Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

by Nicholas D. Kristof

  The Rapex is a reflection of the gender-based violence that is ubiquitous in much of the developing world, inflicting far more casualties than any war. Surveys suggest that about one third of all women worldwide face beatings in the home. Women aged fifteen through forty-four are more likely to be maimed or die from male violence than from cancer, malaria, traffic accidents, and war combined. A major study by the World Health Organization found that in most countries, between 30 percent and 60 percent of women had experienced physical or sexual violence by a husband or boyfriend. “Violence against women by an intimate partner is a major contributor to the ill health of women,” said the former director-general of WHO, Lee Jong-wook.

  Rape is so stigmatizing that many women do not report it, and thus researchers have difficulty tabulating accurate figures. Yet some evidence suggests that it is very widespread: 21 percent of Ghanaian women reported in one survey that their sexual initiation was by rape; 17 percent of Nigerian women said that they had endured rape or attempted rape by the age of nineteen; and 21 percent of South African women reported that they had been raped by the age of fifteen.

  Violence against women is also constantly mutating into new forms. The first documented acid attack occurred in 1967, in what is now Bangladesh. Now it is increasingly common for men in South Asia or Southeast Asia to take sulfuric acid and hurl it in the faces of girls or women who have spurned them. The acid melts the skin and sometimes the bones underneath; if it strikes the eyes, the woman is blinded. In the world of misogyny, that is technological innovation.

  Such violence often functions to keep women down. One impediment for women planning to run for political office in Kenya is the cost of round-the-clock security. That protection is needed to prevent political enemies from having them raped; gangsters calculate that female candidates can be uniquely humiliated and discredited that way. The result is that Kenyan women candidates routinely carry knives and wear multiple sets of tights to deter, complicate, and delay any attempted rape.

  In many poor countries, the problem is not so much individual thugs and rapists but an entire culture of sexual predation. That’s the world of Woineshet Zebene.

  Woineshet, a light-skinned black girl in Ethiopia, keeps her long hair brushed back, letting it frame a face that is almost always serious, determined, studious. She grew up in a rural area where kidnapping and raping girls is a time-honored tradition. In the Ethiopian countryside, if a young man has an eye on a girl but doesn’t have a bride price (the equivalent of a dowry, but paid by the man), or if he doubts that the girl’s family will accept him, then he and several friends kidnap the girl, and he rapes her. That immediately improves his bargaining position, because she is ruined and will have difficulty marrying anyone else. The risks to the boy are minimal, since the girl’s parents never prosecute the rapist—that would aggravate the harm to their daughter’s reputation and would be resented in the community as a breach of tradition. Indeed, at the time of Woineshet’s rape, Ethiopian law explicitly provided that a man could not be prosecuted for violating a woman or girl he later married.

  Woineshet with her father, Zebene, in Addis Ababa (Nicholas D. Kristof)

  “There were many cases like this in our village,” said Woineshet’s father, Zebene, who left years ago to work as a peddler in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, returning regularly to visit his family. “I knew it was very bad for the girl, but there was nothing to do. They all married the man…. When he goes free, people see that, and they do it again and again.”

  Woineshet and her father were sitting in his shack, trying to explain what had happened. The shack is on the edge of Addis Ababa, and the traffic noise from beeping cars and buses without mufflers provided a steady background clamor. Neighbors were on all sides, separated by thin walls, and Woineshet and her father spoke in low voices so no one would hear of the girl’s rape. Woineshet was reserved, looking at her hands and occasionally at her father as he attempted to explain that the villagers are not bad people. “Stealing is a very shameful act in the villages,” he said. “If someone steals a goat, the people would beat him up.”

  But kidnapping a girl is okay?

  “More weight is still given to the crime of stealing a thing than to the crime of stealing a person,” Zebene said sadly. He looked over at Woineshet and added, “I never thought this would happen to my family.”

