WUNRN
From Africa to Asia to the Americas, women are the key to progress on ending poverty, violence, and conflict. Award-winning humanitarian and journalist Sally Armstrong shows us why empowering women and girls is the way forward, and she introduces us to the leading females who are making change happen, from Nobel Prize winners to little girls suing from justice. Uprising tells dramatic and empowering stories of change-makers and examines the stunning courage, tenacity and wit they are using to alter the status quo. From mud-brick houses in Afghanistan to the forests of Congo, where women still hide from their attackers, to a shelter in northern Kenya, where 160 girls between 3 and 17 have won an historic court case against a government who did not protect them from rape, to Pakistan, where Malala Yousafzai is fighting for the rights of women everywhere, Uprising is about the final frontier for women: having control over your own body, whether in zones of conflict, in rural villages, on university campuses or in your own kitchen. In this landmark book that ties together feminism and our global economy, Sally Armstrong brings us the voices of the women all over the world whose bravery and strength is changing the world as we know it.
About the Author, Sally
Armstrong - Human rights activist and journalist SALLY ARMSTRONG has covered
stories about women and girls in zones of conflict all over the world. Her eye
witness reports have earned her awards including the Gold Award from the
National Magazine Awards Foundation. She received the Amnesty International
Media Award in 2000, 2002 and 2011, and she was a member of the International
Women’s Commission, a UN body whose mandate is assisting with the path to peace
in the Middle East.
CHAPTER
1 - 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 prevent them
from 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. Defenseless 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 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
prefer to either 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. And the raping of an
unconscious girl in Steubenville, Ohio, in 2012 got everyone’s attention,
mostly because some of the media reported that the “poor boys who raped her
were going to jail and their lives were over.” An outraged public responded
with a conversation that went viral: “If you’re so worried about your high
marks and your great ‘rep’ and your football scholarship, don’t go around
raping unconscious girls and posting the photos on YouTube.”
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, 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. Getting
traction on a UN resolution is like hoping for rain in the middle of a drought.
Women are fed up with waiting for action. Eve Ensler, the award-winning
playwright, author of The Vagina Monologues, and founder of V-Day, the global
activism movement to end violence against women and girls, had an idea. What if
1 billion women around the world stood up on the same day and sang the same
song and danced the same dance? What if together they claimed their own space,
raised their own voices, took back the night? Would that send a message that 50
percent of the population has had it with violence against women? The naysayers
said it could never be done. But the naysayers hadn’t asked the world’s women.
On February 14, 2013, 1 billion women from India and the Philippines to the
United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany danced, sang, and reclaimed
their own bodies.
On February 14, 2014, they did it again. Thousands of pairs of feet stomping, hands clapping; little kids and grannies, businesswomen and teenagers flooded into public squares in 207 countries. They danced, raised their arms skyward, and sang in a victory chant that was heard all over the world.
I dance ’cause I love,
Dance ’cause I dream,
Dance ’cause I’ve had enough,
Dance to stop the screams
Dance to break the rules
Dance to stop the pain
Dance to turn it upside down
It’s time to break the chain
They were taking part in One Billion Rising, which was the largest global action
in history to end violence against women. Like a rising tide, the decision to
stop the oppression, the abuse, the second-class citizenship of women was
already surging in Asia, in Africa, in North America and Europe. When Eve
Ensler did the math, she made a startling announcement: “One in three women on
the planet will be raped or beaten in her lifetime. One billion women violated
is an atrocity. One billion women dancing is a revolution.”
The idea came to her when she returned to the Democratic Republic of Congoto
Bukavu and the City of Joy she had built with the women who had suffered the
worst and likely most depraved abuse the world had ever known. It was a bald
and thin Eve Ensler who had just stumbled out of the fog and fear of uterine
cancer treatment who fell into the welcoming arms of the women she had worked
with in what had come to be known as the rape capital of the world. Eve linked
her own cancer to the cancer of cruelty that these women knew. In her new book,
In the Body of the World, she describes “the cancer from the stress of not
achieving, the cancer of buried trauma” and the epiphany she had that “cancer
was the alchemist, an agent of change”: “I am particularly grateful for the
women of Congo whose strength, beauty, and joy in the midst of horror insisted
I rise above my self-pity.”
It was there she imagined the dance. “It could transform suffering into action
and pain into power. We could call on all women to dance, to take back the
spaces, put their feet on the earth, reclaim their bodies.” The idea spread
like wildfire: urban and rural women, farmers and fishers, artists and teachers
all said they would dance.
Eve Ensler says, “Dancing is a genius form of protest. You can do it together
or alone, it gives you energy, makes you feel you own the street. Corporations
can’t control it.” She lists dozens of events that made up One Billion Rising:
a flash mob in the European Parliament, more than forty events in New York
City, participation by cell phone in Tehran, a human chain in Dhaka,
Bangladesh, and acid attack survivors in that country who rallied and danced.
