Visitors' civil comments encouraged.
Women's History Month Linkage
Message From Eve Ensler of V-Day
My daughter forwarded this email update from Eve Ensler of V-Day. Eve's message is pertinent to Partizane, so I'm posting it here.
Congo Update From Eve
Dear Friends,
It is almost 4AM and I am awake in Bukavu. I find myself filled with so many images of the recent days here. I think being in the Congo, one is forced to hold the extreme duality of this century in almost every breath and image. I find myself alternatively believing we are at the beginning of real change and revolution and simultaneously at the end of all possibility.
I am there in Kinshasa where 5 brave women survivors break the silence in front of 500 people -- members of Parliament, Senators, activists. There, as they tell their stories, Janet limping to the microphone on a cane as she vividly tells of how they ripped her legs over her head so violently when they raped her they made her permanently handicapped. I listen to the women form words around such cruelty and am simultaneously crushed by the horror and how easily one becomes accustomed to atrocity. How 500 people politely listen to such crimes against women's bodies and do not stand, scream, rush into the streets demanding justice.
In Kinshasa I meet a core of totally empowered and engaged V-Day activists (many men) changing their communities, educating and mobilizing for change. In the same city on the same day, when we address the Parliament, I meet strong empowered women members of government like Eve Bazaiba and Mama Batchu and then there are others who are surprised to hear there is a war still going on in the East.
I see brilliant Congolese actors performing The Vagina Monologues at the Grand Hotel in front of hundreds, singing African songs, dressed in colorful panges. Their performance breaks taboos and frees a discourse that feels like true liberation.
Read Eve's Commentary in The Guardian
Read Eve's recent Commentary piece "An Apathetic Greedy West Has Abandoned War-torn Congo" in The Guardian (UK):
Despite an emerging women's movement, the rape of women and girls continues as the UN looks the other way.
In 1996, I was sitting with 20,000 grieving women in a stadium in Tuzla, Bosnia. The women were holding photographs of husbands, fathers, brothers, sons and boyfriends who had been disappeared a year earlier in a place called Srebrenica, a UN enclave where Bosnian refugees had turned over their protection to UN peacekeepers who stood passively by as 10,000 men were marched off to be slaughtered. I will never forget the wailing of the women in that stadium as they cried out, demanding the international community explain how they could have allowed this horror to take place.
V-Day Apex Creates Animoto Video
In 2009, a group of Apex, North Carolina women and businesses united to organize V-Day Apex 2009. Led by Somer Cooper, V-Day Apex produced a fashion show, two silent auctions and a V-Day benefit production of The Vagina Monologues to raise money for The Apex Police Department's efforts to provide assistance to survivors of violence by creating a "safe" interview room and comprehensive training for their officers.
V-Day Apex has created a short video from their events through Animoto, a web application that helps users create music video style online clips.
In 2009, Anitmoto.com launched Animoto For A Cause, to bring attention to non-profit groups working throughout the world, offering organizations and community activists free and unlimited access to the full range of Animoto's services. V-Day is happy to be a part of Animoto For A Cause, which enables our activists, such as V-Day Apex, to illustrate their activism with a dynamic, multimedia twist and reach more people with our message to end violence against women and girls.
Create your own Animoto V-Day Video >
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So sad and the clash of centuries must be mind boggling for someone like Eve.
It's like stepping back 500 years
Civil Discourse - ERA - A Mother President - Women's Rights - Primary Reform
women of the Congo, just as it has to the women of Iran and Sauia Arabia. Did that august body say anything against Iran and the brutality it exhibited toward protesters? Or are they debating a way to blame it on us and the rest of the West? Or maybe they'll blame it on Israel? The Congo seems to be full of ruthless , brutal men, who abuse the women there without any fear of reprisal. Why hasn't the UN corrected the problem? Perhaps too many members don't see it as a problem, because their countries also hold women in low regard.
a judge right here in this country let a rapist go free declaring that rape was natural and that women were made for it.
The comments here are similiar to those given by gang rapists everywhere - "everyone else did it" and "the devil made me do it".
Twandx, where did this happen. I haven't heard this story; please tell us more.
I lost most of my links a few years back so I googled and only got one ref. I checked with the few living friends of that era who all remember it but tell me their links lead to zilch - seems that story was deep sixed like others we hear about. Here's the one I found:
And on the second part of that, I found a ref to why the judge made that conclusion:
There is plenty to be found to support the first judge saying rape a natural act. Here's a couple that refute the Thornhill and Palmer book which has plenty of links since the media, of course, found it delightful. Not so women's rebuttles
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1034
http://www.susanbrownmiller.com/susanbrownmiller/html/review-thornhill.html
While searching, I found another more recent article showing how little we have progressed.
Nebraska law offers judges broad discretion to ban evidence or language that present the danger of "unfair prejudice, confusion of the issues or misleading the jury." And it's not unheard-of for judges to keep certain words out of a courtroom. Words like victim have been increasingly kept out of trials, since they tend to imply that a crime was committed. And as Safi's lawyer, Clarence Mock, explains, the word rape is just as loaded. "It's a legal conclusion for a witness to say, 'I was raped' or 'sexually assaulted.' … That's for a jury to decide." His concern is that the word rape so inflames jurors that they decide a case emotionally and not rationally.
The real question for Judge Cheuvront, then, is whether embedded in the word sex is another "legal conclusion"—that the intercourse was consensual. And it's hard to conclude otherwise. Go ahead, use the word sex in a sentence. Asking a complaining witness to scrub the word rape or assault from her testimony is one thing. Asking that she imply that she agreed to what her alleged assailant was doing to her is something else entirely. To put it another way: If the complaining witness in a rape trial has to describe herself as having had "intercourse" with the defendant, should the complaining witness in a mugging be forced to testify that he was merely giving his attacker a loan?
[my emphasis]