Disturbing The Peace: UN Peacekeepers and Sexual Abuse (Part 2: Unabated Horrors)

By Devon Bowers

Author’s Note: This article and series focuses on sexual abuse and assault, with some graphic descriptions of such acts. Reader discretion is advised.

Nearing the end of the 20th century, there was an increase in United Nations peacekeeping missions around the world. While there were positive efforts to maintain and/or create peaceful environments where non-violent solutions could be pursued in war-torn nations, there was also a dark underbelly to these operations. Most prominently that peacekeepers would regularly abuse primarily women and girls, many of them having already fallen victim to government and rebel forces, they were to be victimized yet again but by the very people who should have provided security and stability.

Still worse, the United Nations itself would engage in cover ups of the abuse, hanging victims out to dry and suffer in silence. With the turn of the century, one would hope that there would new efforts would be put forth and sought after to hold abusers accountable, yet the horrors would continue unabated.

Ethiopia and Eritrea

In 1998, violence broke out between the neighboring African nations of Ethiopia and Eritrea regarding a border dispute, with the Organization of African Unity mediating a sort of peace between them, yet clashes occurred again in May 2000, ending with the OAU working out a cessation of hostilities and the UN sending in a peacekeeping mission to monitor the ceasefire and the border dispute in July 2000.[1]

The very next year it was reported that a former member of the Italian contingency had been involved in abuse, specifically the Italian military justice system was investigating them “for allegedly having sex with underage girls while serving in the Mission area.”[2] That same year, three Danish soldiers were sent home and charged with having sex with a thirteen year old Eritrean girl. This, coupled with the Italian story, enraged the local populace, with “diaspora Eritreans [accusing] UNMEE of trying to destroy their country by ‘bringing their sick nature with them.’”[3]

Though there were few reported incidents of abuse throughout the entire mission, it reveals that the cancer that is sexual abuse was still strong in peacekeeping operations.

Liberia

In September 2003, then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan requested that a peacekeeping force be deployed to Liberia to support the transitional government in their attempt to establish order and legitimacy, primarily stemming from the second Liberian civil war, with forces being deployed that month.[4]

The chief of the UN mission, Jacques Paul Klein, a French UN diplomat, emphasized that the zero-tolerance rule for sexual misconduct would be enforced and that anyone caught having sex with minors would be summarily repatriated.[5] Despite these reassurances and even the enforcement of a midnight curfew, abuse still occurred.

An internal UN letter from 2004, written by a UN Children’s Fund representative to the mission’s second-highest ranking official, stated that “girls as young as 12 years of age are engaged in prostitution, forced into sex acts and sometimes photographed by UN peacekeepers in exchange for $10 or food or other commodities,”[6] noted the failure to address several misconduct reports, and that the U.N. Deputy Secretary General, Louise Frechette, was pressuring leadership to crack down on sexual abuse.[7]

This information of the abuse of young girls was made all the worse when the UK branch of the children-oriented humanitarian organization Save The Children published a 2005 report which found that “girls as young as eight were selling sex for items such as food, beer, clothing, perfume or mobile phones [while others] were reported as having sex with adults in return for good school grades, video screenings or rides in cars”[8] and those bribing and raping these girls were primarily UN peacekeepers and agency staff. There was a stark hypocrisy as these same individuals would promote anti-sexual exploitation and abuse narratives, but would partake in that very exploitation on their off hours.

The girls would actively sell themselves to peacekeepers and aid workers as a way to make money, but there was still risk. Beyond getting sexually transmitted infections, if a girl were to become pregnant, they would quickly be disowned and blamed for their situation, despite her parents enjoying the extra funds that were being produced.[9]

The situation was extremely predatory, with “children [being] viewed as potential sexual conquests.” One example is Oretha, 15, and her 16 year old sister Sarah, who “go to the town's [Foya’s] main highway and beg from foreign aid workers in NGO-branded 4x4s who give them the equivalent of 40 pence [$0.54 USD] in exchange for sex.” If the highways were bare, “they go to the base where the UN peacekeepers are stationed and ask for food, but they say the peacekeepers, too, expect sex in return.”[10] The allegations of purchasing sex came up again in 2015 when a report from the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services noted that peacekeepers in Liberia were purchasing sex by offering money, jewelry, and cell phones, among a variety of items used to bribe and lure victims.[11] This effectively created a free-for-all of sorts where peacekeepers can abuse women and girls, with little to no concern in being held responsible for their actions.

