I see from a quick glance here that my concerns are not original (not that I was unaware of that, of course!), but that expressing and discussing them may be a delicate exercise. Oh well, here goes.
I've been gobsmacked and horrified and sickened by some responses here at DU to reports of criminal victimization, and especially the sexual victimization of women and children, among victims of the hurricane and flood. I see that the question has been asked in this forum of how women might have been especially affected by this tragedy/atrocity, and this may provide some insight.
I can't cite specifics of what I'm talking about that has been said at DU, as that would be "calling out", and I don't want to invite all and sundry over here to duke it out. I'm not looking for argument, I'm looking to share understanding and concerns. I actually abandoned
arguing with, let alone "debating", people who don't share my concerns in these respects about 30 years ago.
Essentially, I cannot believe that anyone would deny that women were criminally sexually victimized in those situations -- women trapped and isolated by the flood, women trapped and exposed to danger by circumstances at supposed places of safety.
Women are criminally sexually victimized on good days, in the best neighbourhoods, in broad daylight, in our homes, our schools, our workplaces, our private and public places.
Women (and children) are vulnerable at the best of times. At the worst of times -- when the rule of law is nowhere to be seen, and when disorder is unchecked, and when the ordinary protections of civil society are absent (family members, neighbours, passersby, streetlights, escape routes ...), they are doubly and quadrupally vulnerable. Anyone familiar with the experiences of displaced women in all parts of the world knows this, and international aid agencies know that they have special responsibility to these specially vulnerable people. And this is true even in areas within our own societies where the rule of law is weak and disorder is generalized -- women are always at special risk.
And there are people who exploit vulnerability, to victimize. Some men exploit women's vulnerablility to victimize us. That's the way of the world. And those people are everywhere, and expoit whatever opportunity arises, for whatever their reasons may be and whatever the causes of their behaviour may be, to victimize the vulnerable.
And yet somehow, we are supposed to believe that last week's disaster turned everyone in the affected areas into saints, and no men assaulted or abused any women or children.
I, on the other hand, absolutely expected there to be an increase in such victimization. It wouldn't have mattered who the victims of the disaster and subsequent abandonment were, what their race or colour or class or location; there would have been victimizers among them exploiting others' vulnerability.
(Obviously, I have no doubt that the disaster was in large part caused by the utter disregard of the US government for the welfare of anyone, and particularly of the poor and African-Americans, and that the absence of response to the victims' desperate need for aid was in considerable part attributable to its special disregard for the community they belong to.)
But what I have seen is steadfastly blinkered denial that such things happened, calls for proof, rejections of reports that are credible to anyone who acknowledges reality.
Why?
Because acknowleding any of it -- acknowledging the plain certainty that some of it occurred, even if any of the particular allegations has not yet been proved -- would make African-Americans look bad.
Because the reports were being used by racists to demonize African-Americans.
For the love of mike, racists will twist any facts available to them to demonize African-Americans. African-Americans, like any despised minority, live in a no-win situation. Any evidence of their disadvantage will be used as evidence of their lack of worth. Surely we all know that,
and expect it to happen.
Would denying the fact that the prison population is disproportionately African-American help the African-American community?
Women live with the same reality. Evidence of our disadvantage is used against us as evidence of our lack of worth all the damned time.
It's impossible to deny the facts of African-Americans in the prisons, for instance, because there are nice hard numbers. It's easy to deny the facts of women's reality, and especially the victimization, because the disadvantage of women is often experienced in private, individually, in isolation, and because the individual women who experience it do not always register themselves in the databases.
The woman who is the de facto symbol of what women experienced in the disaster areas is Charmaine Neville. Her experience has become public, because she made it so and because she is a public figure.
Go to google news and inquire about
Charmaine Neville. Here is a transcript of one interview:
http://www.pej.org/html/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=3250&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0If you go here:
http://www.wafb.com/you can click to see the video of Neville telling her experience to RC Archbishop Hughes.
