, the year of an international conference on sexual slavery in Rotterdam, into “violence against women”—which essentially meant sexual violence. “Forced prostitution” turned into the centerpiece of activism: now termed “female sexual slavery,” which at the conference extended to marriage and normative heterosexuality along with commercial sex.52 At the Vienna conference in 1993, sexual violence again expanded to include the all-encompassing category of “sexual exploitation.”
For women outside the West, the issue was electrifying because it illuminated just how entrenched female subjugation was. Liberal emphases on job equity and property rights could not do the same work. In Africa, women across the continent responded with excitement. Bread-and-butter issues such as sexual discrimination at work and lack of opportunities in higher education were irrelevant to the vast majority of rural African women. But beatings, rapes, and child marriage were familiar elements of their lives, daily enactments of men’s power untrammeled by any contravening force of law or social norms, and backed by tribal or religious law in states with mixed judicial systems. The new attention pulled these debilitating, deadly exercises of power out of the obscure realm of what men did to women and gave those protesting them some credibility, as well as international norms to draw upon for legitimacy.
It is possible that violence against women was actually rising around the world, deployed against those very feminist initiatives that global feminism nurtured. Thus an analysis that took the full measure of misogyny as a political dynamic was necessary to understand the outbreaks. But a framework that isolated women as the victims of choice was also inadequate. Sex-specific violence was inextricable from the plague of wars and insurgencies that laid waste to entire populations. Rape, torture, mutilation, and female captivity and enslavement were standard procedures of marauding insurgents in Africa, from Liberia and Sierra Leone to Congo, northern Uganda, Rwanda, Sudan, and Somalia. Prostitution across borders—sexual trafficking in women and girls—also stepped up in intensity, following patterns of labor recruitment and forced migration. Everywhere, violence was inseparable from politics: Islamic extremists in Afghanistan, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, for example, wielded power by implementing draconian interpretations of sharia to harass, brutalize, and murder alleged female offenders against codes of sexual propriety.
The appalling death of Hauwa Abubakar in Nigeria is a good example of an individual tragedy that came to public attention because the attention to violence against women made intolerable what once would have been seen as a terrible but inevitable by-product of religious and cultural tradition. Hauwa’s case became a cause célèbre among feminists and antigovernment protesters in 1987, the outcry lasting for months at the collusion of officials, police, and medical personnel in her death and the subsequent cover-up. At issue was not simply violence against women but child marriage, an ongoing battle for Nigerian feminists.
Betrothed at nine to a cattle farmer in the Islamic state of Bauchi, Hauwa Abubakar was married at twelve and sent to live with her husband. She repeatedly ran away; the husband, to punish her, cut off her fingers. The next time she tried, he cut off her legs with a cutlass rubbed with poison, so that the stumps were infected. Moved back and forth between the hospital and local healers, the child died after several months. The husband was charged with homicide and indicted in a Nigerian criminal court, but Hauwa’s father, who had paid off a debt to him by giving his daughter in marriage, professed sympathy with the man’s travails and asked that the case go to a sharia court as a family matter. The hospital also minimized the husband’s culpability, declaring that the child died of shock not from the amputation but from refusing to eat.
Where violence was systemic, as it was in Nigeria, the efficacy of opposition depended on first of all raising potent questions of why. Why here, why now, and to what ends? Defenders of the government cautioned protesters to stay away from such a sensitive subject as a husband’s rights in a Muslim state. While male dissidents and feminists raged at the “male cartel” of the Nigerian legislature, the official women’s organization and the Federation of Muslim Women’s Associations in Nigeria rushed to cover up the outcome of a system that operated to bestow virgin girls on older men. Hauwa’s case was a lurid and tragic illustration of the miseries of child marriage. From there, feminists proceeded to denounce the plague of reproductive injuries that ensued even without violence, as when girls were married and impregnated at menarche.53