While testimonies and reports are useful in examining the level of abuse that occurs, statistics help to create an even fuller picture, however even if one looks at the numbers, it is impossible to get an encompassing analysis.

The Numbers Game

In March 2007, the UN reported some positive changes regarding sexual abuse allegations, namely that the number of assaults in Liberia decreased from 45 to 30, with programs such as “a compulsory induction course for all military and civilian staff members to raise awareness about the effects and consequences of sexual exploitation and abuse”[12] and training local NGOs to spread the message about the UN’s program on preventing such abuse being credited for the decline. However, we have to question the numbers as there are serious problems with how they are calculated. There are two main problems: 1) the sole reliance of reporting of cases as a way of gathering data and the larger issues that stem from that and 2) the actual statistical data being so muddled that it is, at the very least, extremely difficult to get any hard numbers on the matter.

Though the UN touts its zero-tolerance policy, it is extremely important to note that the entire policy depends on people reporting abuse. While there may be actions that are an attempt to mitigate the chances of sexual abuse happening, overall, the ability of the UN to enforce its zero-tolerance policy is extremely difficult[13], as can be seen in the form of patrols. Patrols looking to curb and enforce sexual abuse laws still have difficulties as

situations that may be seen as suspicious with regards to SEA [sexual exploitation and abuse] often end up going unreported and unpunished or, if reported, garnering only a minor punishment. A typical example – and one we witnessed personally – is when a mission staffer is caught with a local person in the car. Because the couple (in this case a male UN employee and female local, in a UN vehicle parked by the side of the road at ten o’clock on a Friday night) was not caught en flagrante and neither admitted any wrongdoing (indeed, the woman slipped out of the car and quickly vanished), the end result was that the employee would only be reported as having an unauthorized personnel in his vehicle. [14]

Rather than deal similar problems through the proper channels, it was dealt with internally, generally resulting only in a peacekeeper losing their driver’s license. Not only does this deprive the victims of justice, but it also helps to skew reported numbers of sexual abuse, making the problem seem less prevalent than it actually is. Just as bad, however, is that even if there are reports from third parties, it’s almost impossible to substantiate the accusations due to the lack of physical evidence or eyewitnesses. Many times, when a victim comes forward, it devolves into a ‘he said, she said’ situation, again making enforcement near impossible.

A secondary problem with relying on reporting as the primary means of enforcing sexual abuse rules is that it assumes that sending up such incidents is a unit priority, that “reporting cases of SEA will trump other priorities – such as loyalty to colleagues or a desire not to get involved in someone else’s private life.”[15] To those ends, it has been found that many peacekeepers have an idea of what is and isn’t ‘legitimate’ sexual abuse and will act on those ideas when deciding whether or not to report.

The situation was looked at in-depth in 2013 when an independent report was conducted which evaluated the sexual abuse prevention efforts in UN missions in Haiti, Liberia, the Congo, and South Sudan, respectively. The team of was composed of General Paban J. Thapa, a retired Force Commander of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan, Dr. Thelma Awori, a retired Assistant Secretary General of UNDP Africa, and Dr. Catherine Lutz, a professor at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University.

It was brought to light that there were a number of bureaucratic issues that resulted in a decrease in reports being sent up, such as:

 1) That there were multiple routes for reporting which created problems when attempting to track cases.

2) The lack of information sharing between the Office of Internal Oversight Services, the Conduct and Discipline team, and the military/police.

3) The military police weren’t out in the field, which denied “the Force Commander information about conduct and discipline that could be used to enforce the SEA policy and regulations.”[16]

4) There were poor investigation methods, which creates problems when trying to prosecute a case due to lack of evidence or evidence not meeting a high standard.

