Rape Victim Sentenced -- For Being Raped

raped and initially sentenced for having sex out of wedlock

by Jack Gerson

It doesn't get much worse than this. Last week, a 24-year-old Norwegian woman who had been raped in Dubai by a co-worker was sentenced to 16 months in prison for having sex outside of marriage. I am not making this up.

We need to condemn the legally sanctioning of rape in Dubai and beyond that the  generalized oppression and victimization of women there. We need to condemn the mass gang rapes in Tahrir and elsewhere in Egypt, and support the heroic Egyptian women who have banded together to fight them. But  it's not just a problem in Dubai, nor the entire Arabian peninsula, nor Egypt. There are the out of control gang rapes in India and elsewhere in South Asia -- as discussed on this blog; see

http://weknowwhatsup.blogspot.com/2013/01/mass-protests-against-sexual-violence.html

and

http://weknowwhatsup.blogspot.com/2013/01/arundhati-roy-on-rape-in-india.html


There are the gang rapes carried out for years by Central African militias and armies, and those by militias on all sides of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. And then there's the Catholic Church's enforcement of marriage as legalized rape in Ireland, tellilng generations of Irish women it was their religious duty to endure sexual slavery. (For those who haven't yet read John Throne's brilliant novel on this subject, The Donegal Woman, I urge you to do so.)

We can't help but notice that the ruling families in Dubai -- and Saudi Arabia, and the other emirates wallow in oil-drenched opulence, control multinational construction conglomerates, own world-class football (aka soccer) teams, etc.  They are "our" allies. The enlightened democracies of North America and Western Europe will not lift a finger to change that awful situation.

But it's too easy to look at this, say "Shame! Shame!", and look past what's going on right in our own backyard. And this reinforces a smug complacency and thus a tacit complicity in the shameful prevalance of sexual violence against women right here in the U.S.:

The epidemic of rape in the military -- it has taken decades for this scandal to break, and still nothing concrete has been done about it.  Gang rapes and all manner of sexual baiting in high schools across the country -- winked at for years and years ("boys will be boys"). Sexual harassment on the job from bosses and managers. As Sana Saaed explained in a Guardian op ed piece that we reprinted  earlier this month, focusing on mob sexual violence in Egypt, India, and Africa is too often used to avoid looking at the sexual violence in our own society -- see

http://weknowwhatsup.blogspot.com/2013/07/sana-saeed-guardian-how-we-other-sexual.html

So yes, we need to massively publicize and protest the atrocity that continues to be perpetrated on the Norwegian rape victim in Dubai. But that must lead us to deepen our resolve to expose the truth about the prevalance of sexual violence in the U.S., and to put an end to the system that produces and reproduces it.

Note: Just as I was about to post this piece, dispatches from Dubai came across the web reporting that Dubai's ruler has pardoned the Norwegian rape victim. Some of these stories are accompanied by a video of a visibly relieved victim smiling and even laughing about the news.  "All's well that ends well", or so CNN et al would have us believe.  But what's really going on here? Well, Dubai is a global tourist resort, a vacation spot for many Europeans, and the news that they can be jailed for casual sex and will be jailed if they're raped is exceedingly bad for the tourist trade. The uproar around this case was enough to make Dubai's bosses realize that. We are very glad that the Norwegian rape victim is now free. But nothing much has really changed. Not in Dubai, where those laws are still on the books and where women -- especially domestic servants imported from Asia -- remain prey to sexual violence. Nor elsewhere around the world. It's urgent to oppose it everywhere, and it's critical that we understand that the fight against sexual violence and oppression, like the fight against racism, must be in the forefront of the fight to transform society.

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Sana Saeed, Guardian: How We 'Other' Sexual Assault to Ignore Our Own Norms of Abuse

by Jack Gerson

We reprint a Guardian op ed by Sana Saeed that pulls no punches about how rape is used to terrorize women in Egypt, and how mob sexual violence in particular is an open tool used to discourage women from taking part in demonstrations and other political activity. But she also takes on the racist and chauvinist media propaganda prevalent in the West that sexual violence against women is mainly attributable to religious and cultural roots: Islam, Hinduism, Middle East, Indian subcontinent. But as she discusses, Egypt and India have no monopoly on sexual violence -- we need look no further than the U.S. (especially, but not only, the U.S. military).