Fifteen city blocks in Manila had to be closed to accommodate more than a
million women dancing. Two hundred women and men marched in front of the
parliament in Afghanistan. There was the first-ever flash dance in Mogadishu,
Somalia, and more than two hundred events in the United Kingdom. Hollywood
actors like Anne Hathaway rose up. So did the Dalai Lama and politicians and
CEOs. Eve says the participation was beyond her wildest dreams. She’s on a
mission to stop the violence that she calls “the methodology of oppression”
once and for all. Her goal was to find the right steps to end violence “so it’s
not perpetual Groundhog Day.”
One Billion Rising was the wind needed to blow on the coals so the fire would
ignite. And now she wants the international community to step up and keep
stoking the fire. “Our time has come,” she says. “This is the moment to trust
what you know, trust your instinct, move knowledge into wisdom. Now is the
moment to stop waiting for permission. Stand up for your truth.” She calls
women the people of the second wind and calls on all of us to keep rising.
One Billion Rising isn’t a single assault on violence against women. It’s part
of a collection of volleys against sexism and oppression that is gaining in
strength around the world today.
One of the most stunning examples comes from Kenya, where in 2011 there was a
watershed moment everyone had been waiting for. In the northern city of Meru,
160 girls between the ages of three and seventeen sued 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 believed these girls
would win and that the victory would set a precedent that would alter the
status of women in Kenya and maybe all of Africa.
These are grand claims for redressing a crime as old as Methuselah, but the
researchers and lawyers working on the case insisted that the evidence was on
their side.
The suit was the brainchild of Fiona Sampson, winner of the 2014 New York Bar
Association Award for Distinction in International Law. She is the project
director of the Equality Effect, a nonprofit organization that uses
international human rights law to improve the lives of girls and women. It came
about by way of a touch of serendipity and a lot of tenacity. Sampson was doing
a master’s degree at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto in 2002 when she met
fellow students Winifred Kamau, a lecturer from the University of Nairobi Law
School, and Elizabeth Archampong, vice dean at the Faculty of Law at Kwame
Nkrumah University in Ghana, who had come to Canada to study international law.
Their mutual interest in equality rights drew the women together. A few years
later, when Seodi White, a lawyer from Malawi, was a visiting scholar at the
Center for Women’s Studies at the University of Toronto, the trio became a
foursome. When the African women wondered if the model used in Canada in the
early eighties to reform the law around sexual assaultin which legal activists
successfully lobbied to rewrite the law, educate the judiciary, and raise
awareness with the publiccould work in Africa, Sampson started thinking about
ways to tackle the entrenched violence against women in countries like Kenya,
Malawi, and Ghana.
Eight years after their initial meeting, the quartet gathered in Nairobi in
2010 with the pick of the human rights legal crop from Canada and Africa for
the historic launch of Three to Be Free, a program that targets three
countries, Kenya, Malawi, and Ghana, with three strategieslitigation, policy
reform, and legal educationover three years in order to alter the status of
women. Their intention was to tackle marital rape and make it a crime. But when
the lawyers returned home and started their research, another serendipitous
meeting took place. A woman named Mercy Chidi was in Toronto taking a course at
the Women’s Human Rights Education Institute at the University of Toronto. One
of the lawyers working on the marital rape case, Mary Eberts, was teaching the
course and heard Chidi’s story. She called Sampson and suggested she meet
Chidi, who was the director of a nongovernmental organization called The
Ripples International Brenda Boone Hope Centre (which is known locally in Meru
as Tumainithe Swahili word for “hope”). First a word about Brenda Boone, the
Washington-based executive whom the shelter is named for. She met Mercy in 2006
when Mercy was in Washington raising money to rescue kids with AIDS who’d been
abandoned. “I invited Mercy and her husband to come to my housethey arrived in
full African attire in my Capital Hill home that was full of antiques and
Victorian furniture.” Brenda asked how she could help, and when they asked her
for a computer, she provided one immediately, along with a check for $5,000. A
year later, Mercy was back in Washington to receive the International Peace
Award. Brenda invited the Chidis back to her home“I served them fried chicken
because it was Sunday and I’m Southern”and Mercy explained that they had made
a business plan and decided to open a shelter for girls who had been raped.
“That pierced my heart,” says Brenda. “I gave them another check, this time for
$25,000, and committed to financing everything to get the place going.” Brenda
knew the missing piece was the legal action required to stop the raping of
girls.
