What do we do when the scope of violence against women is so unimaginable, so extreme and enormous, that it is beyond our vision? Beyond our realm of thinking?

How is it possible that we live in a world where one doctor has treated 25,000 victims of rape for mutilation and suffering?

For those of us who are safe from the world of the Congo, who are unable to go there, to physically help the thousands of women who are victims of rape as a tactic of war, we read about it. We learn about it. We bear witness to it. So that we can help in other ways. So that we can stop it from ever happening in other places, in future wars. To make rape as a tactic of war NOT ACCEPTABLE. ANYWHERE.

This past weekend an incredible film was screened at the St. John's International Women's Film Festival. In The Greatest Silence of All: Rape in the Congo ,  filmmaker Lisa F. Jackson, a rape survivor herself, goes to the Democratic Republic of Congo to tell the stories of the thousands of women who have been tortured, mutilated, kidnapped and raped by both foreign militia and members of the Congolese army.

Jackson shares her own story with the many survivors, who in turn share their stories with the world. She gives political context through speaking with doctors, militia, foreign peacekeepers. She interviews members of the Congolese army, admitting to the many rapes they themselves have committed.

I left the film without words. My soul breaking for the atrocities inflicted upon these women. Experiences too unimaginable for words, for description - yet these women shared them for the world.

In today's Globe and Mail, foreign correspondant Stephanie Nolen shares the stories of the Congo with Canadian readers. Dr. Denis Mukwege, one of the world's leading experts on how to "fix" victims of rape - physically, of course, himself has seen over 25,000 women.

I am glad that these women have such support in such a place. And yet, I want more. It is a fix to the symptom, not the cause. Its good, but its not enough.

What can we do?

What are you going to do?

This year, V-Day is making its spotlight campaign on the women of the Congo. The Spotlight, "Stop Raping Our Greatest Resource: Power to Women and Girls of Democratic Republic of Congo" will be worldwide at V-Day events this year. Check out the site, host a Congo teach-in, read letters from Eve Ensler as she reports direct from the Congo. Do something. The title of the Spotlight Campaign is great - women are our greatest resources. Life-giving, nurturing, yet desecrated each and every day - this is your chance, your opportunity to do something.

Even if its just reading about their stories from the safety of your home.

Do something. 

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Peg Tittle said:

War rape is not just an enthusiastic spillover of violence and aggression. The act of sexual intercourse is too specific, too far removed from the other acts of wartime violence and aggression. Shooting a person twenty-five times instead of once or twice would be such a spillover; forcing your penis or something else into a woman's vagina is not. Furthermore, war rape is often not a spontaneous, occasional occurrence; apparently it has been quite premeditated and systematic. And it's not, or not just, a matter of ethnic cleansing. If men truly wanted to eradicate the other culture, (and if they believed ethnicity was genetic), they'd just kill the women along with the men. (Women are killed, but as I understand it, they're usually raped first.) (Or, sometimes, after.) (And men are castrated, but not nearly as often as women are raped.) And if they truly wanted to increase their own numbers, they'd hang around and see that the kid reached maturity. (Raped women are sometimes kept prisoner until the child is born—but unless the kid is subjected to specific and exclusive cultural conditioning, well, how is their purpose achieved? They'd have to look after the kids themselves for ten years.) (Which is unlikely.) And it's not, or not just, a property crime against the enemy. If men sought merely to destroy their enemy's property, they'd, again, simply kill their women and children, along with their livestock, before or after they burned their houses. (Unless, of course, they wanted to confiscate their property—in which case, they'd enslave the women rather than rape them.)

March 01, 2010 | url

Peg Tittle said:

So what is it? What can explain this peculiar practice of male soldiers forcing sexual intercourse with enemy civilian women? Some insight can be gained if we consider that for men, sexual intercourse is an act of conquest. But then we must ask, since one army of men conquers another, why don't the soldiers rape each other as an act of conquest? Perhaps men are so afraid of being considered homosexual, they rape the enemy women instead of the enemy men. (So only homophobia prevents men from raping enemy men? Note the vested interest women have, then, in discouraging homophobia: maybe then men would rape each other instead of us.) Or perhaps the conquest involved is not that of one person over another, but that of one person over another's property—and women are men's property. And as long as conquest, rather than destruction, is the point, the property will be occupied, not destroyed. And in sexual intercourse, men literally occupy women's bodies—they thus occupy the enemy's property. But all of this is nothing new. One might persist, however, and ask how men can continue to regard women as property when legal and economic conditions no longer support that interpretation. The answer lies in attending not to the ownership part of property, but to the inanimate part of property: to be property is to be a thing. Men do not, clearly, consider us equals—otherwise, we would be the enemy, not the enemy's property. And they'd kill us as they do the men (or they'd rape the men as they do us) (well, except for the homophobia bit). They don't even consider us inferior human beings, say, as children. Children are either spared or ignored. (Or, increasingly, drafted.) We aren't even considered (non-human) animals. They too are either spared or ignored. (Or just killed.) We belong to some special category—that of cunt: we are a vagina, and sometimes a uterus; we are a sexual body part, a sort of subhuman thing. Rape is not so much impersonal as apersonal. It's no coincidence that one protests rape by claiming the characteristics of personhood: you're hurting me! (sentience); I have a name! (identity); I have a life! (interests). (One might wonder how the husbands and fathers can renounce their raped wives and daughters—don't they recognize it was against their will? But of course not: subhumans don't have will, volition.) Greer once said something like women have no idea how much men hate them. To be hated would be a step up. I say women have no idea how much men fail to see them as anything but their sex. On the basketball court, playing with a bunch of high school boys, a pick by me is not just a pick: it's a pick by a girl, and so it elicits extra humiliation and anger, it elicits shame and rage. And the next time I set a pick, the boy aggressively ploughs me out of the play. In the university classroom, teaching to male students, a critique of an argument is not just a critique: it's a challenge to one's masculinity, and so it elicits strong defensive action. Complaints are made to the Dean. And a suggestion to a colleague, a male colleague, is not just a suggestion: it's a woman telling you what to do, and so at best it's not taken seriously. (At worst, it too is taken as a challenge.) It's certainly not accepted. Thus our agency in, our interaction with, half the world is denied. Men's insistent perception of us as female limits us, because to be female precludes being a person. Such a perception may indeed be irrational—and the consequent behaviour, such as rape, may indeed be primitive and/or pathological. But it is their perception, and women would be wise to understand that. (Even more wise would be the men who understand it: for enlightenment and/or imprisonment is surely not going to be brought about by anything we subhumans do.)

March 01, 2010 | url

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