Ascent of Women (5 page)

“One of the challenges is that our culture doesn’t allow us to speak out about sexual things,” says Mercy Chidi. “My only advice from my mother when I got my period was ‘Don’t play with boys; you’ll get pregnant.’ My own uncle tried to rape me, and to this day I have not told my mother. We have to break this silence.”

When the girls arrive at the shelter, she says, they are severely traumatized and don’t want to talk to anyone. Some are frightened, others aggressive. They tend to pick on one another. And as much as they come around and begin to heal, Mercy says that they never completely overcome the trauma. “It’s like tearing a paper into many pieces. No matter how carefully you try to put the pieces together again, the paper will never be the same. That’s what sexual assault does.” One little girl at the shelter begins to cry every night when it starts to get dark and the curtains are drawn. “It’s the hour when her father used to come and rape her,” Chidi says.

In the program at Tumaini Centre, the girls stay for six weeks; they receive prophylaxis drugs to prevent HIV/AIDS and pregnancy as soon as they arrive and medical care and counselling for the duration. If it isn’t safe for them to return home, they go to a boarding school or stay on in the residence at the centre. Those who go home come back once a month for six months and then every three months for ongoing counselling and support. When I visited, there were eleven girls in residence.

One of them, a fifteen-year-old called Luckline, had been raped by a neighbour. She was thirty-nine weeks pregnant when we met. When she talked about what happened to her, she didn’t sound like a victim. She sounded like a girl who wanted to get even, to make a change. She said, “This happened to me on May 13, 2010. I will make sure this never happens to my sister.” When I asked what she would do after the baby was born, she said she wanted to return to school because she planned to become a poet. With little prompting, she read me one of her poems.

Here I come

Walking down through history to eternity

From paradise to the city of goods

Victorious, glorious, serious and pious

Elegant, full of grace and truth

The centrepiece and the masterpiece of literature

Glowing, growing and flowing

Here, there, everywhere

Cheering millions every day

The book of books that I am
.

This from a teenager who is disadvantaged in every imaginable way. Yet she was preparing to sue her government for failing to protect her. This is how change happens. But it takes commitment and colossal personal strength for a girl to tackle the status quo and claim a better future for herself.

Back in Nairobi, I visit with Nano, a magistrate in the children’s court. She insisted that her full name not be used, as she must be seen as totally impartial both to the children and to the system that she criticizes. “The difficulty,” she said, “is that the police
lack knowledge of the law. Not all but most need training and sensitization around sexual assault.” And, she said, “It’s hard to get evidence from children; they need psychologists and counsellors to talk to them, and the Kenyan legal system simply doesn’t have that resource. Even some magistrates lack training and knowledge of the Sexual Offences Act.” Of the few cases that have made it to the court, she said, “The difficulty is they come without the information I need to convict. The girls block it out or don’t turn up. There are all kinds of judicial tools I can use: CEDAW [the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women], the Children’s Convention, even the new Sexual Offences Act legislation in Kenya. The investigating officer needs to tell the court what has been found, the charge sheets have to be drafted correctly and the child needs to be able to tell the officer what happened; if she can, she needs to identify the man who defiled her and say, ‘He is the one who did this to me.’ The children have to be prepared for this. Without it, I cannot convict.”

~

After that conversation with the magistrate, I sat in on the meeting that the team of lawyers was holding in a hotel across town. While diesel-belching buses and the traffic chaos in Nairobi created cacophony outside, the lawyers hunkered over their files at a long narrow table creating a strategy for the case. They debated the wording, parsing every sentence, nitpicking the legal clauses, testing the jurisprudence. They knew it would take collaboration between lawyers, doctors and academics, experts in human rights law as well as international law to be successful. They also needed to protect the girls and make sure they weren’t revictimized by the
process. Once the child’s story has been documented by an officer, the lawyer can make the accusation in court, thus preventing the girls from being further traumatized.

For five long days, they argued over how best to make the case. There were three choices: a civil claim, a criminal claim or a constitutional claim. Finally they decided that a constitutional challenge was the way to go. The Kenyan constitution guarantees equality rights for citizens. It promises protection for men and women. It governs the laws that deliver that protection. The lawyers will argue that the state failed to execute the constitutional rights of the girls. Then they set their sights on a court date. The journey they’re on together is about girls who dared to break the taboo on speaking out about sexual assault. It’s about women lawyers from two sides of the world supporting these youngsters in their quest for justice. It’s about the kids who were told they had no rights but insist that they do. It’s the push-back reaction that every woman and girl in the world has been waiting for. “This case is the beginning,” said Chidi. “It’ll be a long journey but now it has begun.” If they win, the victory will be a success for every girl and woman in Africa, maybe even the world.

~

The road they travel was paved by women who went before: those who were willing to cry foul rather than be silenced by shame; those who worked tirelessly to make the world understand that rape is not the right of men; those who insist rape is not the “fault” of women but a control issue among men who have failed to grasp the consequences of scarring a woman’s mind by assaulting her body.

Like so many issues that have reached a turning point for women, rape has gone from being the crime no one wants to talk about to making headlines, to being a prominent subject in courts, in newly published books and in award-winning films. Among the first to go public on a world stage were the extraordinarily brave women from Bosnia who went to the International Criminal Court in The Hague in 1998; despite the very real possibility that they would be forever rejected by their families, they testified about what had happened to them: they had been rounded up, taken to enemy camps and gang-raped.