A few years later, when Mercy met Fiona Sampson and told her about the shelter
and about the girls who can’t go home because the men who raped them are still
at large, they both knew it was time to tackle the root of the problemthe
impunity of rapists and the failure of the justice system to convict them.
Sampson admits it was her own sense of urgency that made the concept take
flight. “I am the last thalidomide child to be born in Canada,” she explains,
referring to the anti-morning-sickness drug whose side effects in utero had
affected the development of her hands and arms. (The drug was banned in 1962.)
“There was a culture of impunity in the testing of drugs at that time,” she
explains, “so I’m consumed with the desire to seek justice in the face of
impunity.”
Kenya has laws on its books designed to protect girls from rape, or
“defilement.” The state is responsible for the police and the way police
enforce existing laws. Since the police in Kenya failed to arrest the
perpetrators and fail on an ongoing basis to provide the protection girls need,
the lawyers filed notice that the state is responsible for the breakdown in the
system. Sampson said at the time, “We will argue that the failure to protect
the girls from rape is actually a human rights violation, that it’s a violation
of the equality provisions of the Kenyan constitution. It’s the Kenyan state
that signed on to international, regional, and domestic equality provisions and
it’s therefore their obligation to protect the girls. Only the state can
provide the remedies we’re looking for, which is the safety and security of the
girls.”
Sampson and other human rights lawyers in Canada have done this successfully
for approximately twenty-five years since the introduction of Section 15, the
equality provision of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Their track record
includes considerable success with precedent-setting cases that establish the
state’s responsibility to protect the rights of Canadian women. One of them was
a case in Toronto in 1986 involving a woman raped by a man referred to as the
Balcony Rapist, who was targeting the women of one downtown neighborhood,
gaining access to their bedrooms by breaking in through second- and third-floor
balconies in the dark of night. The woman, who called herself Jane Doe, sued
the police, claiming it was their responsibility to warn the potential targets
of the Balcony Rapist and thereby protect them. The police tried to have her
case dismissed using the argument that if they had warned the potential
targets, it would have tipped off the rapist. But Jane Doe argued that the
Toronto police used her as bait to draw out the predator. Her courage and
dogged determination turned her case into a cause célčbre. In 1998, she won.
Mary Eberts, who is working on the Kenyan girls’ suit, explains the connection
between the two cases: “The police knew about this guy, they knew about his
method of operation, and they knew where in the city the women he liked to
target would be living, but they did not warn those women about the potential
danger they were in. Jane Doe was raped by this guy, as the police might have
predicted. She brought this case, which we are using as a precedent in the 160
girls’ litigation, to say there is a duty on the part of the police to enforce
the lawthat’s why the law is there. And if the police do not enforce the law,
if the government does not enforce the law, then they are guilty of violating a
person’s equality.”
Eberts knows that the stars need to be aligned for precedent-setting cases to
work. Her colleague Winnie Kamau says a case like this couldn’t have happened
even a few years ago. “I think the timing was actually quite perfect,
particularly in the Kenyan context,” Kamau says. “We have a new constitution
that was enacted in August 2010, and in the last half dozen years we have had
some very progressive laws passed in our country. Five years ago it would have
been difficult to bring everybody together, but the timing now I believe is
right. There’s also a lot more awareness among African women about their
rights, and they have the feeling, the sense that they need to change. We can
harness these energies.”
The new Kenyan constitution contains powerful provisions that provide for
increased equality for women and girls, provisions that have not yet been interpreted
by the country’s courts. This is precisely where the Canadian courts were
twenty-five years ago when the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted. New
laws must be tested and interpreted in the courts. Reflecting on their own
experience with charter challenges, the Canadian lawyers see this case as an
opportunity to ensure that the courts interpret and apply constitutional
provisions in ways that guarantee the human rights of women and girls. The
process is time-consuming and expensive, but it’s the best way to establish
precedents that the courts can rely on for future cases. The Three to Be Free
activists plan to take similar action in Malawi and Ghana once this case is
won.
Historically, when you alter the status of one woman, you alter the status of
her family. When a girl is confident and knows what her rights are, she knows
what she can claim from the state and that the state owes her certain things by
virtue of the fact that she’s a citizen of that state. She can claim an
education, livelihood, and shelter. She can claim that she has the right not to
be marginalized. Once the state is held accountable for its obligation to
promote women’s human rights and to protect women and girls from violence, a
climate of intolerance for violence against women follows. There’s more
likelihood that people who talk casually about violating women and girls will
be censured by their friends and that women themselves will speak out, bring
charges, demand justice.
