Nicholas Kristof, Tamara Kreinin, Executive Director of Women and Population at the United Nations Foundation, Adrienne Germain, President of the International Women's Health Coalition, and Sheryl WuDunn.
Yesterday afternoon, I had the pleasure of attending a lunch co-hosted by the UN Foundation and the International Women’s Health Coalition. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn were speaking on their new book, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, which I blogged enthusiastically about several weeks ago. The audience was an interesting and impassioned group of women and men from different walks of life and diverse backgrounds; some were donors, some had decades of experience in NGOs devoted to women’s empowerment and others, like myself, were getting our feet wet, there to listen and learn.
If you pay attention to the coverage of Darfur and Sudan, you may be wondering: what happened to it? If you’re a follower of the adage “no news is good news,” it would seem that the millions of women stuck in Internally-Displaced Persons (IDP) camps have begun to return home and rebuild their lives, or that they no longer suffer from eminent threat of rape and gender-based violence. This could not be further from the truth, and the risk of sexual violence may grow as international attention wanes. In Half the Sky, Kristof and WuDunn address this tendency to cover the “splash” rather than a more sustained kind of suffering:
When a prominent dissident was arrested in China, we would write a front-page article; when 100,000 girls were routinely kidnapped and trafficked into brothels, we didn’t even consider it news. Partly that is because we journalists tend to be good at covering events that happen on a particular day, but we slip at covering events that happen every day – such as the quotidian cruelties inflicted on women and girls. (xiv)
Due in large part to the shame and stigma attached to sexual assault, we do not have clear numbers regarding how many women and girls have been victims of gender-based violence in the IDP camps which litter the landscape of Sudan and even beyond its borders. But we do have thousands of stories. Kristof, who has visited Sudan at least ten times, is the most followed of the handful of American journalists who continue to cover the crisis in Darfur and, increasingly, Southern Sudan. Though little of Half the Sky discusses the situation in Sudan explicitly, much of the book is devoted to the overlap between national or regional conflict and women’s insecurity. Clearly, while our focus at Save Darfur is centered around the conflict in Sudan, the instability and pervasive campaigns of sexual violence in neighboring Chad and Congo have a tremendous effect on the area’s prospects for enduring peace.
One of the highlights of Half the Sky, particularly for Darfur activists, is WuDunn and Kristof’s detailed attention to rape as a tool of genocide:
In short, rape becomes a tool of war in conservative societies precisely because female sexuality is so sacred…in Darfur, it gradually became clear that the Sudanese-sponsored Janjaweed militias were seeking out and gang-raping women of three African tribes, then cutting off their ears or otherwise mutilating them to mark them forever as rape victims. To prevent the outside world from knowing, the Sudanese government punished women who reported rapes or sought medical treatment. When one student, Hawa, was gang-raped and beaten by the Janjaweed outside Kalma camp, her friends carried her to a clinic run by Doctors of the World, an aid group. Two French nurses immediately began caring for her injuries, but several truckloads of police stormed the clinic, pushed aside the French nurses who tried valiantly to resist, and burst in on Hawa. They dragged her out of the clinic and carried her off to prison, where she was chained to a cot by an arm and a leg.
The crime? Fornication, for by seeking treatment, she was acknowledging that she had engaged in sex before marriage, and she did not provide the mandatory four adult male Muslim eyewitnesses to prove that it was rape. Sudan also blocked aid groups from bringing into Darfur postexposure prophylaxis kits, which can greatly reduce the risk that a rape victim will be infected with HIV. (83)
For the estimated one in four women worldwide who experience rape in their lives, the assault itself can be beyond painful, emotionally and physically. The added insult of disbelief, harassment and imprisonment that is common in Sudan and IDP camps beyond is nearly too much to believe and certainly too much to stand for. Kristof and WuDunn both suggested during the discussion at lunch that, while NGOs had been talking to each other about these issues for some time, they wrote Half the Sky because they deeply wanted the issue of protecting and empowering women worldwide to reach beyond the choir. WuDunn emphasized that the tipping point cannot be reached until there is a broad coalition of ordinary people who are willing to fight against “sex trafficking and forced prostitution; gender-based violence, including honor killings and mass rape; and maternal mortality, which still needlessly claims one woman a minute” (xxi). Women in Sudan are vulnerable to each of these threats, due to a combination of widespread poverty and lack of education, an absence of justice and punishment, and strong delays in the development of the country owing to decades of war.
Perhaps one of the things I respect most about Kristof and WuDunn is that they are practical journalists, with their heads in the sky and their feet on the ground. Studying political theory in university, the take-home point of most of the books I read could be summarized as follows: “There are so many deeply-entrenched, horrible and complex problems in the world, as I have done the easy work of outlining in the past 700 pages. Hopefully someday these things will change.” What?
I was pleased that Kristof and WuDunn resisted such an urge to dip out at the end of their discussion, instead devoting the last twenty pages of their book to what you, as an individual engaged in a broader social movement, can do – as well as a section on organizations that do great women-centered work and “Four Steps You Can Take in the Next Ten Minutes.” At Save Darfur, we use our voices to advocate for better policies, legislation and plans for peace on the ground in Sudan, many of which support women and emphasize that women’s security is an integral part of any salient solution. Our partners at Jewish World Watch have established solar-cooker programs, which help women to cook without firewood (many are raped when searching for firewood to cook with outside the camps). We have friends who sell baskets from Darfur, which provide employment, income and power to women on the ground. The UN Foundation Women & Population Program invests in adolescent girls in ways that have lifelong effects. Now is the time to act, and the opportunities for innovation and advocacy are endless.
I recommend Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide to all who are concerned about violence against women and believe that a respect for women’s rights and equality can lead to lower levels of conflict throughout the world. When Save Darfur participates in the 16 Days of Activism against Gender Violence Campaign (which I blogged briefly about earlier), we will post a list of 16 Ways to Fight For the World’s Women on our revamped Violence Against Women website. In the meantime, stay tuned….and pick up a copy of this book.
The opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Save Darfur Coalition.
Tags: Darfur, Half the Sky, Human Rights, IDP, Nicholas Kristof, Sheryl WuDunn, Sudan, Violence Against Women
