Tag: women

Women, girls at risk in South Sudan camps

The UN base in Malakal is home to 17 000 displaced civilians. (Pic: IRIN / Jacob Zocherman)

Julie Francis’s self-imposed curfew starts when the sun sets. The widowed mother of four has been living at the UN base outside Malakal since December, one of more than 17 000 people who have fled there to escape episodic fighting in South Sudan’s Upper Nile State capital. But the overcrowded camp is not without its own dangers, especially for women and girls.

Francis can hear drunken teenagers hound women as they make their way around the site’s darkened paths. She has seen the holes men have cut through the tarpaulin walls of the showers so they can peep and leer at women. She has comforted rape survivors.

“It is too much,” she said. “They attack us at the place of the toilets or at night where we collect water.” There were 28 reported cases of sexual assault in the Malakal camp between January and June of this year, according to an assessment released by the inter-agency Global Protection Cluster late last month. But aid workers acknowledge the vast majority of attacks probably go unreported.

So Francis has decided it is best to push a bedframe in front of the entrance to her tent as soon as it gets dark. If she or her daughters need to go to the bathroom, they just use a bag.

But she doesn’t think it is fair. “People should take this seriously,” she said. “They should be serious to help. There are still people who need to know that it is not right to rape.”

Where, she wants to know, are the floodlights that could roust deter men hiding near the latrines, or the regular UN Police (UNPOL) patrols to protect women who want to visit their friends at night or go to the bathroom? Why, she asked, does it seem like she is the only one taking steps to make sure she does not get raped?

The problem is not in Malakal alone. Since fighting broke out in South Sudan in mid-December, nearly 100 000 people have crowded into 10 UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) bases across the eastern half of the country. They have been dubbed “Protection of Civilian” or PoC, sites. Though there are no official statistics, humanitarian groups say sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) – including rape, but also beating, harassment and domestic violence – exists in varying degrees at all of the larger camps, as does a growing resentment among women and girls that more is not being done to protect them.

“Increasing frustration”
“Of course there’s increasing frustration,” said Nana Ndeda, the advocacy and policy manager for Care International. She has been talking to women living in the camps about their experiences since the conflict started. “They’re getting very frustrated by the fact that UNMISS is not able to provide the kind of security that they would want provided.”

What is most galling, she said, is that the strategies for what should be done already exist. The 87-page Guidelines for Gender-Based Violence Interventions in Humanitarian Settings, compiled by a committee of UN agencies and humanitarian groups, offers detailed recommendations, including lighting communal areas, creating safe spaces where women can confidentially seek help and consistently soliciting the input of women and girls on how to improve the situation.

But in the early days of the conflict, with unprecedented numbers of civilians seeking shelter at the UN bases and scores of humanitarian workers evacuating, UNMISS employees were scrambling just to provide basic services.

“We had many more people than we could house and we needed to find a way to still be able to operate the base, as well,” said Derk Segaar, who heads UNMISS’s protection team. In the early days of the conflict, as people flooded into bases across the country, “it was a matter of trying to get them in a sustainable space that would allow just enough space for them to be there.”

Thousands of people are still living in shelters hastily constructed in the early days of the fighting, when issues like SGBV took a backseat to rescuing as many people as possible.

Tidial Chany is a community leader elected to represent one of the original parts of the Malakal camp, known as PoC 2. He works closely with UNPOL on security concerns in his area, but said it is nearly impossible to monitor all of the boggy, unlit alleys and has ultimately concluded, “It’s no good for security within the PoC.”

Aware of the problems, UNMISS started working to secure additional land and to construct more strategically planned sites almost from the beginning of the conflict, Segaar said, but their efforts were slowed by both bureaucracy and continued fighting.

New camps finally opened in Juba and Malakal in June. Within the new spaces, attention has been paid to the guidelines: women’s latrines are stationed near well-lit arteries and are separated from the men’s, for instance. Another site is slated to open in the Jonglei State capital, Bor, later this month.

“It’s not a matter of a few weeks or a few months and people will all be happy to go home,” Segaar said. “That’s why we built these bases. We need to be able to keep people safe and healthy for potentially a much longer period of time.”