* * *
It’s a four-hour drive from Nairobi to Meru (population 1 million) and the
shelter where the Kenyan girls are staying. We drive through banana farms and
tea plantations, past dark umbrella-like acacia trees, inhaling the dry scent
of the savannah. Bleating goats and signs declaring JESUS SAVES dot the
landscape. Mango trees and roadsides drenched in pink, orange, and red
bougainvillea smack up against fluorescent green billboards advertising Safari,
the country’s cell phone provider. When we cross the equator on the way to
Meru, the heat intensifies but the traffic remains the sameheavy and fast, a
series of near misses for both vehicles and pedestrians.
The rutted red dirt road into the Ripples International shelter is shaded by a
canopy of lush trees that offer refuge from the heat of the equatorial sun.
Hedges of purple azalea and yellow hibiscus camouflage the fence that keeps
intruders away from this bucolic place that is a refuge for the 160 girls who
are poised to cut off the head of the snake that is sexual assault.
I’d been briefed in Nairobi about what to expect when I met the girls whose
cases have been selected for the lawsuit. The first one I’m introduced to is
Emily. The size of the child takes my breath away. Emily is barely four and a
half feet tall, her tiny shoulders scarcely twelve inches across. But when she
sits down to tell her story, her husky eleven-year-old voice is charged with
determination. “My grandfather asked me to fetch the torch,” she explains. But
when she brought it to him, it wasn’t a flashlight he wanted. “He took me by
force and warned me not to scream or he would cut me up.” Along with thousands
of men in Kenya and indeed throughout sub-Saharan Africa, Emily’s grandfather
believes that having sex with a girl child will cure HIV/AIDS, a belief that
led him to rape his own granddaughter to presumably heal himself. What’s worse,
men believe that the younger the child is, the stronger the cure will be. Now
she is taking the old man to the high court in Nairobi. Even Emily knows the
case is likely to be history making. This little kid, along with the other 159
plaintiffs, knows that she may be the one who strengthens the status of women
and girls not only in Kenya but in all of Africa.
“These men will learn they cannot do this to small girls,” says Emily, who,
like the other girls I met, balances the victim label with the newfound
empowerment that has come to her from the decision to sue.
Charity is also eleven and her sister Susan only six. Their mother is dead.
Their father raped themfirst Charity, then Susanafter they came home from
school one day during the winter months. Charity says, “I want my father to go
to the jail.” Her sister is so traumatized that she won’t leave Charity’s side
and only eats, sleeps, and speaks when Charity tells her it’s okay to do so.
Perpetual Kimanze, who takes care of these girls and coordinates their
counseling and therapy, keeps a close eye on Susan when the little girl begins
to talk to me in a barely audible voice, uttering each word with an agonizing
pause between, and says, “My … father … put … his … penis … between … my … legs
… and … he … hurt … me.”
It’s been six days since Emily was raped; she still complains of stomach pain.
She can’t sleep. She says in her native Kiswahili (a local dialect of Swahili),
“Nasikia uchungu sana nikienda choo, kukojoa.” It hurts to go to the bathroom.
Doreen, fifteen, has a four-month-old baby as a result of being raped by her
cousin. Her mother is mentally ill. Her father left them years ago, and they
had moved in with her mother’s sister. When Doreen realized she was pregnant,
her aunt told her to have an abortion; when her uncle found out, he beat her
and threw her out of the house. She was considering suicide when she heard
about Ripples and came to their Tumaini Centre.
In Kenya a girl child is raped every thirty minutes; some are as young as three
months old. If a girl doesn’t die of her injuries, she faces abandonment;
families don’t want anything to do with girls who have been sexually assaulted.
She almost certainly loses the chance to get an education. Some can’t go to
school anymore because they’ve been raped by the teacher. Others are prohibited
by the stigma; the girls are doubly victimized by being ostracized. They often
become HIV positive as a result of rape, so their health is compromised.
Urinary tract infections and sexually transmitted diseases plague them. Without
an education, with poor health and no means of financial support, the girls
drift into poverty. Their childhood is over and they become the face the world
expects of Africapoor, unhealthy, and destitute.
Twenty-five percent of Kenyan girls aged twelve to twenty-four lose their
virginity due to rape. An estimated 70 percent never report it to the
authorities, and only one-third of the reported cases wind up in court. If the
prosecutor can prove that a girl was under the age of fifteen when she was
assaulted, the rapist’s sentence is life in prison. But there’s the rub. The
laws are not enforced, and rape is on the rise. More than 90 percent know their
assailant: fathers, grandfathers, uncles, teachers, prieststhe very people
assigned the task of keeping vulnerable children safe. And raping little girls
as a way of cleansing themselves from HIV/AIDS isn’t the only reason they act.
Says Hedaya Atupelye, a social worker I met at the shelter run by the Women’s
Rights Awareness Program in Nairobi, “Men think having sex with a little girl
is a sign of being wealthy and stylish. Some of these men are educated beyond
the graduate level, but they want to be the first to break the flower so they
seek out young girls.”