  Then Woineshet took over the story. Continuing to look mostly downward, she sat in the dim hut and with quiet dignity told what had happened when she was still living in the village, as a thirteen-year-old seventh grader.

  “We were deep asleep when they came,” she said calmly. “Maybe it was eleven thirty at night. I think there were more than four of them. There was no electricity, but they had a flashlight with them. They broke down the door and took me. We were shouting, but nobody heard us. Or at least nobody came.”

  Woineshet didn’t know her kidnapper, Aberew Jemma, and had never spoken to him, but Aberew had noticed her. For two days the kidnappers casually battered and raped Woineshet. Her family and a teacher went to the police and demanded that they rescue her. As the police approached, Woineshet escaped—hurtling down the village path, screaming, covered in blood and bruises.

  Zebene returned to the village from the capital as soon as he heard of his daughter’s kidnapping, and he was not inclined to have his loving, studious daughter marry the man who had raped her. In Addis Ababa, he had often heard radio commercials about women’s rights aired by the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association. He had seen women in the capital working confidently, holding meaningful jobs, enjoying rights and a measure of equality. So Zebene talked to Woineshet, and they decided that she would refuse to marry Aberew. Both Zebene and Woineshet are quiet and unassuming but possess steel spines; both are disinclined to back down. They were appalled by what had happened and refused to be mollified as tradition demanded. They decided that Woineshet would report the rape as a crime.

  She walked five miles to the nearest bus stop, waited two days for a bus, then endured the grueling journey to a town with a health center. There she underwent a pelvic exam by a nurse, who wrote in her health record: “She is no longer a virgin…. Many bruises and scratches.”

  When Woineshet returned to the village, the elders encouraged her family to settle the dispute with Aberew. Seeking to avoid a blood feud, they repeatedly pressured Zebene to accept a couple of cows for allowing Woineshet to marry Aberew. Zebene refused to even discuss such a transaction. As the stalemate persisted, Aberew and his family became increasingly concerned that they might be prosecuted, so they devised a solution: Aberew kidnapped Woineshet again, took her far away, and then resumed the beatings and rapes, demanding that she consent to marriage.

  Woineshet managed to escape, but she was recaptured during what was for her a three-day hike back home. Remarkably, Aberew even took her to the local court after kidnapping her, so that she could be bullied into telling court officials that she wanted to marry him. Instead, Woineshet—a battered, pint-sized girl surrounded by men who were threatening her—told the court official that she had been abducted, and she pleaded to be allowed to go home. The official, a man, didn’t want to listen to a girl and told Woineshet to get it over with and marry Aberew.

  “Even if you go home, Aberew will go after you again,” the official told her. “So there’s no point in resisting.”

  Woineshet was determined not to marry anyone yet, let alone her kidnapper. “I wanted to stay in school,” she recalled, speaking softly but with utter determination. Aberew was keeping her inside a house in a walled compound, but one time she was able to scale the wall and flee. Everyone saw her and heard her scream, yet no one helped.

  “People were saying I broke tradition,” Woineshet said bitterly, and she looked up from her hands for a moment. “They were criticizing me, saying I had escaped. I was furious with that attitude.” In the hope of staying alive, Woineshet moved to the police station and was housed in a jail cell—so the rape v
ictim was in a cell and the rapist was free. The police belatedly gathered evidence, including the broken door to Woineshet’s home and her torn and bloody clothing. They also collected statements from witnesses, who included a great many people in the village. But the judges to whom the case was presented thought that prosecution of Aberew was a mistake. At a court hearing, the judge told Woineshet: “He wants to marry you. Why are you refusing?”

  Finally, the judge sentenced Aberew to ten years in prison. But a month later, for reasons that are unclear, the judge released him. Woineshet fled to Addis Ababa, where she moved into her father’s shack and resumed her studies.

  “I decided to leave and go someplace where no one would recognize me,” she said. Then she added slowly and firmly: “I will never marry anyone. I don’t want to deal with any man.”