Andrew Green for IRIN

10 years ago

Ethiopia’s game-changing abortion law

(Pic: Flickr)

After decades battling high maternal death rates – at least a third of which were due to botched abortions – Ethiopia took a stand: it prioritised newborn and maternal health, and in 2005 it relaxed its abortion law in an effort to save women’s lives.

Stopping short of legalising abortion, the new law decriminalised the act. It also allows women to terminate pregnancies that result from rape or incest, if the foetus has a severe defect, or if a girl is under the age of 18 and cannot care for the baby herself. Before 2005, a woman could only have an abortion if it was a matter of life or death.

“Anecdotally, I would say [the law] has had a huge impact on saving lives of girls and mothers,” said Addis Tamire Woldemariam, general director for the minister of health, but he said he did not have official numbers on the law’s impact. The latest statistics available are from 2008, which show that 27% of women who sought abortions in Ethiopia did so legally and safely. That still suggests more than 70% of abortions were done in unsafe conditions by untrained providers, but before 2005, that figure was much closer to 100%.

“Before, women would drink a tea made of plants to induce abortion,” said one health extension worker in the northern village of Mosebo. The women would then have extremely painful cramping followed by heavy bleeding – too heavy, she said. “It is much better now. We encourage them to go the health centres or clinics.”

Lack of access
But one major reason women are not getting safe abortions is that most Ethiopians live in places even less accessible than Mosebo, which is just off a bumpy gravel road that stretches 43km to the northern city of Bahir Dar. Getting to a health facility that provides abortion care is extremely difficult.

In Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa, Dawit Argaw owns a Blue Star Clinic – a private health facility partnered with Marie Stopes, a global provider of newborn and maternal care, contraception and safe abortions. He explained that if he did not perform the abortions women sought at his clinic, they would just end up choosing a dangerous option. “The main reason that we do this is that we have seen so many complications [from abortions performed illegally], by [untrained] persons,” Argaw said. It used to be common that women would come to his clinic with puncture wounds or severe infections from botched abortions. “But since 2009 [four years after the new law was implemented], we have seen this maybe two or three times.”

While the vast majority of women seeking abortions are still getting them through unsafe means, in large cities like Addis, women can get to clinics and doctors more easily.

But women’s health is also helped by increased access to contraceptives, and the number of women who have unwanted pregnancies is in decline as more women use birth control. “Ten years ago, contraceptive prevalence was 6%, and the most recent figures are at 40%,” Woldemariam said.

Grateful for the service
At the Marie Stopes Clinic in Addis Ababa, a woman sits in a small room with a desk, a bed with stirrups attached and a thin curtain. Here, she receives contraceptive advice. “We consult with her and have her choose a family planning method before she receives the abortion care,” Sister Tihish, the nurse, explains. The patient, who withheld her name, also did not disclose how she got pregnant, “but many of the cases we receive are because of rape,” the nurse says.

In cases of rape or incest, women are not required to give proof. Woldemariam of the Ministry of Health said making a woman relive the psychological trauma of rape by asking for evidence would be “immoral” and “inhumane”, so many abortion-providers have adopted a “don’t ask” policy. For many, that leaves a gaping loophole in the law and gives women a way to get abortions for reasons beyond what is legally allowed.

Dr Seyoum Antonios vehemently opposes the abortion liberalisation. The general surgeon explains the requirements are far too lax. “You look at the books at these clinics and all of them say `rape, rape, rape’ with no proof,” he exclaims. “My country is being painted as a land of rapists.”

But for 29-year-old Khadija Ali, who asked that her real name not be used, access to an abortion was a matter of life or death. “I was working as a housekeeper in Bahrain when my employer raped me,” she explains, wringing her hands in pain from cramps as the abortion pills she took a few hours earlier took their toll. “I became pregnant, and immediately returned to Ethiopia because no one could know it happened, or else I would be seriously hurt or even killed.”