If it’s the breadwinner who’s guilty, the family will go hungry if he’s sent
to jail, so even a child’s mother will choose to remain silent. “It’s our
African culture,” says Kimanze. “No one wants to associate with one who’s been
raped or who’s lived in a shelter. We need to stand up and say the shame isn’t
ours, it’s yours.”
In Kenya, people can pay to have their police charges disappear. Or they can
bribe a police officer and no charges will be brought. If the case is taken
seriously, statements are taken, the child is sent to a doctor for examination,
and the file with the doctor’s report is returned to the police. “This is also
where money changes hands,” says Atupelye. “If a girl, or for that matter a woman,
goes to the police on her own, she is usually ridiculed and harassed. It was
suggested half a dozen years ago that the police create a gender desk where a
female would be safe in reporting the crime, but invariably the gender desk
isn’t manned and is covered with dust.”
“One of the challenges is that our culture doesnt 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 counseling 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
center. Those who go home come back once a month for six months and then every
three months for ongoing counseling 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 neighbor.
She was thirty-nine weeks pregnant when we met. When she talked about what had
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 centerpiece 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
counselors 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 decided to 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 were 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.” The feeling as they prepared to go to court was if they won, the
victory would be a success for every girl and woman in Africa, maybe even the
world.
On October 11, 2012, when the case went to court in Meru, the lawyers marched
through the streets from the shelter where the girls had been staying to the
courthouse. The kids wanted to march as well but were told their identity
needed to be protected and they must stay back at the shelter. Nothing doing,
they said. They marched beside their advocates to the courthouse chanting,
“Haki yangu,” the Kiswahili words for “I demand my rights.” With all the
hullaballoo on the street, the police at the court panicked and slammed the
gates shut as the girls approached. Nothing would stop them now. They climbed
onto the fence still calling, “Haki yangu,” and then they looked at one another
and started to laugh at the reversal in roles being played out in front of
them. “Look,” they called to each other, “these men who hurt us and made us
ashamed are scared of us now.” Soon enough the gates were opened and the girls
and their lawyers entered the court to begin the proceedings that would alter
their future.
There was something deliciously serendipitous about the power going off in
northern Kenya seven months later on May 27, 2013, just as Judge J. A. Makau
read his much-anticipated decision about this case that put rape in a glaring
spotlight, a case that could alter the status of women and girls in Kenya and
maybe all of Africa. When the lights came on, the judge in the high court in
Meru, Kenya, stated: “By failing to enforce existing defilement [rape] laws,
the police have contributed to the development of a culture of tolerance for
pervasive sexual violence against girl children and impunity.”
Guilty.
The earth shifted under the rights of girls and women that day; the girls
secured access to justice for themselves and legal protection from rape for all
10 million girls and women in Kenya.
Within forty-eight hours of the court decision, Fiona Sampson had heard from
half a dozen other countries that want the same action. But “the win is only as
good as the justice each girl gets,” says Marcia Cardamore, whose PeopleSense
Foundation was the major funder of the court case. She underscores the need for
close follow-up when she says, “We sent a letter to the court to give three
months’ notice to the police that we need to see results or we’ll take more
action, put more legal pressure on them. Without due process, we haven’t won
anything.”
Marcia is part of a new generation of women philanthropists who are determined
to make changes. She belongs to an organization called Women Moving Millions
that was founded in 2005 by Helen LaKelly Hunt and her sister, former U.S.
ambassador to Austria Swanee Hunt, who understood that moving the bar for
women’s equality rights meant raising the financial stakes. “I get the sense I
am not an outlier and there are other women in the world who want to overcome
these injustices,” says Marcia. Like everyone else involved with this case,
she’s watching and ready to act if justice is not forthcoming.
* * *
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 neighbors, 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.
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 turned 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 rumors 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 couldcell 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 anotherstill 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 gigglenervously. “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 oldand 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 counseling 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 neighbors 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.
Eva was canning tomatoes in a little stone pantry at the back of her house when
her door splintered open and twelve men rushed in, subdued her, and blindfolded
her. Hissing profanities in her ear, they bullied her out the door and beat her
about her legs as she stumbled along a path to a neighboring house, which an
extremist Serbian group known as the White Eagles had moved into just the week
before.
Born of Croatian parents, Eva knew every house in her home village, every
garden, the configuration of the town center, every bend of the creek that
flowed around it. Her lifelong best friend, Mira (her name has been changed),
was Serbian. As children, they spent their days chasing geese through the
middle of town to the Savak Creek. The game was always the same, the kids
shrieking wildly as they chased baby geese, with the big geese in hot pursuit
of the kids. Eva became a sprinter of such caliber that she was selected to
represent first her village, then her district in regional track meets.
