It’s a sweeping generalization, but my experience writing about women in zones of conflict as well as in developing and developed countries tells me that women are more interested in fair policy than in power, in peace rather than a piece of the turf. And women leaders have long asserted that a sense of community is far more valuable than a sense of control. The information age is altering the grip of top-down power, giving rise to the less confrontational leadership style that women prefer. Gloria Steinem, who is perhaps the best-known contemporary feminist in the world, predicted that the switch would take time when she said a decade ago, “One day an army of grey-haired old women may quietly take over the world.”
As a journalist I have been telling women’s stories for twenty-five years. Until recently the oppression and abuse and second-class citizenship that we endured were seen as women’s immutable lot in life, dictated by culture and religion. Now that treatment is seen as symptomatic of a failed economy, the consequences of sidelining half of the world’s population.
Scenes still play like YouTube videos on the back of my eyelids: the woman in Croatia who was gang-raped in 1991 because she lived in a village that the belligerents wanted. The women of Malicounda Bambara in Senegal who banded together in 1997 and swore a public oath, “Never again, not my daughter,” and eradicated female genital cutting there. The girl on the Shomali Plains in Afghanistan who couldn’t read or write and didn’t know how old she was when she became the sole guardian of her six younger brothers and sisters after the Taliban killed her parents and grandmother in 2000, who told me, “I will go to school and learn to read and I’ll take them with me.” The women in Nairobi who held a public meeting in 2010 to announce that they would make marital rape a crime, proclaiming, “We were there in the room the day that signalled the beginning of the end of violence.” The woman in Canada who grew up in a polygamous family and was forced into a polygamous marriage and had three husbands, eight children, seventy-six stepchildren, forty-seven brothers and sisters. When she broke away, she used one of her best assets, her sense of humour, to sum up the absurdity of that polygamous sect: “I’d become my own step-great-grandmother.”
I also still see the thugs in the lives of these women who get away with denying the girls an education, with refusing to let the women go to work; the rapists and war lords who see women and girls as pawns or worse; the so-called men of God whose misogyny knows no bounds. They’re all on notice now. Diplomats and activists are no longer silenced by men who claim they are acting in the name of God and that no one outside their culture or faith can point out the error of their ways. Claiming violence is “none of your business” has become an oxymoron. Violence is everyone’s business.
The World Bank has issued reports every five years since 1985 to say that if attention is paid to the girl child—educating her, taking care of her health, feeding her—the economy of the village will improve. Why? Because she will marry later, have fewer children and those children will be healthier. But it’s more than that: in many places women’s intelligence is an untapped resource. If you foster it, the benefits spill over from the domestic sphere into public life. Research conducted by Plan International has found that the level of poverty reduction and economic growth in a country is directly correlated to the levels of education attained by the women—more than any other factor. Studies done in 2010 by MIT and Carnegie Mellon University on collective intelligence found that if you add females to a group, its collective intelligence improves.
There was a time when people were not chastised for making gross presumptions about women: that raped women asked for it and women who were beaten by their husbands liked it. No one would dare to talk that way now in countries where women have achieved emancipation. In 1994 an Alberta judge claimed that a young woman “wasn’t exactly dressed in a bonnet and crinolines” when she applied for a job in a trailer at a construction site and was raped. He implied that it was her own fault and said, “A well-chosen expletive, a slap in the face or … a well-directed knee would have been a better response than charging the offender.” He was removed from the bench.
When the Canadian MP Margaret Mitchell presented the idea of a sweeping reform of the judiciary to the House of Commons in 1982—reform that included criminalizing marital rape and making sexual assault, including wife abuse, child abuse and incest, a crime—her fellow members of parliament laughed! When the new sexual assault bill passed in 1983, nobody was laughing. Now similar changes are being demanded elsewhere in the world. Honour killing, female genital mutilation, forced marriage and a litany of assaults against women and girls are now being named for what they are. They aren’t cultural, they’re criminal. Until recently there has been a taboo against speaking out on issues pertaining to sex and abuse. But if you can’t talk about it, you can’t change it. Now the women are talking and their conversation is life altering.
I remember being in Bangladesh on assignment in 2002 to research abuses against women that were increasing in frequency as well as severity. Women had been beaten by their spouses, had their joints dislocated, had acid tossed in their faces; one had been tied to a railway track and rescued moments before a train roared by. While I was walking to a village with Rita Adikary, who was working for the non-governmental organization World Vision, a young woman who was trying to hide at the side of the road beckoned to me. When I got close enough I saw that she had been badly burned. Blistered skin was hanging from the underside of her breast, from her arms and her face. One of her eyes was bulging out of its socket after an apparent beating. When I asked her what had happened, the men who had gathered on the street to watch us all claimed that she was a stupid woman who had spilled boiling water on herself.