Her friend told her about the Marie Stopes Clinic, which provides abortion care and contraceptive counselling. “I am very glad,” she said, for the service. Still, Khadija says she will never tell anyone – including her husband – what happened, and definitely not about the abortion.

Social stigma reigns
Khadija is not alone in keeping her silence. “This is something very sensitive in the community,” Woldemariam said. “I mean people practice it, but they do not want to talk about it,” which is fine, he said, as long as women are getting the care they need.

The vast majority of Ethiopians are socially and religiously conservative within their respective beliefs. Orthodox Christian leaders, who have the most followers in Ethiopia, are willing to privately consult families on family planning but would never discuss abortions. That is the case with almost all communities, Woldemariam explained.

A local priest in Mosebo village said that is how he advises families and what he practices in his own family. “Children are a gift from God, but having more children than you can feed is an even bigger sin,” he explained. Magadesa Mugeda, a resident of Mosebo pregnant with her second child, agrees. Her daughter was born five years ago, and she used an injectable contraceptive to plan her family. “With our land and our resources, we could not afford to have more kids,” right away, she said.

When asked about abortions, Mugeda immediately tensed up. “I do not know or care to discuss these things.”

Abebe Asrat, a no-nonsense midwife at the Marie Stopes clinic agrees with Mugeda. “Do not ask me what I think of government policy,” when it comes to abortions she said. “Almost everyone is against abortions… but we do what we have to,” she explained. There are alternatives, she insisted: women should be encouraged to use contraceptives and family planning methods to prevent the whole ordeal.

Argaw said if he did not see that safe abortions saved women’s lives, he would have a harder time accepting how his work was conflicting with his religion. “Religiously [abortion] may be forbidden. Even in my religion it is forbidden. But for me as a human being I accept it [is necessary],” he admits. “So that is why I do it.”

10 years ago

Rape: A weapon on the battlefields and in the suburbs

Women take part in a campaign at the hospital ‘Heal Africa’ which advocates an end to sexual violence and rape against women, and complications which arrive from this, in Goma, DRC. (Pic: AFP)

American actress Angelina Jolie and British Foreign Secretary William Hague hosted a War Zone Rape Summit in London last month. Officially named ‘the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict’, it sought to highlight and combat the use of sexual violence against women and children within war zones.

The event was the biggest of its kind and brought together thought leaders, policy makers and change makers from around the world. The issues raised were especially relevant, given the current Boko Haram situation. Around two hundred Nigerian school girls who were abducted by the Islamist group on April 22 are yet to be found.

One of the key points of the summit was that during conflict it is not just guns causing destruction, but the penis. In times of war women are raped at an alarming rate as ‘all laws are suspended’ and anything goes.

Africa delegates featured prominently and many of the cases highlighted were from the region. African Union Commission chairperson Nkosozana Dlamini Zuma, speaking on one of the panels, stated that there must be zero tolerance of sexual assault within battle zones.

As part of its #ENDViolence campaign, Unicef has shared some statistics on sexual violence against women and children: in the Democratic Republic of Congo an average of 36 women and children are raped every day. In Somalia, 34% of rape survivors are children under the age of 12. And in war zones these statistics are sketchy at best as hordes go unreported because the channels to report are often destroyed in conflict.

It is well documented that women in Sierra Leone and Uganda have been subjected to rape, sexual slavery, and other forms of sexual abuse as well. There is a clear mandate to speak out on this. It has reached a point where sexual assault in countries such as Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire are posing a threat to justice, with this form of violence being a ‘characterising feature of war’.

But why is the brutality of rape only highlighted during war when the act is no less brutal on a Saturday night in a peaceful suburb? Why are you an animal in the combat zone and a man asserting himself in the city?

Rape: present during war and peace
At the summit, Nobel laureate Leymah Gbowee said that ‘Sexual violence in war is directly related to sexual violence in peace’ .

The problem is as prevalent across the continent, although it doesn’t receive an equal amount of attention in all countries. Take Kenya, which has had to deal with a legacy of British troops raping women over a period of 30 years. This institutionally imposed silence was broken by Amnesty International in 2003 when it emerged that over 650 women had been raped by British soldiers as long ago as 1965 and as recently as 2001.