As a young woman, she fell in love with a man named Bartol Penavic, and on
November 17, 1958, they were married. Together they raised three children, saw
them married and settled, and in time became grandparents. Life was good.
The countryside surrounding the village resembles a mural crayoned by
childrena clutch of clay-colored houses here, a barn there. On one side of the
village stretches a patchwork of rolling hills and thick oak forest so green
and purple and yellow that the colors could have been splashed there by
rainbows; on the opposite side is flat black farmland with hedgerows of
venerable old trees. The town itself is an antique treasure, a
three-hundred-year-old tableau of muted colors and softly worn edgesas
unlikely a setting for ugliness as could be imagined.
By the time spring began to blossom in 1991, Croatia had declared its
independence from Yugoslavia and there were rumblings of trouble. But no one
paid much attention. Eva said, “We’d lived togetherCroats and Serbs and
Muslimsfor fifty years. How could anyone change that?” Bartol had told her,
“Now is the time for us. Our children are settled. It’s time for us to enjoy
life.” They’d had their share of grief: Eva’s father had been killed during the
Second World War, and the uncle who assumed charge of her was appalled that she
dared to choose the man she would marry. Bartol’s family saw Eva as a peasant,
hardly a match for the son of the biggest landowner in the surrounding
villages. Despite the odds against them, their thirty-three-year marriage had
been rich with the promise of happily-ever-after.
Then in the fall, barricades appeared on the street. As a precaution, they sent
their daughter and two daughters-in-law away with the grandchildren to a safer
place. Soon enough, the village was under siege. Their sons managed to escape
as tanks rolled into town. Most villagers ran away; those who didn’t, including
Eva and Bartol, were rounded up and kept in detention. The interrogations and
beatings began. Bartol was beaten to death. Eva was sent home by the commander
and told to stay in the pantry at the back of the house.
Then the men came for her. They said they were taking her to another village
for interrogation, but she knew precisely where they were goingto the nearby
house where the White Eagles were headquartered. At the door, her captors
announced to the others, “Open upwe bring you the lioness.” Once she was
inside, they attacked her like a pack of jackals. Six men stripped her, then
raped her by turns, orally and vaginally. They urinated into her mouth. They
screamed that she was an old woman and if she was dry they’d cut her vagina
with knives and use her blood to make her wet. She was choking on semen and
urine and couldn’t breathe. The noise was horrendous as the six men kept
shrieking at her that there were twenty more men waiting their turn and calling
out, “Who’s next?” She was paralyzed with fear and with excruciating pain. The
assault continued relentlessly for three hours.
When they were finished, they cleaned themselves off with her underwear and
stuffed the fouled garments into her mouth, demanding she eat them. Then they
marched her outside into the garden. She could hear the village dogs barking.
She knew exactly where she was and she knew that the cornfield they were
pushing her toward was mined. Still blindfolded, she was thrust into the field
and told to run away. She stumbled through the slushy snow and sharp
cornstalks, and when she was far enough away from the house, she ripped the
blindfold off. Injuries from the rape slowed her down, but she was fast all the
same. Then she slipped in the muddy field and fell, and at exactly that moment,
bullets ripped over her head. She flattened herself into the mud as she heard
the cheers of the terrorists, who thought they had bagged another kill. She
waited a long time before getting to her feet and staggering on, and then
wandered for three more hours, trying to focus, to think of a way to survive.
Finally she stumbled into her neighbor’s garden.
Mira had been waiting by the window all night, knowing her childhood friend had
been taken away. When she heard the rustle in the garden, she rushed outside
with her husband, and together they gathered up their battered friend. Mira
bathed Eva, made her strong tea, and cradled her head while she vomited the
wretched contents of her stomach and then collapsed. The next morning, Eva left
the village. She didn’t come back until the conflict was over.
I visited her again during the war and after the war was over, as well.
Although she had reunited with her family and together they returned to Berak,
the men responsible for the crime were still roaming the streets of her
village, still gloating when Eva walked by. The last time I saw her, in 2005,
she told me she still wonders why she was spared. Cradling a new grandchild in
her arms, she repeated the comment she’d made when I left her in 1991: “I’ve
always wondered why God didn’t take me when he took my Bartol. I think I must
have been left here to be the witness for the women.”
It took me the usual three months to get the story to our readers. But after it
was published, they took up the torch for these women, and in the form of
thousands of letters to the editor, they demanded that the United Nations do
something about it.
