I love being in San Francisco, and especially living in Sausalito – in the area called the banana belt due to it being the sunny side of the city – and feeling so happy to be near water and trees and a yoga studio and hanging out near the boats.  I’ve now found a nearby cafe called ‘Fred’s’ (“been here since 1966”) where I can read the Sunday New York Times over a slow ‘eggs and many cups of tea’ breakfast.

And yet the front page of The New York Times, with its story of a 16 year old Dalit girl in India being mob raped, is a stark reminder of what’s happening to women and girls in the world and what’s at stake as a result.  This girl did not report her rape and it was only due to her rapists crowing about their conquest via images on their mobile phones that her father saw them and committed suicide and the Dalit community rose up in response.  It’s hard to know how much this communal response is due to a father’s shame or to a violation of a girl’s human rights and having her integrity and innocence stripped away.

In the state of Haryana in India there were twelve instances of rape in the last month and 367 in the first six months of this year, and these are only the reported ones. Another Dalit girl recently set herself on fire and died after she was gang-raped. This girl knew, as does every girl, that if you are a woman or girl who is poor then it is unlikely that you will see justice done. And if you are both poor and a Dalit, (traditionally regarded as ‘untouchable’, the lowest caste in India) then the chances of justice are almost non-existent.  Even now, with the Dalit community mobilizing in response to what happened to the 16 year old girl, who said “I wanted to study to be a doctor” she says now she does not think it will be possible to now study to become a doctor.  Perhaps it will be possible for her though, with the help of the global community responding and laws changing.

In Haryana the ratio of women to men is 833 women to every 1000 men.  A decade ago social analysts predicted an increase in sexual assault and violence on women due to this sexual ratio imbalance. This factor is exacerbated by the continued dominance of caste-based khap panchayats, consisting exclusively of men, who are the cultural lawmakers regardless of the laws of the land.

These rules include special rules for women such as how to dress, behave and conduct themselves. This includes an inherent belief that all girls should be married by 16 years even though official law sets the minimum age for marriage at 18 years. The implication from the panchayats is that girls who do not marry by 16 years can expect to be raped. Thus both caste and gender render Dalit girls as being particularly vulnerable with the criminal system utterly failing these girls. Most of the time Dalit females will say they can’t go to the police due to police stations not being friendly places.

The progress that has been made has been achieved as a result of three decades of campaigns by women’s groups achieving important changes in the rape law and in the rules governing the police in their dealings with women. However, it is only those women who are organized, and have the backing of a collective to fight the system, that are able to respond effectively.

Internationally, movements are organizing too.  A newly named Girls Not Brides global campaign, supported by many organizations, attracted $25 million in funding from The Ford Foundation recently in order to end the practice of child marriage.

Here in the US, young women born into more fortunate circumstances, and who go on to a college education, perhaps at one of the highly regarded colleges such as Amherst, also face the possibility of being raped.  The likelihood is aided, in this case, by the cultural laws of the campus where bureaucratic attitudes and red tape have silenced women who have been raped and allowed some to end up in psychiatric wards while their rapists graduate with honors.  The latest Amherst rape victim to speak out, Angie Epifano, ended up withdrawing from her studies and going to Europe.

Epifano’s story was a story familiar to many college students. A study by the Center for Public Integrity found that 95 percent of rapes on college campus go unreported to an official. Meanwhile, a 2010 Boston Globe investigative report of Massachusetts schools that included Salem State College, MIT, Northeastern, Tufts and Amherst from 2003−2008 revealed Justice Department documents of 240 reported cases of sexual assault. Out of those 240 reported cases, only four students were expelled from their respective institutions, according to the Globe’s report.

Before Epifano’s story became public, an underground fraternity at Amherst had printed T-shirts featuring a cartoon of a bruised, bikini-clad woman roasting like a pig over an open fire.   Epifano’s experience, when she finally reported the rape, was of being sidelined by the very people she was told she could trust.  This included a social worker, a counselor and a college administrator.  Epifano was told that it was too late to seek a disciplinary hearing because she had no physical evidence and she couldn’t change dorms because everything was full.  She was asked if she was sure it was rape and then she was sent to the nearest hospital and encouraged not to return. It was while in this psychiatric ward that she finally told her story of being raped at a group therapy session.  She wrote later:

“Silence has the rusty taste of shame,” a fellow survivor once wrote.
I had been far too silent, far too ashamed.
That night I told them everything.
For the first time I told my story and I was not ashamed.
Later that night, as I lay in bed—still in an adrenaline induced state of wakefulness—I heard my roommate whisper my name, and then, a question.
“Are you still awake?”
“Yes.”
“Thought so…”
A long pause. She’d been in the meeting.
What was she thinking? What would she say?

“I just wanted to tell you, I…I know how it feels. My uncle raped me when I was 15. The police never arrested him. Rape “wasn’t their top priority.” It still hurts…You’re incredibly brave to talk about it…I rarely do.”
She was 42 years old.
I did not sleep. That night I realized that from then on I could not stay silent—if not for myself, then for my roommate.”

When Epifano went public with her story, and shared that “silence has the rusty taste of shame,” dozens of other students came forward with similar stories and hundreds more rallied in support of these young women. It is this momentum from these young women speaking out and mobilizing that will likely be the catalyst for real change to a system that has silenced them. Stories of how they were silenced by college administrators ranged from “Are you sure it was rape? He seems to think it was a little more complicated.” to “Why don’t you take a year off, get a job at Starbucks, and come back after he’s graduated?”