The majority of these cases were gang rapes perpetrated by men during training sessions, not during times of war.

Sexual violence as a societal weapon
Sexual violence as a weapon is not only something confined to the battlefield and understanding this could go a long way towards reconceptualising the prevalent idea of ‘victim blame’. If someone pulls a knife on you people will not automatically look at what you did to ‘deserve’ it; the same should hold true of sexual violence, and not only during war.

Most people are aware that rape is never about the sexual act (the need for sex per se), but about asserting dominance. Men have supposedly romanticised the idea of rape, equating it to notions of ‘machismo’. This is in no way to excuse rape, humans after all separate ourselves from being beasts by resisting and restraining destructive primal urges.

Within the private realm sex is seen as a weapon, a tool that speaks to a balance of power and is seen more as a power struggle between two people and not as serious attack. Often cases involving sexual assault either fall to the wayside or the perpetrators receive ridiculously inadequate punishments, such as cutting grass.

In the home there are certain power dynamics that take place in terms of sexual relations between spouses. For one, to be married to another is to essentially lose the ability to state when and where sexual relations take place. This power struggle in the home can be embodied in the phrase: ‘There is no such thing as marital rape’. This is a view infamously held by the Chief Justice of South Africa Mogoeng Mogoeng, who came under fire for downplaying domestic violence in his judgments.

The idea of sexual assault as a weapon extends to sexuality as well.

Corrective rape in South Africa is rife. This act is based on the premise that a man can change the sexuality of a lesbian woman through the act of forcibly sleeping with her thus making her ‘see the light’. The idea that one can be changed or altered through a forced sexual act is again using sex as a weapon.

A move away from victim blame
The call for empowerment of women is tied extremely tightly to the notion that rape is not the fault of the person who is assaulted, that they need not carry that burden. Sexual assault needs to be seen in light of any form of physical assault. No one questions someone who has been shot, and one shouldn’t be questioned as to the ‘role you played’ in your rape.

Summits such as this one highlight the aggressive nature of sexual assault and show it in a new light and context: as something outside the sexual realm and akin to a stabbing or even a shooting. It highlights the violence behind the act.

The call for a global shift from that of impunity (especially in the case of those involved in sexual assault within conflict zones) speaks to the severity of the situation. Sexual assault is not just about sex, one person wanting it and one person not. It has a far more vicious element to it which is often left out of the global rhetoric on the subject.

Sexual violence is violence, not just on the battlefield. It is not asking for it in one place and a weapon of mass destruction in another. Seeing it in the context of conflict shows the severity and brutality of the situation, a lens that should be applied across all cases, not just ones in which the man doing the raping is carrying an AK-47.

Kagure Mugo is a freelance writer and co-founder and curator of holaafrica.org, a Pan-Africanist queer women’s collective which engages in activism and awareness-building around issues of African women’sidentity, experiences and sexuality. Connect with her on Twitter: @tiffmugo

11 years ago

Tunisian women waging ‘sex jihad’ in Syria: minister

Tunisian women have travelled to Syria to wage “sex jihad” by comforting Islamist fighters battling the regime there, the country’s Interior Minister Lotfi ben Jeddou has told MPs. “They have sexual relations with 20, 30, 100” militants, the minister told members of the National Constituent Assembly on Thursday.

Rebel fighters scouting in the Syrian city of Homs. (Pic: AFP)

“After the sexual liaisons they have there in the name of ‘jihad al-nikah’ – (sexual holy war, in Arabic) – they come home pregnant,” Ben Jeddou told the MPs. He did not elaborate on how many Tunisian women had returned to the country pregnant with the children of jihadist fighters.

Jihad al-nikah, permitting extramarital sexual relations with multiple partners, is considered by some hardline Sunni Muslim Salafists as a legitimate form of holy war. The minister also did not say how many Tunisian women were thought to have gone to Syria for such a purpose, although media reports have said hundreds have done so.

Hundreds of Tunisian men have also gone to join the ranks of the jihadists fighting to bring down the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. However, Ben Jeddou also said that since he assumed office in March, “six thousand of our young people have been prevented from going there” to Syria.

