About a week ago, I bore earwitness to a very strange statement from a fellow student who claimed that women in the United States won all of their rights (I am assuming he meant, generally, social equality with men) when they refused to go back into the kitchen after playing an integral role in the Second World War. To put this into context, we were discussing the way in which Muslim women often emerge from the harem (only in the most conservative homes is this still used, from my understanding) during pivotal revolutionary conflicts only to assume their gender roles after the conflict is over. An important historical example of this movement occurred in the Algerian Revolution. In addition to this conflict, more contemporary examples are the conflicts in Syria, Libya, and Egypt.
I was shocked at my classmates comment about this supposed equality of women in contemporary society, but I was more shocked when our professor began to elucidate just how difficult it is to be a woman in many parts of the middle east. For women, even those who are not Muslim, it is seen as indecent to be seen looking into the eyes of a man, even in public. It is indecent to be seen out without another female overseer to corroborate that nothing indecent happened. The list goes on and on.
All of these details are quite shocking; however, things become much more grotesque when it comes to rape. Apparently, if a female member of the family (wife, or daughter) is raped, this brings shame upon the entire group. The only way to efface this shame is to kill the woman in question.
During revolutionary periods, the anti-revolutionary leader often sends the military through towns and villages that are home to revolutionaries. The soldiers are told to rape the women and leave them alive. Once word gets to the head of the house who is at the front, he will immediately drop everything he is doing for the war effort and "take care of his home." This happened in Libya, and Iraq, and is now happening in Syria. It was enough for the military to pass through a town to put doubt on to the legitimacy of female family members.
I wanted to post this not necessarily to pose a question to the class, or to make a philosophical assessment of this situation. I simply wanted to reiterate a series of anecdotes that were passed onto me. Even writing this now, I cannot, cannot, digest this series of events. My eyes are wide.
Oh, and the cherry on top: An Iraqi women was beaten to death in her California home last week for being Muhajiba, or someone who wears the hijab. Her murderers were nice enough to clear up the motive for us: she was a terrorist, of course.
Earlier in March, a rape victim in Morocco was ordered to marry her rapist. Last semester, I was in a course where we discussed rape as a tool of war, specifically in the context of the former Yugoslavia, where women were raped to produce a new generation of "pure" sons (the father's contribution outweighed the mother's ethnic/religious origins), to destroy communities (their husbands would, depending on the situation, abandon them or they would be ostracized), or for a wide variety of other reasons. The rape was systematic; soldiers testified about the rape or we'll shoot you scenarios of the war. Here at home, rape statistics are mortifying. Every year at Vagina Monologues, there's a reminder of the number of people who have been assaulted or know someone who has been assaulted. All that is to say, yes, I agree that it's completely horrifying.
ReplyDeleteAdditionally, it makes me reach back to the conversation that we had in class about the unique qualities of rape as a violent crime and to the similar discussion in Queer Theory. It seems like one way to make rape less powerful would be to reclassify it to address the shame it puts on women, but how do we do that without invalidating the feelings of those women, which come from our constantly culturally reinforced ideas about rape, sex, and responsibility in the crime? How do we make rape less powerful while respecting the experiences of survivors of rape?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/14/amina-filali-morocco-rape_n_1345171.html