This was rape as a form of genocide. In the rape camps, many Bosnian women
were assaulted until they became pregnant. The Serbian soldiers, known as
Chetniks, viewed systematic rape as a way of planting Serbian seeds into
Bosnian women and therefore destroying their ethnicity and culture. It wasn’t
enough that the women felt their families would reject them because they had
been raped, a shame to Islam. The women’s suffering was twofold, just like that
of the women of Rwanda and Congo in the years that would follow.
I often wondered what made Eva tell her story when others were too afraid to
speak. She told me that in her opinion, the vanquished need a face and a name.
Atrocities need a date and a time. Telling the truth is the only way to heal.
“It’s not enough to say, ‘You raped me,’” she said. “When I say it happened,
where it happened, and what my name is, it makes the rape something to be
responsible for.”
But even with worldwide attention on the mass rape of women in the Balkans, and
the enormous pity for them and fury for the perpetrators that resulted, the
stigma of being raped stuck to those women. One of the problems with stopping
the scourge of rape in zones of conflict is eradicating that stigma. What
everyone needs to understand is that these women and girls are just like
everybody’s mothers and daughters. They are women who had jobs to go to,
mortgages to pay; their children, just like the children of their rapists, just
like our children, also got croup and forgot to do their homework or ducked out
of doing family chores. They had friends over for dinner, took holidays, went
to the park, watched over their kids on the swings, the seesaws, the jungle
gyms.
But somehow when we hear stories like Eva’s or stories about the women in
Rwanda or Congo, we turn the victims and their attackers into “others.” We
listen to foolish remarks such as “They’ve been at this for centuries; let them
kill each other.” Or “They always treat their women like this; it’s not my
business.” Perhaps it’s a way of separating ourselves from something we feel
powerless to stop. But we do have power. We can write letters to the United
Nations to demand action. We can speak up when others dismiss these atrocities
as cultural or religious or worsenone of our business. It took a brave
collection of women from Bosnia to do something about rape. They took their dreadful
stories to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. They risked being
rejected by their families by telling their stories to the world. But they gave
the international tribunal the tools to do what courts and governments have
avoided throughout history. It made rape a war crime. In 1998, the Yugoslavia
War Crimes Tribunal, also in The Hague, made rape and sexual enslavement in the
time of war a crime against humanity. Only genocide is considered a more
serious crime.
* * *
I believe the shift in thinking about the role of women and the issues that
women deal with in the first decade of the third millennium will go down in
history as a turning point for civilization. Issues such as sexual assault that
had been buried, denied, and ignored suddenly began to be explored in
groundbreaking research papers and to figure in legislative reform.
Two books published in the spring of 2011 brought facts to light that might
have put the international community on alert against the mass rape in Bosnia,
Rwanda, and Congo. In one of them, At the Dark End of the Street, Danielle
McGuire exposed a secret that had been held for sixty-five years. It’s the
story of the iconic Rosa Parks, the tiny, stubborn woman who defied the Jim
Crow segregation rules in Montgomery, Alabama, when she refused to comply with
a white man’s order to move to the back of the bus. That solitary act of
defiance was the catalyst that in 1955 gave rise to the civil rights movement.
But McGuire’s research brings out a more astonishing piece of the story. For
ten years prior to her famous bus boycott, Rosa Parks was an antirape activist.
Parks began investigating rape in 1944, collecting evidence that exposed a
ritualized history of sexual assault against black women. That evidence was ignored.
All these decades later, McGuire is the first to tell what she calls “the real
storythat the civil rights movement is also rooted in African-American women’s
long struggle against sexual violence.” And she argues that given the role rape
played in the lives of womenthat it was ongoing, that it fueled the anger and
powered the movement as much as the Jim Crow laws didthe history of the civil
rights movement needs to be rewritten. She sees the infamous Montgomery bus
incident as an event that was as much about women’s rights as about civil
rights. As McGuire eloquently writes, “It was a women’s movement for dignity,
respect and bodily integrity.”
Gloria Steinem agrees. In a review of McGuire’s book, Steinem wrote, “Rosa
Parks’ bus boycott was the end of a long process that is now being taken
seriously. What Rosa Parks did was expose [to the leaders of the civil rights
movement] the truth about sexual assault as well as the widespread ugliness of
rape as a tool to repress, punish and control women during the civil rights
movement. Her work was meant to be a call for change in America. And yet until
the fall of 2011, hardly anyone even knew about it.” Why didn’t we know this
before? Why has so much history involving women been either ignored or suppressed?
How is it that the stunning facts Rosa Parks gathered were never published at
the time? And would the world have changed had the information been available
sooner?
