In the M & G this week I read that more than 1,100 women are raped every day in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), making sexual violence against women 26 times more common than previously thought.
Why is it that the only way to punish a
women for anything from being too powerful to being gay is to rape her? In fact
why is it that even to punish a man who has over stepped his mark a women he is
close to has to be raped?
The sick nature of these subjugation/
revenge games are ridiculous but beyond all of that is the
pain/anguish/haunting memories and immense suffering that will remain with
these women throughout their lives. Whether it is Mukhtaran Mai of Pakistan,
the 50000 Bosnian women who were raped during the war or the many victims of
‘corrective rape’ in South Africa the results are the same a brutal violation,
not just of your property but right into your body … can you really ever feel
secure after such an experience?
An act of rape is something that will weigh
on ur collective conscience forever, it cannot be totally buried or
forgotten because eventually pain
erupts. Being violently ravaged is not something any human being can truly put
behind them.
‘Corrective rape is
nothing less than a hate crime and a clear indication that women, children, gay
and lesbian individuals continue to be regarded as soft targets for cowardly
acts of victimisation’, said a human rights activist.
However for some reason the patriarchal
society we live in has created various stigmas and stereotypes to shame and
blame rape survivors because the men that rape are victims of; a woman’s
charms, a woman’s clothes, a woman’s walk… if they could help it they would
probably blame the way she breathed oxygen to stay alive.
God save us if the
men in the world we inhabit are such weak, penis driven creatures.
1 comment:
Excellent and powerful post.
Rape as a weapon of war or any other weapon of patriarchal power must be condemned and acted against in the strongest terms.
What is going on in the DRC is a humanitarian disaster though the silence from the UN/AU is deafening.
I remember when the TRC hearings were going on many women advocated for interrogating the manner in which the apartheid system used rape as a tool of oppression.
That aspect of confronting the past still stands (ignored mostly) - unattended to just like the growing ignorance about "corrective rape".
Men fight wars against declared enemies but mostly they fight undeclared wars on and over the bodies of women.
It can't go on if we are to even get closer to a rudimentary ideal of freedom and human dignity.
Onward!
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