Rita spoke up and said, “Spilled water doesn’t burn the underside of your breast. Thrown water does. Who did it?” She chased down the facts by asking women who were standing nearby what had happened, then she called the police and gave them the details and the name of the man who had assaulted the girl, and finally told the young girl where she could find help and shelter. When I wrote the story for Homemaker’s magazine, the publisher was concerned about using the photos I had taken, which explicitly displayed the woman’s injuries. They were too hard to look at, the reality too upsetting. So other photos were used. Whose sensibilities were being protected by shielding the awful truth? Why is it that the shame of assault lies with victims rather than the perpetrators?
In 2011, though, a similar story won an Academy Award for the filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy. In her documentary Saving Face, she chronicles the ghastly wounds that Pakistani women suffer when men throw acid in their faces. She has riveted attention on a hideous crime that nobody had wanted to talk about. In just ten years, the screen that filters public awareness has been lifted, and the silence has been broken in Pakistan and elsewhere. Talking is the antidote for oppression and injustice. The first result when women share stories of victimization is realizing that other people don’t live that way. For the women of Afghanistan, that realization began when they understood that their religion had been manipulated by political opportunists: despite what the fundamentalist mullahs said, there was scant evidence in the Quran to support the actions of the extremists. The second result of telling our stories is overcoming the personally perturbing question, who will we be if we change the way we are?
In 1997, women in Senegal told me that they spent months discussing their plan to stop female genital cutting with the village chiefs and imams, as it felt so daunting at first to attempt to bring an end to a cultural practice that was two thousand years old. Like other women who tackle the status quo, the Senegalese women wondered if changing an ancient custom would change who they are. But once those initial steps have been taken, achieving change is more about effort and patience.
The Arab Spring was the result of a collection of gatherings at the barricades, conversations at the well and petitions to rulers. But it took an unexpected reaction to oppression and corruption to trigger th
e revolution that raced through the Middle East and North Africa: the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in Tunisia on December 17, 2010. History has taught us that the barrier to change doesn’t come down with the first assault. But each renewed strike will weaken the opposition and ultimately destroy it. The late Canadian journalist and social activist June Callwood put it this way: “The first thing to get out of the way is that virtue always triumphs; in truth most attempts to confront and defeat misdeeds are only partially successful or else seem to be outright failures. It doesn’t matter. Nothing is wasted in the universe. Even an effort that apparently goes nowhere will influence the future. Though the system looks untouched, it has a fatal crack in it. The next assault or the one after that will bring it down. At the very least someone somewhere has learned a lesson and will be more thoughtful.”
The people of Poland and Czechoslovakia and other former Soviet republics followed that strategy. Citizens in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Libya and the rest of North Africa and the Middle East are doing the same today. Women invariably join these protests, exhibiting tenacity and daring. But as much as they stand at the barricades with men, their fight for emancipation extends way beyond deposing a despot. During the two intifadas (the Palestinian uprisings against Israeli occupation in 1987 and again in 2000), Dr. Salwa Al-Najjab, an obstetrician and gynecologist in Ramallah on the West Bank, and her colleagues found that the number of honour killings in the Palestinian Territories fell dramatically. “During the intifada, women were seen as partners,” she says. “The young women and men passed out pamphlets, threw stones and worked on the street together. At that time, the killing of women decreased. But when there was no change in the political situation, the women went back to their houses. Then they were seen as women, not as partners, and the rate of femicide increased [once more].”
The women of Egypt were similarly shocked when they marched on International Women’s Day in 2011, just weeks after the historic events on Tahrir Square, and were attacked by the men in the crowd as well as the military. Some of them were subjected to virginity tests—in other words, they were raped—and told to go home. But the old threats failed to cow them. They created a website called HarassMap—a brilliant method of plotting each incident of groping, catcalls, ogling, sexual comments, stalking, obscene phone calls, indecent exposure, sexual invitations, intimidating facial expressions, rape and sexual assault on city maps. The site is also stuffed with reports, accusations and physical descriptions. It’s a clever new style of naming and shaming, a show and tell of harassment. The site also has a Get Help link to legal and psychological counselling. These women have been to the barricades and they aren’t going home again.
~
It’s as though the centuries-old jig is suddenly up. The abuse of women and girls is being revealed as a bully tactic by out-of-date males who are trying to cling to power. A decade ago policies began to change so funding for a program—be it education, health or small-business building—required a gender component to it. Now governments boast about supporting initiatives that promote education and health care for girls. Even corporate boards are fretting about attracting more women because the economic sages claim profits and productivity increase in relation to the rise in numbers of women appointed to boards of directors. And increasingly newspapers are publishing stories about the emancipation of women in some of the most ancient, traditionally oppressive countries on the planet.
This book is the story of the revolution in women’s lives. One of the stories is about a young Afghan, Noorjahan Akbar, who along with her friend Anita Haidary, founded Young Women for Change (YWC), an organization that is as modern as it is provocative. And they have done this in one of the world’s capitals of female oppression: Kabul. Their aim is to reshape the emotional landscape of Afghanistan.
