Ascent of Women (27 page)

Gender justice is being examined in developed countries as well. Canada, the United States, Scandinavia, Europe and Australia all made significant strides in equality rights for women in the last half of the twentieth century. But along the way, the rights of Aboriginal women were ignored, just as Aboriginal people themselves were left out of equality equations in nation-building. When Amnesty International accused Canada of
overlooking the possible serial killing of Aboriginal women in two reports, one written in 2003 and the next in 2009, they reminded Canadians that violence against Aboriginal women is a long-held and nasty secret. Their plight was the theme of George Ryga’s brilliant play,
The Ecstasy of Rita Joe
, first performed at Vancouver’s Playhouse in 1967. Later adapted as a ballet and translated into French, the play focused on violence perpetrated against the young Rita Joe at the hands of an entitled white society. When she was killed, nobody paid attention—which rang all too true in Canada.

So in 2003, when Amnesty International released its first report,
Stolen Sisters
, no one was really surprised that it addressed the fact that too many Aboriginal women were missing in western Canada and not enough attention was being paid by the Canadian government. The report opened with the story of a woman whose name had become a symbol of struggle and the miscarriage of justice for the country’s Aboriginal women.

Helen Betty Osborne was a 19-year-old Cree student from northern Manitoba who dreamed of becoming a teacher. On November 12, 1971, she was abducted by four white men in the town of The Pas and then sexually assaulted and brutally murdered. A provincial inquiry subsequently concluded that Canadian authorities had failed Helen Betty Osborne. The inquiry criticized the sloppy and racially biased police investigation that took more than 15 years to bring one of the four men to justice. Most disturbingly, the inquiry concluded that police had long been aware of white men sexually preying on Indigenous women and girls in The Pas but “did not feel that the practice necessitated any particular vigilance.”

The sixty-seven-page report ended with a pointed demand that the government do something about it.

Canadian officials have a clear and inescapable obligation to ensure the safety of Indigenous women, to bring those responsible for attacks against them to justice, and to address the deeper problems of marginalization, dispossession and impoverishment that have placed so many Indigenous women in harm’s way.

Amnesty International included a petition with the report and encouraged all Canadians to sign it on behalf of the Stolen Sisters. It reads:

Young Aboriginal women in Canada are at least five times more likely than other women in Canada to die as a result of violence. Not enough is being done to ensure that these crimes are adequately investigated, or to address the discrimination and impoverishment that put so many Aboriginal women in harm’s way. We, the undersigned, urge the Government of Canada to work with Aboriginal women and Aboriginal peoples’ organizations to develop a national plan of action to stop violence against Indigenous women. Such a plan of action must:

• Recognize the high levels of violence faced by Aboriginal women because they are Aboriginal women.

• Ensure effective, unbiased police response through appropriate training, resources and coordination.

• Improve public awareness and accountability through the consistent collection and publication of comprehensive national statistics on violent crime against Aboriginal women.

• Reduce the risk to Aboriginal women by closing the economic and social gap between Aboriginal and non Aboriginal people in Canada.

The petition got plenty of signatures. But successive governments failed to take action, instead obfuscating, delaying and basically ignoring the issue. For instance, when the House of Commons Standing Committee on the Status of Women released its final report on violence against Aboriginal women in December 2011, the Harper government completely ignored the report, as well as the input of the Aboriginal women who had appeared before the committee.

The Native Women’s Association along with the Canadian Feminist Alliance for International Action took their complaint to the UN. And the UN, in keeping with the resolutions it has written (and rarely acted on) on violence against women, decided in December 2011 to send a team to conduct an inquiry into the murders and disappearances of hundreds of Aboriginal women and girls in Canada, based on violations of the Convention for the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW).
*

Relying on the Amnesty International reports, the CEDAW committee noted that in 2008 the Canadian government had failed to live up to its obligations, and had failed again in 2010, stating, “The Committee considers that its recommendation
[regarding missing and murdered Aboriginal women and girls] has not been implemented and it requests the Canadian authorities to urgently provide further information on measures undertaken to address such concerns.” No information was forthcoming. So CEDAW called for its own investigation into a situation that Canada had refused to acknowledge.

When twenty-three independent experts from around the world came to Canada, a country that prides itself on being a defender of human rights, to investigate a national tragedy that the federal government had ignored, it was strong medicine for “the true north.” Mary Eberts, who acts as legal counsel for the Native Women’s Association says, “This is the first time CEDAW has done an investigation in a developed country. It’s a big black eye for Canada.”

The inquiry wasn’t a criminal investigation; it was more about asking questions and writing a report for the UN. Although their findings have not been made public, it is already known that Aboriginal women in Canada experience rates of violence three and a half times higher than non-Aboriginal women, and young Aboriginal women are five times more likely to die by violence. Aboriginal women in Australia, New Zealand and the United States and much of Central America also suffer from increased violence as well as poorer health and more poverty.

Eberts has no hope for government action even when the UN report does come out because “officials are woefully bad at doing due diligence. Nothing happens because of indifference.” But that doesn’t mean the report won’t have an effect, she says. “Women have to stop relying on governments to make change. Politicians love to talk about change; they talk for years about water quality, about Aboriginals, about the environment. But the
resistance to change is endemic. CEDAW doesn’t have the clout to make Canada do anything. But this report will build awareness with Canadians.”

