One Hour in Paris: A True Story of Rape and Recovery by Karyn L. Freedman

Author:Karyn L. Freedman [Freedman, Karyn L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2014-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

4

Africa, 2008

I had been teaching philosophy at the University of Guelph for six years when I was granted a sabbatical leave for the academic year 2008–2009. My plan was to use that time to start writing this book, and to prepare myself for this task I decided that I wanted to go to central Africa and see firsthand what I had come to understand as ground zero in the war against women. I had been following news of that continent through the writing of the award-winning journalist Stephanie Nolen, the Africa correspondent for the Globe and Mail from 2003 to 2008 and author of 28: Stories of AIDS in Africa. Nolen’s empathetic and insightful reporting had helped Canadians understand the complexity of some of the issues surrounding HIV/AIDS in Africa, and in her remarkable book she succeeded in putting a human face to the almost unfathomable scale of the problem. Nolen had helped shape my understanding of some of the cultural nuances of sexual violence against women and children in Africa, and of the way gender figured into the spread of HIV/AIDS. Between Nolen and Stephen Lewis—erstwhile statesman of Canadian leftist politics, former UN special envoy to Africa on HIV/AIDS, erudite author of the best-selling Race Against Time, and currently one of the world’s foremost champions in the fight against HIV/AIDS—there was no mistaking that this was an epidemic of inequality.

Through the intricate layers of economics, politics, and geography, one picture remained clear in everything that I read about Africa: the heightened vulnerability of women and children on that continent. Rape was being used as a weapon of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo; rape was being used as a strategy against refugees in any number of conflict zones; and, according to the myth that virgin blood is a panacea for disease and illness, infant rape and baby rape were being used as a cure for AIDS in South Africa and elsewhere. In war or peace, it seemed, women and children were at high risk. What’s more, women and girls were the fastest growing demographic of people with HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, has reported that in certain African countries, girls between the ages of fifteen and nineteen are six times more likely to be HIV-positive than boys of the same age. This is partly due to the widespread incidence of rape, but it can also be read as a sign of women’s economic dependence on men, which makes it hard for them to negotiate appropriate sexual relations, including condom use, and boosts their reliance on transactional sex (the exchange of sex for money or material goods) for survival. The root of these problems in turn can be traced back to deep-seated structural inequalities between men and women.

Of course, problems associated with patriarchy are not exclusive to Africa. Gender discrimination and gender-based violence are universal. In Pakistan, estimates of women who suffer from spousal abuse range from 70 to 90 percent.

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