5) There was generally “a culture of enforcement avoidance, with managers feeling powerless to enforce anti-SEA rules, a culture of silence around reporting and discussing cases, and a culture of extreme caution with respect to the rights of the accused, and little accorded to the rights of the victim.”[17]

All of the problems reinforce one another, resulting in the victims being thrown away and ignored, while priority is given to abusers whose protection is multi-layered.

The conspiracy of silence even extended to victims, as many peacekeepers would simply pay them off and go about their way while the peacekeepers who would stand up for the protections and rights of victims would be stigmatized by their peers.[18]

Academic Kate Grady conducted a study on UN abuse statistics, which found in part that “the manner in which this data has been collated, presented and explained raises a number of questions as to the reliability of these statistics.”[19] For example, in 2004, statistics were provided on ‘cases,’ however the term itself was never defined and in subsequent UN reports, there was the use of phrases such as ‘allegations’ and ‘cases,’ which still lacked any definition.[20]

In 2007, a sliver of insight was provided regarding these terms, with a footnote explaining that “it should be noted that these numbers do not reflect the number of alleged perpetrators nor victims, as multiple allegations could correspond to one alleged perpetrator” and “conversely, a single allegation may be made in respect of more than one individual.” However, in later years, “the reports explain that ‘each allegation may involve more than one possible victim,’ but do not say whether any allegations cover more than one perpetrator.”[21] The lack of definitive definitions and explanations as to the details of each case or allegation and if they involve one peacekeeper and one victim or multiple peacekeepers with a single or multiple victims results in not only a dearth of understanding regarding sexual abuse, but also an inability to get a full view of the amount of abuse that is occurring.

The situation seems to be that the UN isn’t even attempting to measure the amount of abuse, but is rather “measuring the number of communications it receives about incidents of sexual exploitation and abuse.” Yet that leads to a different problem altogether, as it could mean that the measuring methods of these communications could result in having “incidents involving multiple victims or multiple perpetrators are masked since they are treated as only one allegation.”[22] This situation is made all the worse as the UN doesn’t say if it is able to account for cases that have been doubly reported and adjust accordingly.

On some level, there was an attempt to remedy this as UN Secretary General, António Guterres, stated that he would seek support in establishing a centralized repository of cases, which would be under the Special Coordinator on Improving the United Nations Response to Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, with the goals of “[accelerating] the provision of appropriate aid to victims, [helping] to regularize the initiation of appropriate administrative and criminal investigations, and [providing] system-wide empirical data for more in-depth analysis of events to aid in understanding patterns of misconduct, in order to devise more effective preventive measures.”[23] However, the overall bureaucratic and linguistic problems still majorly contribute to the underreporting of abuse cases.

Burundi

In 2004, UN peacekeepers were sent to Burundi to aid in a national reconciliation attempt to end the civil war between Hutus and Tutsis.[24]

From the outset, the UN was adamant about preventing sexual abuse, with head of the mission and Canadian diplomat, Carolyn McAskie stating in an interview that the UN was enacting plans to curb the chances of abuse happening, such as having certain areas of a town be considered off limits and the threat of dismissal being used for troops who attempt to solicit prostitutes.[25]

This was followed up by discussions with battalion commanders on the issue and creating some level of accountability by having commanders face increased scrutiny as greater training and accountability was implemented. There was also a policy change which required that members report abuse, even if it was only suspect.[26]

Unfortunately, abuse still took place, with two peacekeepers being found guilty of having sex with prostitutes, one of whom was a minor.[27] Thankfully, that was the only reported case and the UN departed in 2007.

Ivory Coast

UN peacekeepers deployed to the Ivory Coast in 2004 to aid in ending the nation’s civil war and guiding it to have free and fair presidential elections.[28]

In 2007, the UN began to investigate serious accusations of abuse involving Moroccan soldiers having sex with “a large number of underage girls,”[29] which resulted in an entire battalion being confined to their barracks.

More information on the amount of abuse that was going on was brought to light via Save The Children with their 2008 report entitled No One To Turn To: The Under-reporting of Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by Aid Workers and Peacekeepers.