What happened to the victims of the disaster was an atrocity. They were abandoned by their society -- abandoned to the wind, the water, the alligators, the filth, the contamination --
and the victimizers. What happened to them is not evidence of the stupidness or laziness or badness of African-Americans -- it is evidence of the utter and complete disregard of their society and its authorities for their welfare.
Charmaine Neville makes that point eloquently in the video. And that video is all that is needed to answer anyone who would twist the experience of the victims of the disaster and the abandonment into evidence of anything but the atrocity committed against them.
But we are told that the stories of what happened to women like her must be denied, must not be believed, because to do so would make African-Americans look bad.
Angela Davis has had things to say about this idea.
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/582.html The Color of Violence Against Women
By Angela Davis, keynote address at the Color of Violence Conference in Santa Cruz,
Colorlines, Vol.3 no.3, Fall 2000
... We have since come to recognize the epidemic proportions of violence within intimate relationships and the pervasiveness of date and acquaintance rape, as well as violence within and against same-sex intimacy. But we must also learn how to oppose the racist fixation on people of color as the primary perpetrators of violence, including domestic and sexual violence, and at the same time to fiercely challenge the real violence that men of color inflict on women. These are precisely the men who are already reviled as the major purveyors of violence in our society: the gang members, the drug-dealers, the drive-by shooters, the burglars, and assailants. In short, the criminal is figured as a black or Latino man who must be locked into prison.
One of the major questions facing this conference is how to develop an analysis that furthers neither the conservative project of sequestering millions of men of color in accordance with the contemporary dictates of globalized capital and its prison industrial complex, nor the equally conservative project of abandoning poor women of color to a continuum of violence that extends from the sweatshops through the prisons, to shelters, and into bedrooms at home.
And into the ravaged streets and the places of supposed refuge of New Orleans. Why on earth would anyone think otherwise, or deny what is so entirely to be expected? And why would the obvious response to demonization of African-American men for what happened to women in this situation not be that
it is their society's job to protect them when they are vulnerable to the small minority of any community who victimize them, as all women of every class and colour are and are especially in such situations, and that society REFUSED to do it and bears responsibility for its refusal?
Another interesting bit to note from that presentation:
The major strategy relied on by the women's anti-violence movement of criminalizing violence against women will not put an end to violence against women -- just as imprisonment has not put an end to crime in general.
I should say that this is one of the most vexing issues confronting feminists today. On the one hand, it is necessary to create legal remedies for women who are survivors of violence. But on the other hand, when the remedies rely on punishment within institutions that further promote violence -- against women and men, how do we work with this contradiction?
... We want to continue to contest the neglect of domestic violence against women, the tendency to dismiss it as a private matter. We need to develop an approach that relies on political mobilization rather than legal remedies or social service delivery.
What undoubtedly happened to women in New Orleans is not a private matter, is not their private misfortune. It is just as integral a part of the entire atrocity as the exposure and dehydration and contagion and contamination, and the other undeniable violence, that happened there. But the fact is that women were, and I cannot imagine how it can rationally be questioned,
more vulnerable and victimized as a group than men, and the atrocity was perpetrated more horribly and specifically against women (and the old and sick, also more vulnerable, in different ways) than against that community in general.
But there are people everywhere trying to silence these stories. People who say they do not believe them, people who are more subtle and say not that they disbelieve anyone in particular but that they need "proof" of each individual event (will we have proof of each suicide, proof that any person found drowned jumped rather than falling, and refuse to acknowledge that suicides occurred if we don't?), people saying that all such reports in the media must be denied. I hasten to point out that I am not quoting or referring to anyone in particular, and in particular to anyone here at DU.
One can't help but recall what Stokely Carmichael had to say -- reports of the circumstances and exact words vary, but no one denies that he said it:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Stokely_Carmichael The only position for women in SNCC is prone.
(cutting off discussion when women raised the issue of sexism during the 1964 SNCC conference)
I'm seeing just one more time when women are being told not to voice their concerns, not to report their experience, not to demand recognition of their reality, because it might be bad for someone or something else that is, once again, more important than them.
And I'm disgusted, and outraged, and not happy to see this going on all these years later.
I guess it would be better not to ask me whether I'm surprised.
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