  Such a culture in rural Ethiopia might seem impervious to change. But Woineshet found support in an unlikely corner: indignant Americans, mostly women, who wrote angry letters demanding change in the Ethiopian legal code. They couldn’t undo the trauma Woineshet suffered, but the moral support was important to her and her father—reassurance when virtually everyone around them condemned the family for breaching tradition. Americans also provided financial support and a stipend to help Woineshet pursue her education in Addis Ababa.

  The letter writers were mobilized by Equality Now, an advocacy organization based in New York that tackles abuses of women around the world. Its founder, Jessica Neuwirth, had worked at Amnesty International and had seen how letter-writing campaigns could help free political prisoners. So in 1992, she founded Equality Now. It has been an uphill struggle to get enough donations to sustain the effort, but Jessica has kept Equality Now going with the support of guardian angels, including Gloria Steinem and Meryl Streep. Today it has a staff of fifteen in New York, London, and Nairobi, with an annual budget of $2 million—pocket change in the world of philanthropy.

  Equality Now launched appeals on behalf of Woineshet, but it seems unlikely that Aberew will go to prison again. However, Equality Now’s army of letter writers did shine enough of a spotlight on Ethiopia that it was shamed into changing its laws. Today, a man is liable for rape even if the victim later agrees to marry him.

  Of course, that’s only the law, and in poor countries laws rarely matter much outside the capital. We sometimes think that Westerners invest too much effort in changing unjust laws and not enough in changing culture, by building schools or assisting grassroots movements. Even in the United States, after all, what brought equal rights to blacks wasn’t the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments passed after the Civil War, but rather the grassroots civil rights movement nearly one hundred years later. Laws matter, but typically changing the law by itself accomplishes little. Mahdere Paulos, the dynamic woman who runs the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association, agrees. The association does much of its work by filing suits or otherwise lobbying to change laws, but Mahdere acknowledges that change has to be felt in the culture as well as the legal code.

  “Empowering women begins with education,” she said. She sees the cadre of educated women growing. Some twelve thousand women a year now volunteer with the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association, giving it political as well as legal weight. Equality Now works closely with the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association, and that is a useful model: We in the West can best help by playing supporting roles to local people. And the Ethiopian Women Lawyers Association may soon have another volunteer. Woineshet is now in high school, getting good grades and planning to go to university and study law.

  “I would like, God willing, to take on cases of abduction,” she said simply. “If I can’t get justice for myself, I’ll get justice for others.”

  Behind the rapes and other abuse heaped on women in much of the world, it’s hard not to see something more sinister than just libido and prurient opportunism. Namely: sexism and misogyny.

  How else to explain why so many more witches were burned than wizards? Why is acid thrown in women’s faces, but not in men’s? Why are women so much more likely to be stripped naked and sexually humiliated than men? Why is it that in many cultures, old men are respected as patriarchs, while old women are taken outside the village to die of thirst or to be eaten by wild animals? Granted, in the societies where these abuses take place, men also suffer more violence than males do in America—but the brutality inflicted on women is particularly widespread, cruel, and lethal.

  These attitudes are embedded in culture and will change only with education and local leadership. But outsiders have their supporting role to play, too, in part by shining a spotlight on these regressive attitudes in an effort to break the taboo that often surrounds them. In 2007, senators Joseph Biden and Richard Lugar first introduced the International Violence Against Women Act, which will be reintroduced annually until it becomes law. The bill provides for $175 million a year in foreign aid to try to prevent honor killings, bride burnings, genital cutting, acid attacks, mass rapes, and domestic violence. The bill would also create an Office of Women’s Global Initiatives in the immediate office of the secretary of state, and a Women’s Global Development Office in the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Both offices would press to make gender-based violence a diplomatic priority. For all our skepticism about laws, this one, like the landmark 2000 legislation that required annual reports about human trafficking abroad, would have a real if incremental impact around the world. It won’t solve any problem completely, but it could make a difference to girls like Woineshet.

