“The way you saw the earth shake, that's how our bodies are shaking now” described one woman of a secondary humanitarian crisis facing the women and girls of Haiti.
As Haiti’s earthquake toppled buildings, it also toppled social structures that provided Haitian women some protection against sexual violence. Rape was widespread before January 12, but the hundreds of thousands of women now living on the streets or in camps, often without their family and neighborhood networks, are more vulnerable than ever.
Special thanks to Harriet Hirshorn for shaping and editing this video and to Sandy Berkowitz for shooting it.
A gang of human traffickers, brothel keepers and pimps received substantial jail terms yesterday over the ordeal of a teenage virgin tricked into travelling to the UK for a life of sexual "slavery".
Their Slovakian victim had cried in the dock as she described spending nearly a year-and-a-half working as a prostitute after being lured to Britain at the age of 16 with the promise of a job in a pub. She told of being sold on from owner to owner, raped by one who was never identified, beaten and threatened.
Six men received sentences of up to 14 years for what the judge called a "terrible story of betrayal".
One, Turkish-born Ali Arslan, was also involved in the plight of a second victim. He was convicted of running a brothel in Hackney, east London, where the 22-year-old woman was forced to work after leaving her six-month-old baby daughter with relatives in Lithuania, having been convinced by one of her brother's school friends that she could earn good money in a warehouse in Britain to provide her child with a better future.
London's Southwark crown court heard she was instead sold for £4,000 to a man who raped and assaulted her before putting her to work as a prostitute. He was never caught.
The government has “callously neglected” a Filipina who was allegedly raped by a US soldier in Okinawa, Japan “at a time when she needed help the most,” the Philippine mission that went there said Thursday.
Gabriela Representative Liza Maza, a member of the contingent, said on Thursday that Honorary Consul Ako Alarcon of the Philippine Consulate in Okinawa failed to provide legal counsel for “Hazel” during the investigation to determine if there was probable cause for the case.
She also blamed the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) for not providing Hazel with enough assistance.
Maza said that Hazel was a “victim of human trafficking and that the Philippine government had been sorely remiss in providing her adequate and proper assistance.”
“Hazel was on her own during the whole process of investigation given that she has no knowledge of the legal system in Japan, does not speak nor understand the local language, and that she hardly knows anyone because she just arrived in Japan three days before the rape happened,” said Maza.
The team, composed of representatives from the Gabriela Women's Party and Migrante, also obtained a copy of medico-legal records that supposedly proved that Hazel was raped.
“We saw the medical records of Hazel. Hazel vividly accounted to us what transpired the night she was raped. And coming from the perspective of a women's organization which has handled many cases of violence against women, we are fully convinced that Hazel was indeed raped,” said Lana Linaban, Gabriela deputy secretary general.
Last July 15, the mission team, and Melly, Hazel's mother, left for Okinawa to investigate the incident.
Upon arrival, the team consulted with Father Rommel Cruz, legal guardian of Hazel, and met with Okinawa officials.
Maza urged both the Philippine and Japanese governments to conduct their own investigations on the incident saying “Wherever the US soldiers commit crime, sovereign countries should have the sovereign right to prosecute.”
She said that the Philippine Consulate in Okinawa should focus on protecting Filipinas who were vulnerable for human trafficking.
“Hazel is one of the many Filipina victims of human trafficking for the rest and recreation needs of US soldiers...this scenario makes women, especially Filipinas working as entertainers, in Okinawa vulnerable to abuse,” Maza said.
My body, as an invadable entity, is coveted by the wounded. To seek relief there are people out there who want to rape me, take me, dominate me, and somehow leave feeling satiated. This occurred to me walking home the other night. I was alone and there were two men walking close behind me. I thought about the fear, a womanly fear, of sexual abuse.
What is it, I wondered once they were no longer close behind me, that makes rape so common? While aware that rape goes both ways, men raping women, women raping men, the fear of a random attack alone late at night in a small mountain town, this fear of rape, for me, is wholly grounded in my female physicality.
To rape a woman, among other things, is to rob her of power. I imagined women's bodies as holders of the sacred, of immense force, the capacity to create, the embodiment of every rapists very origin. To rape is to return to the place you emerged from. To rape is to angrily take back the womanhood that you left, that you do not contain. This fear of physical invasion is a constructed piece of my identity as woman.
Rape and human trafficking are grounded similarly in their connection to social constructs of gender and sex. It is not so simple as patriarchy. It is not so clean as a weaker and stronger sex. The sex trade industry is the manifestation of a deeper imbalance in each culture where it is found. It is the manifestation of repression, the embodiment of the unspoken.
I recently went to an all-nude strip club in Boulder and was surprised by how little it disturbed me. Naked and worshipped, solely for the object form of their bodies, were glistening hairless women. This was a simply reaffirmation of everything I knew to be true in society. On the gendered bodies of men and women we project power roles, dynamics of deprivation, lack of expression, and ultimately, a deep form of idol worship.
I do not condemn the stripper, the john, the rapist. I condemn the socio-economic and socio-cultural structures that create these small worlds. A strip club is no different than a Facebook advertisement telling me to lose thirty-seven pounds in thirty days. Both are byproducts of a social world that emulates masculinity and represses femininity, leaving both the man and woman at a loss.
In Jungian psychology there is the concept of wholeness via the incorporation of the anima and the animus. A man, to be a whole man, needs to incorporate the feminine, or anima. Whereas a woman, to be her complete self, needs also to incorporate the male, or animus. The divisive gendered nature of our world, living in binary and black and white, does not permit this "wholeness." Without wholeness the people functioning within and running this country are fragmented. In raping a woman, a man implies, by default, his own wounded nature. In damaging another, he exhibits his own inner ruin. Pain is passed between people when unresolved. For this, we have a human trafficking problem. For this there are self-hating women, with a counterpart of self-hating men.
Our sex industry is only the mirror of our social selves, fragmented, gender biased, the disempowerment of women by disempowered men. It is a ricochet effect; he who oppresses is himself bound. And we, the community around the oppressors and the victims, are equally tied up. The denial of feminine power is a blanket indicator of a social ill affecting every member of our society.
See the Swedish film "Together" and note their treatment of addiction and abuse. Same with the film "Celebration." Both of these films illustrate the humanity of the oppressor and the devastation caused by unresolved pain.