Their story of sexual violence actually began when the USSR collapsed in 1991 and its sister state Yugoslavia (created at the end of the First World War from seven independent nations) erupted in a civil war in the Balkans so virulent that former neighbours, old friends and business partners attacked one another in a ferocious bloodbath that riveted the world’s attention. I began covering the story soon after that, which is how I came to meet some of the women who had been gang-raped. But getting their story published was a story in itself. Here’s what happened.

In the fall of 1992, I was in Sarajevo to cover the effect of war on children. The siege of Sarajevo was like nothing I had ever seen before. Snipers and soldiers were waging a war against civilians. Targets of the shelling were hospitals, schools and playgrounds. Explosives made in the shape of children’s toys were maiming kids who picked them up. Families were forced to live in basements while soldiers took over the rest of the house. And all this was happening in a breathtaking setting, in a city that had played host to the Olympic Games, in a region that was picture-postcard beautiful. The towns had names that sound like songs. White stucco houses with red clay roofs dotted the landscape.
The sun cast a glow on ancient hills that turn purple at dusk and glowed buttery yellow at dawn. But the streets were rife with the Devil’s work and there was peril at every corner.

The day before I was to leave Sarajevo, I began to hear rumours about Bosnian Serb soldiers who were rounding up Bosnian Muslim women and dragging them off to rape camps. Every journalist knows that one of the first casualties of war is the truth, and I thought that what I was hearing was propaganda. This was two years before the horror of Rwanda, before Darfur, before Congo. But as the day progressed, I kept hearing about the rape camps from more and more credible sources. At that time I was the editor in chief of a magazine, and magazines have a much longer lead time than newspapers. If this story was true, it was breaking news that needed to be published immediately; it couldn’t wait the three months it would take to get it to my magazine readers.

I gathered everything I could—mobile phone numbers, names, details about Muslim wives and sisters and daughters being gang-raped eight and ten times a day. When I flew back to Canada, I went straight to a media outlet and handed over the file to an editor I knew. I said, “This is a horrendous story. Give it to one of your reporters.” I went back to my office and waited for the headline. Nothing. I waited another week and another—still nothing. Seven weeks later, I saw a four-line blurb in
Newsweek
magazine about soldiers gang-raping women in the Balkans. I called the editor I’d given the package to.

As soon as he heard my voice, he started to giggle—nervously. “Oh, I knew you’d be calling me today,” he said.

“What happened?” I wanted to know.

“Well, Sally,” he said, “it was a good story but, you know, I got busy and, you know, I was on deadline and, you know, I forgot.”

I was astounded. I said, “More than twenty thousand women were gang-raped, some of them eight years old, some of them eighty years old—and you forgot?”

I hung up and called my staff together and told them what had happened. We decided to do the story ourselves. I was on a plane back to the war zone two days later.

Six women who were refugees in Zagreb, Croatia, were willing to be interviewed, but they were reluctant to have their names used as they knew they’d be rejected by their families if word of the rapes got out. While most women did not become pregnant, some did. Of those who were pregnant, some managed to get abortions; some had been kept in prison until abortion was impossible. And still others had escaped but couldn’t find medical help in time for an abortion. Many who gave birth left the newborns at the hospital. Mostly I talked to frightened women who badly needed health care and counselling and were too traumatized to share their stories. I worried about asking a woman to relive the horror and began to wonder how to best tell a story that most preferred to be silent about.

Then I met Dr. Mladen Loncar, a psychiatrist at the University of Zagreb, who told me about a woman who was furious with the silence around this atrocity and had plenty to say. He promised to call her and ask for an interview on my behalf, and when he did, Eva Penavic said yes, she would talk to me. Getting to her was a problem, though, as she was living as a refugee on the eastern border between Bosnia and Croatia, near the city of Vukovar. The area was being shelled day and night.

The photographer I drove with accelerated through towns where buildings were still smoking from being hit by rocket-propelled grenades (and turned up the volume on a Pavarotti CD to block
out the sound of grenades exploding in the distance). We finally arrived late in the afternoon at the four-room house Eva was sharing with her extended family of seventeen. For the next seven hours, I listened while she described the hideous ordeal she’d survived.

Eva told me that she thought the men pounding at her door in the little eastern Croatian village of Berak in November 1991 had come to kill her. Rape was the furthest thing from her mind when they shot off the hinges of her door. After all, she was regarded as a leader in this village of eight hundred people. She was forty-eight years old. She had five grandchildren.

Eva was a wise woman who knew that her sex didn’t guarantee her safety. She was the child of a widow who had to leave home and find work in another village. She was the niece of an abusive man who tried to force her into an arranged marriage when she was sixteen. But despite all her girlhood experiences, she could never have imagined the horror she’d be subjected to during the brutal conflict in the former Yugoslavia.

Eva was one of the civil war’s first victims of mass gang rape. The crime committed against her was part of a plan, a cruel adjunct to the campaign known as “ethnic cleansing”—a phrase as foul to language as the act is annihilating to its victims. An estimated twenty thousand to fifty thousand women, mostly in Bosnia and some in Croatia, shared Eva’s fate.

Historians claim that what happened there was worse than the rapes of opportunity and triumph usually associated with war. This was rape that was organized, visible, ritualistic. It was calculated to scorch the emotional earth of the victim, her family, her community, her ethnic group. In many cases, the victim’s husband, children, cousins and neighbours were forced to watch.
In other cases, victims heard the screams of their sisters or daughters or mothers as one after another was dragged away to be raped in another room.