  In talking about misogyny and gender-based violence, it would be easy to slip into the conceit that men are the villains. But it’s not true. Granted, men are often brutal to women. Yet it is women who routinely manage brothels in poor countries, who ensure that their daughters’ genitals are cut, who feed sons before daughters, who take their sons but not their daughters to clinics for vaccination. One study suggests that women perpetrators were involved, along with men, in one quarter of the gang rapes in the Sierra Leone civil war. Typically, women fighters would lure a victim to the rape site, and then restrain her as she was raped by male fighters. “We would help capture her and hold her down,” one woman ex-combatant explained. The author of the study, Dara Kay Cohen, cites evidence from Haiti, Iraq, and Rwanda to suggest that female participation in Sierra Leone’s sexual violence was not an anomaly. She argues that ubiquitous gang rape in civil wars isn’t about sexual gratification, but rather is a way for military units—including their female members—to bond, by engaging in sometimes brutally misogynistic violence.

  Female infanticide persists in many countries, and often it is mothers who kill their own daughters. Dr. Michael H. Stone, a professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and expert on infanticide, obtained data on Pakistani women who killed their daughters. He found that they usually did so because their husbands threatened to divorce them if they kept the girl. For example, a woman named Shahnaz poisoned her daughter to avoid being divorced by her husband. Perveen poisoned her daughter after her father-in-law beat her for giving birth to a girl. Yet sometimes women in Pakistan or China kill their newborn daughters simply because daughters are less prestigious than sons. Rehana drowned her daughter because “girls are unlucky.”

  As for wife beating, one survey found support for it from 62 percent of Indian village women themselves. And no group systematically abuses young women more cruelly than mothers-in-law, who serve as household matriarchs in much of the world and take charge of disciplining the younger women. The experience of Zoya Najabi, a twenty-one-year-old woman from a middle-class family in Kabul, Afghanistan, illustrates the point. She came to our interview wearing blue jeans with embroidered flowers and looked more like an American than an Afghan. She went to school up to the eighth grade, but then, after her marriage at age twelve to a sixteen-year-old boy, she was subjected to constant corporal punishment.

  “Not only my husband, but his brother, his mother, and his sister—they all
beat me,” Zoya recalled indignantly, speaking at a shelter in Kabul. Even worse, they would punish her for faulty housework by tying her to a bucket and dunking her in the well, leaving her freezing, gasping, and half drowned. The worst moment came when Zoya’s mother-in-law was beating her and Zoya unthinkingly kicked back.

  Zoya Najabi in a shelter in Afghanistan, after fleeing her husband’s family (Nicholas D. Kristof)

  Resisting a mother-in-law is an outrageous sin. First, Zoya’s husband dug out an electrical cable and flogged his wife until she fell unconscious. Then, the next day, her father-in-law strapped Zoya’s feet together, tied her down, and gave a stick to the mother-in-law, who whipped the soles of Zoya’s feet.

  “My feet were beaten until they were like yogurt,” Zoya said. “All my days there were unhappy, but that was the worst.

  “Mostly those kinds of beatings happen because the husbands are illiterate and uneducated,” she added. “But it also happens that the wife is not taking care of her husband or is not obedient. Then it is appropriate to beat the wife.”

  Zoya smiled a bit when she saw the shock on our faces. She explained patiently: “I should not have been beaten, because I was always obedient and did what my husband said. But if the wife is truly disobedient, then of course her husband has to beat her.”

  In short, women themselves absorb and transmit misogynistic values, just as men do. This is not a tidy world of tyrannical men and victimized women, but a messier realm of oppressive social customs adhered to by men and women alike. As we said, laws can help, but the greatest challenge is to change these ways of thinking. And perhaps the very best means of combating suffocating traditions is education—through schools like one of our favorites, in a remote nook of the Pakistani Punjab, run by one of the world’s most extraordinary women.