Also of import are the questions of those students who were there at the time and did nothing, such as Dee Mandiyan who wrote in response to Epifano’s piece:

Guy and girl alone in her room.
Guy doesn’t listen to the word “No.”
Girl is brave enough to report it.
Campus restraining order issued.
The girl leaves Amherst for two years.
The guy goes on to study abroad, write a senior thesis, graduate on time and with an excellent job lined up.
No one really knows what happened to the girl.
I’m telling you these things because when I read Angie Epifano’s statement, I was overwhelmed by how alone she was.

How she had no one on her side until she was in the Ward and lucked into a social worker with a conscience.  Amherst’s institutional response to Ms. Epifano was–and is – abhorrent…For a woman to be raped by a man and then raped by an institution whose sole priority seems to be self-preservation is the epitome of inhumane.

And then they locked her up… So here is my question: where were we?

Once she finally could speak about it–and how could she go a year without anyone around her seeing that something was wrong?–where were we?
How could we let her get committed by that institution?
How could we allow one of our own to just disappear for five days in the middle of May?
We never speak about any of it.
We never hold each other accountable.
Shame on Amherst.  Shame on us.”

In a special trauma ward in Birmingham, England, Malala Yousafzai, the 15 year old Pakistani girl who was shot by the Taliban for championing her right, and that of all girls, to get an education, is slowly recovering.  Her dream is to be a politician and she will realize this dream only if she is protected from the Taliban which still intends to kill her.

Malala’s father, Ziauddin Yousafzai said “They wanted to kill her. But she fell temporarily. She will rise again. She will stand again,” he told reporters, his voice breaking with emotion.  Malala has become a powerful symbol of resistance to the Taliban’s efforts to deny women education. Public fury in Pakistan over her shooting has put pressure on the military to mount an offensive against the radical Islamist group.

“When she fell, Pakistan stood and the world rose,” Malala’s father told a press conference. “This is a turning point. In Pakistan, for the first time, all political parties, Urdus, Christians, Sikhs, all religions prayed for my daughter.”  He added, “She is not just my daughter, she is everybody’s daughter.”

Malala’s father is standing strong with his daughter in her fight for an education and in facing down the violent acts of the Taliban.  In the Democratic Republic of Congo, another man, Denis Mukwege, a doctor, renowned for his brave acts in supporting female rape victims, has just survived an assassination attempt. Four gunmen forced the gynaecologist out of his car on arrival back at his home in Bukavu and shot dead a security guard who tried to intervene. The doctor ducked when the armed men fired at him, before driving off in his car.

It is clear that this attempt is directly related to Dr. Mukwege’s advocacy work highlighting violence and rape in Eastern Congo including at the UN last month.  More than 500,000 women have been raped and 6 million killed in 16 years of violence in the mineral rich North and South Kivu Provinces of the Congo.

Speaking about the attack, Susannah Sirkin, Deputy Director for Physicians for Human Rights said “Thousands of Congolese women and girls put at risk following incidents of sexual violence have depended on Dr. Mukwege for their lives and well-being.”  Men such as Dr. Mukwege are speaking out in order to mobilize for action to stop women being raped, in this case securing the mandate of the UN troops in the DRC to be stepped up so they “can do all that is necessary to protect citizens” while also working to strengthen institutions to respond.

Meanwhile, back on US soil, we heard Indiana Republican Senate candidate Richard Mourdock say in a debate with Democratic Senate candidate, Joe Donnelly in reference to a woman being raped and getting pregnant, “I struggled with it myself a long time but I came to realize that life is a gift from God, that I think even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape that it is something that God intended to happen.”

Mourdock’s stance on abortion came after comments by Republican Representative Todd Akin of Missouri, a Senate candidate earlier this year when he postulated that women’s bodies could mysteriously prevent pregnancy in cases of “legitimate rape,” whatever that means. Former Senator Rick Santorum, when he campaigned for the Republican presidential nomination, said if his daughter was raped and impregnated he would advise her “to make the best out of a bad situation.” “I think that the right approach is to accept this horribly created, in the sense of rape, but nevertheless, in a very broken way, a gift of human life and accept what God is giving to you,” was his advice to victims.  The firestorm that erupted in response to these comments, and in support of what we stand for – women’s human rights and women’s right to make our own decisions about our bodies –  may yet determine the outcome of this US Presidential election.

I reflect on all this, from my quiet and lovely space in Sausalito. And I’m more convinced than ever of the importance of investing in women’s rights organizations and movements in order to strengthen women’s collective leadership to advance women’s human rights.

The message from these stories is that we are stronger together. Movements build social change.  Women’s collective leadership and movement building helps to drive and secure social change. Movements that are led by the brave, brave, brave Malala Yousafzai’s and Angie Epifano’s of this world and supported by men of exceptional courage such as Ziauddin Yousafzai and Denis Mukwege.

Leaving Fred’s, my new favorite coffee shop, I returned home to a hula hoop I’d recently bought myself to reinstate that mind-to-hip meditation I began when I was a girl.  I spun my hoop down to the shared garden space outside my apartment and, as I was practicing, a girl in red Dorothy shoes ran over to watch.

‘Can I do that?” she asked, her eyes sparkling.  “Sure you can,” I said smiling and handing her the hoop. And soon she was wheeling and flowing and laughing with such grace and confidence that I hoped she never had cause to falter and lose that beautiful, fluid sense of life in all its possibilities by virtue of being a woman.

 

Jane Sloane