Based on field work done in Southern Sudan, Côte d’Ivoire and Haiti, it was found that “children as young as six [were] trading sex with aid workers and peacekeepers in exchange for food, money, soap and, in a very few cases, luxury items such as mobile phones.”[30] There was even testimony from Ivory Coast children who discussed what went on in their respective towns. One boy stated that the peacekeepers “[asked] them for various types of favors,” while others went into more detail:

Sometimes they ask us to find them girls. They especially ask us for girls of our age. Often it will be between eight and ten men who will share two or three girls. When I suggest an older girl, they say that they want a young girl, the same age as us.

[…]

For us, we said to ourselves that even if it is bad, we are gaining something from it too. So we continue because we then get the benefits, such as money, new t-shirts, souvenirs, watches and tennis shoes. They also used their mobile phones to film the girls.[31]

The utter lack of morality in these peacekeepers is truly revealed here in that they are literally using children as middle men in order to abuse and denigrate other children, going about and bribing people who are in desperate need of bare necessities and preying upon them. The worst aspect is that local authorities weren’t able to unable to prosecute the perpetrators, in spite of knowing their identities, due to insufficient evidence and lack of cooperation.[32]

The use of bribing underage girls for sex was further confirmed in 2011 when a U.S. Embassy cable was released by Wikileaks. The cable focused on peacekeepers from Benin that were in the town of Toulepleu, where it was found that “parents were encouraging their daughters to sleep with the peacekeepers so they would provide for them.”[33] This only reveals the extent to which the abuse had been normalized, to the point that parents would encourage their children to sleep with UN troops. A total of 16 Beninese peacekeepers were subsequently barred.[34]

Still, some were never punished, such as in 2008, when it was reported that that ten UN peacekeepers gang-raped a 13 year old girl, with her saying that they grabbed her, threw her on the ground, and raped her. ‘Elizabeth’ stated “I was terrified. Then they just left me there bleeding.”[35] Yet no action was taken against the soldiers and worse, it was found that aid workers had been sexually abusing children, both boys and girls. There was also the case of fourteen Moroccan soldiers, where information “including DNA evidence showing that some had fathered children” [36] was considered inconclusive and so the Moroccan government dropped all charges against the soldiers.

The mission came to a close in 2017.

Haiti

During February 2004, among the US-motivated and deeply controversial[37] departure of Haitian president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the UN moved in to clamp down on the fighting that sparked up in multiple cities around the country.[38]

At the start of the operation, it seemed that the zero-tolerance policy was taken seriously, with one high level military commander saying that he was “very concerned about sexual exploitation” with a senior police official adding that its wrongness “[needed] be drummed into people. It has to be reinforced all the time.”[39] Despite these strong assertions of zero tolerance, many Haitians were not convinced that the UN took the issue seriously.

In February 2005, two UN soldiers were suspended after having sex with a prostitute[40], however, this was only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the interactions between prostitutes and UN forces. The humanitarian organization Refugees International issued a report where it was stated that “prostitutes haunt the streets every evening and hang out in many of the bars frequented by UN staff,”[41] with one Haitian man saying that such establishments actively fed into the increase in prostitution and that the police were even involved.

Bolstering the argument that the UN presence aided in the proliferation of prostitution, a Haitian women’s group stated: “We’ve seen an increase in prostitution since MINUSTAH came. In 1994, we had a lot of problems with the Multinational Forces. The [peacekeepers] bring their bad habits with them to Haiti, but they do not bring change.”[42]

Interestingly enough, the ‘zero contact’ policy that was enacted in Haiti led to “increased complaints of sexual harassment by UN female personnel, both local and international,”[43] which when added onto the reluctance of victims to come forward, created a de facto wall of silence which restricted the UN’s ability to investigate allegations and get a full understanding of the problem.

The peacekeepers often contributed to larger, ongoing problems in Haiti. Violence, both physical and sexual, already came from criminals and the Haitian National Police. So the UN peacekeepers, primarily the ones from Brazil and Jordan[44], simply added on yet another layer of destruction, pain, and misery for a populace that was already bearing massive political and economic burden. This was made all the worse when those peacekeepers were the ones who would supposedly bring protection and stability but delivered the opposite.