Cindy Blackstock, the executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, is preparing for action. “Within the hierarchy of First Nations, women have one of the most sacred roles—we are the life givers. With every generation there comes a chance to make the world anew. We have the possibility as women to truly shape the future, the future of humanity.”

~

During the past decade, women’s rights have shifted from the margins to the centre of discourse in international law after a collection of conferences provided the tools for change: the United Nations Decade for Women, the Vienna Declaration on Violence against Women and the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing. The sea change today is that women are ready to talk, and everyone knows that if you can talk about it, you can change it.

It takes men and women together to make a healthier, safer and more prosperous future. From Molly Melching, the woman who invited the religious leaders to help her group lead the way to ending female genital mutilation in Senegal, to Hangama Anwari, the human rights commissioner who enlisted the mullahs in Afghanistan to reform family law, to Cindy Blackstock, the Canadian advocate for Aboriginal women, to the economists and policy-makers who are calling for the recognition of women’s beneficial impact on wealth making and well-being: all these people are seeking changes that are not only good for women but
for men too. They are calling violence what it is. They are tackling inequality where it is. They are finding the courage to stand up to brutality and say, “Never again.”

They are understanding that the ascent of women is good for everyone.

*
Like most countries, Canada is a signatory to CEDAW and also to the Optional Protocol, which outlines a process for initiating an inquiry when the CEDAW Committee receives “reliable information indicating grave or systemic violations.”

SEVEN

The Final Frontier

Women themselves can be the agent of their own change.

— W
INNIE
K
AMAU
,
law professor,
University of Nairobi, Kenya

I
n 1969, twelve women met at a workshop in Boston, Massachusetts, whose topic was “women and their bodies.” What eventually came out of that get-together was groundbreaking. The women asked each other such questions as, how come doctors are the arbiters of a woman’s body? Why aren’t women making their own decisions about their health? Where was the knowledge women needed?

The sixties had been a heady decade for Western women, as one group of equality seekers after another challenged the status quo in everything from health, to education, to marriage, to careers. The Boston dozen decided to research and gather the information women needed about their own bodies and ended up coming together in a book collective to publish
Our Bodies, Ourselves
, which soon became not only a blockbuster bestseller but a requisite for women, who had long pondered the mysteries of menstruation and acne, pregnancy and birthing, birth control and menopause, yet had accepted that a doctor’s opinion and instruction was all they needed. The new generation digging into
Our Bodies, Ourselves
insisted that they’d make their own decisions.

Although much has changed, the final frontier for women is still having control over our own bodies, whether in zones of conflict, in rural villages, on university campuses or in kitchens. In 2009, Farida Shaheed, the UN expert on culture, did a multi-country research project, “Women’s Empowerment in Muslim Contexts: gender, poverty and democratization from the inside out,” exploring these truths: “It is clear that women can be empowered in the marketplace but not in the bedroom. You can have this right but not that right. You’re allowed to go out to work but not allowed to socialize.” Like most researchers in this area today, she feels that the problem won’t be solved until men get involved. “This is holistic because you can’t change society by changing only half of it.”

Comments such as “I only tapped her—you can’t call that hitting” and “She’s my wife—I have every right to have sex with her whenever I want” are still common responses from men who think they own women’s bodies. For women, that lack of control has at times only held us back but at other times has oppressed and brutalized us. In the past five decades, laws have changed, attitudes have altered, misogyny has been exposed. But rape has persisted as a tool of war, a weapon to oppress women and a power play by men.

Joanna Kerr, the director of Action Aid in Johannesburg, South Africa, says that despite the international conventions countries have signed, “It’s really local power brokers … whether it’s fathers, whether it’s priests, whether it’s moms, whether it’s grandmothers … who want to determine how girls and women dress, when they will marry, have children, how they will space their children. Having control over our own bodies is the final frontier for us.”

The publication of
Our Bodies, Ourselves
launched the conversation in North America in the seventies, but in much of the world there’s been a taboo against discussing related topics—marriage, sex and the right to self-determination when it comes to reproduction. Some of the most merciless acts of violence have been committed against women who simply had no recourse when someone else decided whom they would marry and when the marriage would take place. Abuse is also a result of a presumption of ownership once a woman is betrothed. And there is a long-accepted view that the violence used against women in the home is a private matter. But now women in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere are engaged in a conversation they dared not have before. They’re challenging laws and cultural norms and religious doctrine in order to strip away the misogyny and take control of their bodies.

It is savvy young girls and feisty women who are setting an example in places that still follow ancient traditions; their courage and tenacity are leading to changes most people thought impossible.

~

Having the right to choose your own husband and the age at which you will get married is an important piece of the final frontier for women and girls. But being regarded as the equal of your husband after you are married—in particular, having the right to refuse to have sex with your husband—is another.

This was the frontier I was researching when I travelled to Kenya in 2010 to write a story about the first project of the Equality Effect. I started this book by describing their unprecedented
initiative to help 160 girls in Kenya sue the government for failing to protect them from being raped. As the book goes to press, that case has gone to court. But before it began, the Equality Effect had launched their first groundbreaking program in Africa, called Three to Be Free.

In the past three decades, while human rights have become the new standard in much of the world, even in Afghanistan, the rights of women in many African countries haven’t budged. African women are treated as chattel and are vulnerable to ghastly forms of violence. Since women have no right to say no to sex, they have become the face of HIV/AIDS. Family violence hasn’t been curbed even a little, and marital rape is legal. All of which means that sexual assault is state-endorsed violence and a form of social punishment for married women.