Ascent of Women (3 page)

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 the 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. Change 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.

— G
LORIA
S
TEINEM

R
ape 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.

Rape as punishment or as a means of control still lurks in the lives of women. Marital rape is an old story. Date rape is relatively new. In many households husbands still claim that they own their wives and have the right to sex on demand. Defenceless children
are sexually abused by fathers, uncles and brothers; in some countries, men think that having sex with a virgin girl child will cure HIV/AIDS. The impunity of men when it comes to getting away with rape constitutes a centuries-old record of disgrace. For women, sexual violence has been a life sentence.

I’ve spoken to women in Africa and Europe, in Asia and North America about the role of rape in their lives. Some of the stories they told me made me gasp in near disbelief at the extent of the horror inflicted on them. Others made me cheer for the awe-inspiring courage they showed in demanding justice. They all described perpetrators who banked on the silence of society and the shame of the victims to protect them from consequences. But they also spoke of the fearlessness and tenacity it takes to end this scourge.

Some people think you shouldn’t talk about rape. If it happens to you, be quiet, don’t tell, because the stigma could prevent you from getting a job, making new friends, finding a partner. People say, “Put it behind you. There is no good in rehashing the past.” Others still dare to say, “She asked for it. She was dressed like a whore.” Or worse, “She needed to be taught a lesson.” And too many people refuse to accept the statistics. They don’t want to believe that one human being could be so brutal to another human being, so they dismiss the topic as not fit for polite conversation. People who don’t intervene when something is wrong give tacit permission for injustice to continue, proving that there’s no such thing as an innocent bystander.

Rape has always been a silent crime. The victim doesn’t want to admit what happened to her lest she be dismissed or rejected. The rest of the world would either prefer to believe rape doesn’t happen or stick to the foolish idea that silence is the best response.

Today the taboo around talking about sexual violence has been breached. Women from Bosnia, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have blown the whistle about rape camps and mass rapes and even re-rape, a word coined by women in Congo to describe the condition of being raped by members of one militia and raped again when another swaggers into their village. Instead of being hushed up, cases such as that of Mukhtar Mai, the Pakistani girl who was gang-raped by village men who wanted to punish her for walking with a boy from an upper caste, have made headlines around the world.

The causes and consequences of rape are at last being debated at the United Nations. The International Criminal Court in The Hague declared rape a war crime in 1998. The UN Security Council decided that rape was a strategy of war and therefore a security issue in 2007. The announcement was welcome news to the activists on the file, but most people asked what the Security Council could or would actually do with their newly forged resolution, which called for the immediate and complete cessation by all parties to armed conflict of all acts of sexual violence against civilians. The resolution also called for states to provide more protection for women and to eliminate the impunity of men.

Then in 2011 a case in Kenya became the watershed moment everyone had been waiting for. In the northern city of Meru, 160 girls between the ages of three and seventeen are suing the government for failing to protect them from being raped. Their legal action was crafted in Canada, another country where women successfully sued the government for failing to protect them. Everyone from high court judges and magistrates in Kenya to researchers and law school professors in Canada believe these girls
will win and that the victory will set a precedent that will alter the status of women in Kenya and maybe all of Africa.