In late 2006, the BBC revealed the amount of sexual abuse that was ongoing in Haiti, with one 11 year old girl reporting sexual abuse by peacekeepers. Another 14 year old girl described her personal horror of having been abducted and raped inside a UN naval base two years prior, where “despite detailed medical and circumstantial evidence, the allegation was dismissed by the UN for lack of evidence”[45] and the attacker was repatriated to their nation of origin.

There were peacekeepers who would regularly take advantage of the cash-strapped and desperate population for their own depraved ends, with one incident occurring of a “14-year-old girl who told of the peacekeeper who offered her jelly, sweets and a few dollars for sex with her and her friend - a child of just 11 years.”[46] BBC reporter Mike Williams told of one especially horrific story.

Sarah (not her real name) is a fragile looking girl of 16. She says that two years ago, she was raped by a Brazilian soldier serving with the UN mission there.

She stared at the ground while we talked and, almost in a whisper, she explained what happened: "He held me down by the arms and held both my wrists, twisting them back and we struggled together. And then he raped me."

Her mother cried while she recalled that day: "When I found her I didn't recognize my own child," she says. "She had the face of a dead person - I started to cry out, she couldn't tell me what had happened."[47]

Once again, there was insufficient evidence to find the perpetrator guilty of any crimes. This was a regular occurrence unfortunately.

In some cases, there would be problems due to relatives, such as with ‘Natasha,’ who was raped by a Sri Lankan peacekeeper in 2004, but whose mother forbade her from making a complaint for two years due to the stigma attached to rape.[48] Such actions only helped to muddy the waters with regards to testimony and evidence, effectively aiding the offending party in avoiding justice. Though one of the UN’s biggest miscarriages of justice would happen in 2011.

In September 2011, a video began circulating on the internet which showed a Haitian man being sexually assaulted by a group of Uruguayan peacekeepers. Eventually it was found that the assault had occurred in July, but the video, which showed four UN troops attacking Johnny Jean, only surfaced in the following months.

Two young Haitian men had come across the video while looking at a peacekeeper’s cell phone when they were exchanging music and one of the men recognized Jean and transferred the video to his own personal device, turning the video over to a local journalist soon after. The two men later met with a UN official who immediately denied any allegations, but was then shown the video.[49]

A preliminary investigation done by the UN “found that the men did not sexually abuse the Haitian teen but that they committed misconduct by allowing a civilian into their barrack and could face severe penalties,”[50] however, this is in direct conflict with information provided by medical professionals which proved that Jean “had sustained injuries consistent with having been sexually assaulted,”[51] as well as the video itself being sexual in nature. It should be emphasized, though, that there was evidence of sexual assault not just in the immediate aftermath, but could still be found five weeks after the incident.[52] From the beginning of the situation, not only do we see the immediate denial by UN officials, but then further rejection of something that is crystal clear.

Eventually, the accused soldiers were freed due to the case having stalled,[53] the details of which are rather intriguing. Jean was scheduled to testify against his attackers, with a UN spokesperson stating that the soldiers would be free until Jean could be located to provide his testimony, however he had to actually be in Uruguay to testify. [54] Actions such as these simply reinforce an observation made by the US Institute of Peace, which noted that there was a need to create effective programs to assist victims, especially when they themselves nor the UN were unable to hold abusers accountable. [55]

Another travesty of justice would take place in 2012 when Pakistani peacekeepers were accused of sexually assaulting a 14 year old boy. UN spokesperson Martin Nesirky stated that Pakistani authorities had said that the guilty individuals would be punished, “including through dishonorable discharge from service with loss of benefits and imprisonment, the latter sentence to be served immediately on return to Pakistan.”[56] Unfortunately, the punishment was laughable, as the perpetrators only served a single year in prison.[57] Even worse, was how the UN dealt with it. They agreed to have the soldiers tried in a closed trial at a Pakistani military court and took at face value assurances that there would be financial compensation for the victims. Unsurprisingly, no compensation occurred, the troops were essentially given a slap on the wrist, and Pakistani soldiers still continued going over to Haiti, unabated.