Akbar is just twenty-one years old and barely over five feet tall. But she’s the face of the new Afghanistan. “I want to mobilize the youth,” she told me. “Sixty-five percent of the population of Afghanistan is under the age of thirty. We have never fought a war. We have new ideas. And we want to get rid of those old customs that nobody wants.”
A sophomore at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania, Akbar comes home to Kabul on all her school holidays and with her friend Haidary sets up projects to bring change to Afghanistan. They began by building a tennis court for young people and starting literacy classes for children. But, Akbar says, “We wanted to work with issues that are our passion. As women growing up in Afghanistan, we faced a lot of discrimination. We are the witnesses of injustices like forced marriage, underage marriage, sexual harassment and physical beatings.” They felt they couldn’t wait any longer for those who had promised change—the Karzai government, the UN, the rest of the international community—to deliver.
Akbar told a few friends that she would hold a meeting at a restaurant and invited them to come. She hoped five might turn up. Seventy arrived, and the restaurant owner found the idea of hosting a meeting demanding women’s rights so unnerving that he kicked them all out. So they located an office space and began holding their meetings there. Since then, they’ve handed the tennis and literacy programs off to others and have concentrated on holding art exhibits about women’s rights, a series of monthly lectures to increase awareness, a protest walk to end harassment of women on the street and, in the spring of 2012, they opened an Internet café for women. In the process they also brought young men into the movement.
“At first we didn’t think we needed the men, and considering that some women aren’t allowed to communicate with men, we needed to make sure everyone was comfortable,” Akbar said. “But there is so much segregation in our society—by tribe and gender—that keep us apart. We don’t want to do that anymore, so we felt we needed men who would be role models, men who would be outspoken about violence against women. Although there is a powerful backlash against men who speak up for women and against violence, young people will get a better picture when they see men and women from different ethnic groups standing together [in public].”
In the meantime, she is pressing a lot of very reactionary buttons. If a man harasses her in the street—speculates on her virginity, her breasts or calls her a prostitute for being on the street without a male escort, which is all too common in Afghanistan—she stops and asks him, “Why did you say that?” If a man gropes her, which is also not at all unusual, she’ll say, “What’s your problem? These streets are mine too. I have the right to walk freely in my city.” She wants to make the men stop behaving in a way that she finds ridiculous. “If they harass me physically, I hit them with my backpack. When I ask them what they’re trying to do, I feel I am planting a seed of doubt in their hearts, and that’s valuable. The next time they might think before speaking or acting. When you start to question the injustices you’ve put up with all your whole life, that’s very empowering.”
She even walked down the main street in Karte See—the neighbourhood where YWC is located—with a recording device hidden in her head scarf and gathered evidence of the truly revolting things men say to women on the street. Then she delivered the recording to ABC News, which sent it to radio and television stations in Kabul to play for their viewers and listeners. She feels she and her collaborators have nothing to lose. “Afghan women have been sent to jail for being raped, killed for giving birth to a girl, kept from going to school, harassed our whole lives.” She honours the example of the mothers of Afghanistan who suffered ongoing abuse but fought to educate daughters like her. “We’ve seen what men can do for the last thirty years,” she says. “Let’s see what women can do.”
~
Once in a very long while, maybe a lifetime, you get to tell a story about how lives can be altered. The process of change is usually daring, certainly time-consuming, invariably costly, occasionally heartbreaking but eventually an exercise so rewarding that it becomes the stuff of legends. But like all movements and most periods of change, there are invariably false starts and setbacks. Ch
ange is fuelled by anger and disappointment, as well as inspiration and patience. What is happening today is the culmination of all the waves of women’s efforts that went before. Once change like this begins in earnest, once it has lifted off, the momentum picks up and it becomes unstoppable.
Lots of people remain pessimistic. They suggest that soon the Taliban will return to power and Afghan women will be thrown back into the dark ages. Others say the women of the Arab Spring are a one-off, that the draconian personal-status laws that govern family life, marriage, divorce and inheritance will keep them subservient.
I don’t believe either prediction is true and neither do the women I interviewed for this book.
ONE
The Shame Isn’t Ours, It’s Yours
The first corner turning was realizing we weren’t crazy. The system was crazy.
— GLORIA STEINEM
Rape is hardly the first thing I would want to mention after delivering the uplifting news that women have reached a tipping point in the fight for emancipation. But as much as major corporations now want women on their boards, and the women of the Arab Spring have flexed their might in overthrowing dictators, and the women of Afghanistan and elsewhere are prepared to go to the barricades to alter their status, sexual violence still stalks them. It doesn’t stop women from reforming justice systems, opening schools and establishing health care. It doesn’t eliminate them from leadership roles or acting as mentors and role models. But rape continues to be the ugly foundation of women’s story of change. Burying the terrible truth is as ineffective as wishing it hadn’t happened. Naming the horror of sexual violence is a crucial part of the change cycle.
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