Women’s movements such as Nigeria’s tied violence to the context that produced it rather than isolating sexual violence as a unitary phenomenon that could be separated from other vectors. “The cultural clash between extremist Muslims and the West is not about democracy but about women’s equality,” advised Ms. magazine in 2004, naïvely assuming the two could be separated; but for women and men fighting Islamic fundamentalists in Nigeria, as elsewhere, feminism was about democracy.54 This was enveloping feminism in a thick understanding, which took account of particular places, times, casts of characters, histories, and power relations—as opposed to a thin one that depended on a floating paradigm of gender relations issuing from the West. Thus: sexual violence and child marriage. Violence and land rights. Violence and sharia. Violence and state concessions to religious parties. Rape and genocide. Rape and the political uses of ethnic antagonism. Violence against women condoned by regimes and ruling parties in exchange for clerical and conservative male support. Linking violence against women to other issues also led to remedies that otherwise might seem extraneous. Women’s rights to land, for instance, denied and violated in many places, turned out to be a major protection against domestic abuse. And finally, tradition and culture, and the interest of antidemocratic male elites in using both against supposedly Westernized feminists.55
In America, however, the fascination with sexual violence typically thrived on thin understandings. Violence against women seemed instantly recognizable, something that could be understood without recourse to knowledge about the region, locality, or nation. Stories about domestic horror, escapes, captures, violations, torture, and dishonor, featuring many varieties of male villains, inspired sympathy yet demanded little effort to understand. Feminist advocates saw this tendency to homogenize all violence against women as unproblematic. To the contrary, the identifications were a positive force: “Despite vast differences in the way violence is manifested, be it as domestic battery or rape during wartime, the omnipresence of violence in women’s lives provides them with a unifying agenda.” Violence was a way to link women across the divides of fortune: the class they were born into, the places and the group identities
that claimed them.56
Why was sexual violence so compelling an issue? Why sexual trafficking in women (the old issue of the white slave trade put in the new bottle of globalization) and not labor battles—including the major form of trafficking, the international trade in female workers? Why clitoridectomy and not vaginal fistula, a devastating condition attendant on injuries in childbirth (which inordinately affects postpuberty brides) that is endemic in Africa? Why domestic beatings, and not women’s lack of land rights? There were so many terrors, hardships, sorrows, and injustices that afflicted women the world over: Why this particular set? For one, sexual violence was, literally, sexy, calling up prurient fascination. For another, the preoccupation stirred up the passions of the political semiconscious, calling forth the fantasy of the powerful rescuer, transposing a late Victorian allegory of innocence and evil into twentieth-century globalism. Women in the late nineteenth century lumped together polygamy and the harem with child marriage, sati, and footbinding. The fascination ran deep. Incredibly, in 1939, at the last meeting before World War II, as Hitler was marching into Poland, the International Women’s Alliance (formerly the IWSA) made a resolution linking the threat of war to an increase in prostitution its main piece of business. Likewise, in the 1990s, feminist college students dreamed of traveling to Cambodia and India to extricate girls from brothels.
In the United States, the fixation on international expressions of sexual violence bundled together many issues, some related, some unrelated. Clitoridectomy, for example, riveted popular feminist attention in the 1980s. Reduced by polemicists to a savage enactment of men’s fear of female sexuality, clitoridectomy is, in reality, a complex practice that varies by locale in technique, severity, and meaning. Bound up with rites of kinship and adulthood, and enacted by women, it may or may not be violent for the individuals involved.57 As for prostitution, another subject conflated with violence, not all prostitution is violent, and not all commercial sex is coerced—except in the sense that poverty drives women into prostitution, as it drives them into other demeaning and exploitative employments. Not all trafficking is sexual trafficking. Not all states are the same in their treatment of rape, or of domestic abuse. The treatment of victims in the United States and judicial procedures was (and remains) flawed and biased. The law, however, allowed some latitude of prosecution and formally recognized rape as a crime. In rape and other matters of violence, the situation of women in liberal democracies has to be distinguished from that of women beset by religious extremists backed by local authorities. In a dramatic instance of resistance in 1987, Indian feminists exposed a sati, or widow-burning, in the state of Rajasthan as an event engineered by the Hindu extremist political party, using a frightened teenage widow—and drugging her to boot—to demonstrate the supposed reverence of the villagers for tradition. Feminists showed that the ceremony was cooked up not by pious peasants but by very modern politicians vying for power.