He has said in the past that border controls have been boosted to intercept young Tunisians seeking to travel to Syria. Media reports say thousands of Tunisians have, over the past 15 years, joined jihadists across the world in Afghanistan Iraq and Syria, mainly travelling via Turkey or Libya.

Abu Iyadh, who leads the country’s main Salafist movement Ansar al-Sharia, is the suspected organiser of a deadly attack last year on the US embassy in Tunis and an Afghanistan veteran. He was joint leader of a group responsible for the September 9, 2001 assassination in Afghanistan of anti-Taliban Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud by suicide bombers. That attack came just two days before the deadly Al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York and Pentagon in Washington. — AFP

11 years ago

‘Walk-in vagina’ kindles anger and approval in SA

It lets out a high-pitched scream as you enter, then a sneering laugh. It’s a walk-in vagina, a conceptual art installation that has South Africans wagging their fingers and scratching their heads.

When 30-year-old South African artist Reshma Chhiba was asked to produce artwork for a disused apartheid-era women’s jail in Johannesburg, she wanted to make a statement about women’s power.

What she came up with was a talking “yoni”, or vagina in India’s ancient language, Sanskrit.

“It’s a screaming vagina within a space that once contained women and stifled women,” she told AFP. “It’s revolting against this space… mocking this space, by laughing at it.”

Visitors enter the 12m red padded velvet and cotton canal by first stepping onto a tongue-like padding. Thick, black acrylic wool mimics pubic hair around the opening.

A view of the art installation “Giant Walk-In Vagina” installed at a former women’s prison by artist Reshma Chhiba in Johannesburg. (Pic: AFP)

The shrill soundtrack that assaults visitors as they stroll through the tunnel is a revolt against the women’s jail, built in 1909, that held some of South Africa’s leading anti-apartheid activists.

Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was incarcerated there twice in 1958 and 1976.

“I definitely did not make this work for the sake of controversy,” said Chhiba.

For her, it was about artistic freedom and challenging deeply entrenched patriarchal systems .

“You don’t often hear men talking about their private parts and feeling disgust or shamed,” as women often do, she said.

“And that alone speaks volumes of how we’ve been brought up to think about our bodies, and what I am saying here is that it’s supposed to be an empowering space.”

The artist also wanted to address the scourge of rape in South Africa, where nearly 65 000 attacks on girls and women are reported a year in one of the highest incidences of rape in the world – with little improvement.

But the installation, on display throughout August, has collided with some sensitive cultural and religious taboos.

“It’s the most private part of my body. I grew up in the rural areas, we were taught not to expose your body, even your thighs let alone your vagina,” said Benathi Mangqaaleza, 24-year-old female security guard at the former prison that is now a tourist site.

“I think it’s pornographic, I think they have gone too far.”

‘A sacred space’
Twenty-four-year-old gardener Andile Wayi thought the exhibition — on the site of the Victorian-era brick women’s jail and another that once held Mahatma Gandhi – as well as the Constitutional Court – was wrong.

“The [Constitution] Hill is respected, it’s a heritage,” he said.

The fine arts graduate,who is also a practising Hindu, has spent years of research into the Hindu goddess Kali whom she views as a symbol of defiance.

She expressed “shock” at the media onslaught and allegations of blasphemy from some Hindu followers who complained through radio talk shows.

“To talk about the vagina, or visualise it, is something that is not out of the ordinary,” she insisted

The exhibition, entitled “The Two Talking Yonis”, was the product of two years of discussion with curator Nontobeko Ntombela on the mythology of female power in patriarchal systems.

Visitors have to take off their shoes to walk through the softly cushioned canal.

“By talking off your shoes, essentially you are respecting it, making it a divine space, a sacred space,” said Chhiba.

Gender Links, a lobby group promoting gender equality in southern Africa, praises Chhiba’s artwork for re-igniting discussion on a subject normally avoided.

“It is bringing the private into the public, that the woman’s body is not necessarily a private matter,” said Kubi Rama, Gender Links boss.