How We 'Other' Sexual Assault to Ignore Our Own Norms of Abuse by Sana Saeed (Guardian, 7/7/13)

On 30 June, as “the Coup That Must Not Be Mentioned” was being celebrated in Tahrir Square, Cairo, news of over 80 reports of mob sexual violence and harassment emerged as a reminder of an ugly undercurrent behind the two-and-a-half-year-long anti-regime uprising. Sexual harassment and violence in Egypt is a daily occurrence – an epidemic, even – with 99.3% of women (pdf) claiming to have suffered some form of it.

Mob sexual violence, however, carries a certain brand of particularity as a near-explicit political tool used to discourage women, who make up nearly half of the total population, from attending demonstrations. Maria S Muñoz, co-founder and director of the anti-sexual assault initiative Tahrir Bodyguard, traces the advent and use of organized mob sexual assaults to the days of Mubarak, pointing to the 2005 assault of journalist Nawal Ali by hired “thugs” during a demonstration. Despite being aware of the risk of attending political demonstrations, women, Muñoz notes, “have continued to share the public space in protests, becoming an essential part of the opposition’s voice and presence.”

The culture of sexual violence and harrassment, in Egypt, has received considerable media attention, often highlighting the efforts of groups such as Operation Anti-Sexual Harassment/Assault, HarassMap and Tahrir Bodyguard as people-powered initiatives tackling sexual violence and harassment head-on. Despite this, it is apparently still difficult to have an honest discussion over why it happens.

On 5 July, US author Joyce Carol Oates (whom I know primarily from her having never written this) decided to join in with the sea of insta-Egypt Twitter experts and opined:

If 99.3% of women reported being treated equitably, fairly, generously–it would be natural to ask: what’s the predominant religion?
— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) July 5, 2013

Despite the brevity of “Oatesgate”, the rhetorical question of a well-respected literary figure highlights popular characterizations of sexual violence and harassment when it takes place elsewhere. Rarely does sexual violence and harassment in our own societies – as it is perpetrated, prosecuted and cultured – allow the sort of cultural reductionism that seems to come with ease when sexual violence is associated with “the other”.

When a 23-year-old physiotherapy intern is brutally gang-raped and beaten in Delhi, we speak of “India’s woman problem”; when an incapacitated 16-year-old student is raped, photographed and filmed for six hours by peers – who share the images on social media – the incident is treated as an isolated act of unfortunate deviance and not part and parcel of a larger endemic culture that normalizes rape and the appropriation of women’s bodies as public property.

Child groomers of Muslim and South Asian backgrounds become cultural ambassadors raised on a steady diet of “savage” notions of sex embedded in anti-white biases and misogyny. Revered coaches and university administrations hiding decades of child sex abuse, on the other hand, become their own victims.

Thus there are no protests, no calls of a “woman problem”, no “natural” inquiries into the predominant religion when a country has ranked 13th in the world for rape, 10th for rapes per capita (pdf) and where 26,000 military service members reported sexual assault in 2012 alone. There are no popular anthropological undertakings by stiff-haired anchors of the inner secrets and dark forces of American culture, religion and society. No white American woman asks why the white American male hates “us”.

None of this is to provide a level playing field for discussing sexual violence. It is to highlight how understanding of sexual violence is reliant on how it is reported and how this, in turn, is reliant on who is involved. In the case of Egypt, the extent to which there is sexual harassment and violence is abysmal and even unique in how it occurs. Yet, this violence did not emerge overnight, nor does it occur in a political and socio-economic vacuum. It is the result of decades of state, legal and political decay. It is the result of a state that itself has created a culture of acceptability of violence and torture, often sexual, inside its own walls.

In the explicit act of violating bodily sovereignty, there is an active search for the conquest of power and control in a space where these have become vulnerable. This requires no sermon, book or belief to legitimize it; it only needs submission.

To read this article on the Guardian website, please go to:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jul/07/sexual-assault-norms-abuse/print 

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