In those places where extremist parties held sway, atrocities went unopposed. In Pakistan, authorities turned a blind eye on honor killings, when brothers, uncles, and cousins murdered women whose supposed sexual transgressions shamed the family. In the Iraq War, there was no Iraqi government opposition, even rhetorical, to an epidemic of honor killings of teenagers who were abducted by rival Shia or Sunni militias, raped, and returned to “shame” their families.58
As a result, the American furor over violence remained oddly apolitical and divorced from present realities, in contrast to feminist protest in Nigeria or India, for example. Knowing little or nothing about the stakes and the contenders, it was impossible to take political positions, since male violence in the international arena was seen as an autonomous force, not a practice of a particular militia or army, supported by a mix of political forces. The problem became striking after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, when long-standing controversies over the treatment of women by Islamic extremist parties and movements moved to the center of international politics. One result of Western deference to multiculturalism was a reluctance to level any but limited and temperate criticism, lest it be construed as neo-imperialist. Indeed, not until Afghan women succeeded in drawing liberal American feminists into their cause in 1997 after the hard-line Taliban seized power was there a sustained outcry against a fundamentalist regime. More typically, protest flared up over an isolated incident, such as the 2002 sentence of death by stoning meted out to Amina Lawal Kurami, convicted of adultery for conceiving a child out of wedlock in Katsina, another Muslim state in northern Nigeria. There a conjunction of international politics, human rights pressure, protest in Nigeria against Islamicization, and feminist activism—including the dedicated lawyer Hauwa Ibrahim—converged; the sharia court overturned the sentence.59
In American politics, the issues were tailored for a conservative age. In the 1990s, church groups joined with veterans of the antipornography crusade to target sex trafficking as a major cause of the global oppression of women.60 When George W. Bush took office, he made it the centerpiece of his foreign policy on women’s issues, even as he implemented draconian restrictions on American funds for family planning, with restrictions that decimated programs throughout the Third World. In Cambodia, American attempts to stop trafficking were the issue of the day, some said the only issue the American ambassador cared about—in a country of one-party rule by a political strongman where all indices of health and welfare (child mortality, crop yields, education, income levels) were plunging. Yet the cause was irrefutable: Who would not want to stop forced prostitution in Cambodia? Moderates, liberals, and feminists alike could agree that ending violence against women was a good thing, and that Americans should do their best to stop it. In a time when feminist power in the United States was an oxymoron, it was an appealing fantasy indeed.
Reproductive rights was the American issue that was perhaps the most transformed in its migration through global feminist networks. In a fruitful exchange, American women’s devotion to abortion rights entered global feminism in the 1980s to transform the agendas of women in other countries and, in turn, to be itself transformed into something much broader. By 1993, reproductive rights had become “reproductive health,” an approach to well-being that feminists succeeded in implementing in world health organizations, development agencies, and the U.N.
The success was enormous in international policy-making circles. It was not easily won. The freedom of choice to bear or not to bear children was, after all, denied women by conservative religious authorities across the world—above all the Catholic Church—as well as antagonists who saw this power as an imposition of Western values on women who were said to value unlimited childbearing above all. Americans were at a disadvantage, because their presence in the debate brought to mind the long history of U.S.-backed population programs that used Third World women as guinea pigs and sought population reduction at any cost, with little or no concern for their health. The programs left a trail of abuse and catastrophes: experimental trials of oral contraceptives with dangerous side effects, painful and dangerous IUDs, and sterilizations.
In the 1980s, the truculent spirit of Americans fighting to hold on to abortion rights entered the international campaign for reproductive rights. There was reason to make abortion central. Abortion was never simply a Western women’s preoccupation, a charge that both the religious right and the far feminist left made. Worldwide, there were some fifty million abortions every year, over half illegal, making the need for legal abortion an urgent international issue.62 Abortion continued (and continues) to be a basic form of birth control used the world over, yet it was (and is) criminalized in most places.
In international women’s circles, exchanges across borders in the 1980s were rich, with those from Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean taking the lead in amplifying ideas of what women needed. A woman’s right to choose had to include the ability to bear children as well as not bear them; and thus reproductive health programs must attend to the conditions that bred pelvic i
nfections and made sterility so extensive in poor countries. In Africa, one couldn’t talk about a woman’s right to choose without first discussing the need for more protein in their diets, or the prevalence of vaginal fistulas, which made them unable to bear more children. In India, researchers found that measures to improve women’s gynecological and reproductive health needed to take into account the dearth of sanitary napkins and toilets—modesty leading them to reuse dirty napkins and retain urine, with chronic gynecological infections as a result.63 Indeed, the insight about the importance of cheap sanitary napkins traveled around the world. In Africa today, evidence suggests that menstruation, with its attendant fears of embarrassing leaks and stains, creates frequent absences from school for girls without the money for pads; the absences increase drop-out rates.
Openness to new information from particular contexts, rather than an intent on proving that women in India were like women in Guatemala, made political understanding more supple. The principle of a woman’s right to choose could only be meaningful if women were free from the threat of disease, hunger, high child mortality, and dangerous childbirth. Nor could choice be considered apart from the pressures behind choices. In places where sons were more prized than daughters—notably China and India—women had the right to choose, but sex-selective abortion was a threat to female life.64
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