The rape of black women as an everyday practice of white supremacy wasn’t the
only revelation in 2011. The other book, Sexual Violence against Jewish Women
during the Holocaust, is a collection of essays edited by Sonja Hedgepeth, a
professor at Middle Tennessee State University, and Rochelle Saidel, executive
director of the U.S.-based Remember the Women Institute. As I read the book, I
had to put it down from time to time to catch my breath. With all the
documentation and literature of the Holocaust, all the memorials and reminders,
how can it be that this appalling information about the gang-raping and sexual
abuse of Jewish women has been left out until now? No one knows how many women
and girls were sexually assaulted while they were isolated in ghettos or
incarcerated in concentration camps, and no one ever will. Some women were
murdered, and others chose to remain silent, as rape carries a stigma even in
the chambers of death: even though a woman was raped, she was “having sex” with
the enemy. The authors refer to this kind of shame as the most effective of all
social weapons. And they say that women caught in war zones invariably face “a
dilemma of fatal inclusion or unbearable ostracism.”
The men who raped these women in Nazi concentration camps were obsessive about
keeping recordsof inhuman medical experiments performed, of the elimination of
men, women, and children in the gas chambers or by shooting or hanging. But
they kept no list of who was raped. There is not a word in the vast accountings
of the Nazi regime about the sexual assault of women and girls. The story is
simply missing. Seen as sexual objects as well as a biological danger by the
Nazis, Jewish women were the target of sexual depravity and rape. And yet their
story was suppressed. As the essays in this important book show, the survivors
shared details before the trials at Nuremburg, but not a word was spoken during
the trials.
In an interview with me, Gloria Steinem said, “The judges at Nuremberg didn’t
want crying women in the courtroom. And some Jewish historians didn’t want to
admit their women had been sexually assaulted and/or denied it had happened.
It’s taken sixty years for that to come out.” She believes that the floodgates
began to open when rape became a war crime and told me that women owe a debt of
gratitude to Navi Pillay, the judge who made that historic ruling at the
International Criminal Court. Because of her, and the recent work of other
scholars and activists in the public sphere, the crime of rape is no longer
seen as either inevitable or the fault of women.
“Think about Bosnia, Rwanda, and Congo,” Steinem said. “If we had acknowledged
what happened to Jewish women in the Holocaust or black women in the civil
rights movement, we’d have been better prepared for what happened in Bosnia,
Rwanda, and Congo. It’s not about war, it’s about genocide. To make the right
sperm occupy the wrong womb is an inevitable part of genocide. The publication
of these books is a warning to the world that sexual violence is a keystone to
genocide, and they make it clear that today there’s a shift in the sense that
rape is now noticed and even taken seriously. That wasn’t true before.”
As the researcher Brigitte Halbmayr points out in Sexual Violence against
Jewish Women during the Holocaust, “Unlike the cases in Rwanda and former
Yugoslavia, where rape was used as a strategy of war, sexualized violence was
not an inherent part of the genocidal process during the Holocaust. Instead, it
was part of the continuum of violence that resulted from genocide. Rape was not
an instrument of genocide, but was the byproduct of intentional annihilation.”
Like the judges at Nuremburg, film directors and publishers have hesitated to
expose the brutal truth about rape. But that too is changing. Lynn Nottage was
awarded the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play, aptly titled Ruined,
which chronicles the plight of women in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The Pulitzer citation hailed Ruined as “a searing drama set in chaotic Congo
that compels audiences to face the horror of wartime rape and brutality while
still finding affirmation of life and hope amid hopelessness.” The play tells
the story of Mama Nadi, the proprietor of a local establishment that acts both
as a shelter for women who’ve been damaged or “ruined” by the civil war and a
bar/brothel for the nationalist and rebel soldiers who keep it raging on.
Always the shrewd businesswoman, Nadi sides neither with the women she shelters
nor with her militant patrons until the war outside closes in and there are
choices to make and truths to face.
Two years later, a film called Incendies (Scorched) became another example of
the new truth-telling. Adapted from a play by Wajdi Mouawad, a
Lebanese-Canadian writer, and directed by the Quebec filmmaker Denis
Villeneuve, it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language
Film in 2011, even though it takes the audience where few have dared to go
before with a story in which twins fulfill their mother’s dying wish. They
travel to the Middle East, where they discover they were born of rape by the
man who ran the prison where their mother was incarcerated. That man turns out
to be their brother as well as their father. It is a searing and courageous
tale of the humiliation of rape, the will to survive, and the scorched-earth
patterns of rapists.
Whether committed inside or outside a war zone, rape punishes women twice.
First they suffer the physical abuse and then the never-ending memory and
shame, which threaten and retreat like tidal surges throughout the rest of
their lives. Justice can only come from acknowledgment and the conviction of
the perpetrator.
That’s what the girls in Kenya were counting on. And when the judge vindicated
them in May 2013, magistrates from around the world were buffeted by the hot
winds of change that blew out of Africa.
Copyright © 2013, 2014 by Sally Armstrong