UN Assistant Secretary for Field Support, Anthony Banbury, gave some major insight when he spoke to the New York Times about the case: “People can always say punishment was too light or whatever, but the system worked as it should.”[58] (emphasis added) In doing so, he reveals that the manner in which the system works is that the UN plays dumb and pretends that national militaries will try their soldiers fairly, while making no effort to hold them accountable, and willingly leaves victims out to dry.

Similarly to Liberia and the Ivory Coast, peacekeepers in Haiti were found to have transactional sex with women in exchange for basic needs like cash, food, medication, and more. The UN’s Office of Internal Oversight stated in the aforementioned draft report that there was “significant underreporting” of abuse and noted further problems, most prominently how “a third of alleged sexual abuse involves people younger than 18, [assistance] to victims is ‘severely deficient,”[59] and that investigations regularly took over a year to complete.

The year 2015 actually saw an increase in sexual abuse cases, with a total of 99 compared to 80 in 2014.[60] A UN report stated that the Secretary General would work within his authority to ensure that abusers would be held responsible “through disciplinary actions or criminal accountability measures when so warranted” and that the Secretary General “was determined to take measures to prevent misconduct.”[61] To those ends, a number of new initiatives were to be launched, including a mandatory e-learning program on sexual abuse, asking that troop contributing nations’ pre-deployment training be up to UN standards, and the development of a complaint reception mechanism to encourage people to come forward.[62]

In the following years, there was also a change to policy as António Guterres, a Portuguese politician and diplomat, took over from Ban Ki-Moon in 2017. The new Secretary General wanted all personnel to have written statements saying that they understood and would abide by the UN’s policy against sexual exploitation and abuse.[63]

New ideas were being put into place, senior leaders were to issue management letters to “their governing bodies certifying that all allegations have been reported and appropriate action is taken on them,” screening mechanisms would work to ensure that abusers weren’t able to leave one element of the UN only to be hired in another, and anyone involved in field activities would “be required to carry the ‘no excuses’ pocket card that restates our rules and spell out how to report allegations,”[64] among other reforms.

On the topic of aiding victims, little was done. The UN Field Support Chief, Atul Khare, an Indian diplomat, spoke of the creation of a trust fund to get victims the psychological, medical, and legal help they needed, though he did note “It would be funded voluntarily, but also from the salaries withheld from those who face significant allegations which have been substantiated.”[65] This simply hearkens back to the problem that victims are not prioritized in the process of seeking justice. Unfortunately, these changes would not be enough to prevent some of the most egregious abuse that was to occur during the mission.

In 2007, it was uncovered that over 100 Sri Lankan peacekeepers were alleged to have engaged in sexual abuse and were sent packing. More specifically they were accused of transactional sex, with UN spokeswoman Michele Montas adding that “there is the question of some underage girls.”[66] More horrors were to come though, as these allegations didn’t stop other Sri Lankans from coming over to aid in operations. The Associated Press broke the story in 2017, in which they found a child sex ring was ongoing, where young girls were regularly abused.

The Sri Lankan peacekeepers wanted sex from girls and boys as young as 12. “I did not even have breasts,” said a girl, known as V01 — Victim No. 1. She told U.N. investigators that over the next three years, from ages 12 to 15, she had sex with nearly 50 peacekeepers, including a “Commandant” who gave her 75 cents.[67]

It was found that between 2004 and 2007, 134 Sri Lankan peacekeepers, at minimum, exploited nine children. Not a single person was imprisoned.

Interestingly enough, the UN data, which draws information focused on sexual abuse over a 12 year period, was found to be incomplete, varying in the amount of details especially for cases before 2010, and that “hundreds of cases were closed with little or no explanation.”[68] (emphasis added) While the soldiers involved in the sex ring were sent home, they were” still in the Sri Lankan military as of [2016]”[69] and the UN still took soldiers from Sri Lanka and sent them to Haiti in spite of the child sex ring.

A Sri Lankan general, Major General Jagath Dias, was sent in 2013 to investigate the matter, though he may not have been the best person for the job due to the fact that he was most likely a war criminal, who stood “accused of attacking civilians and bombing a church, a hospital and other humanitarian outposts in 2009, during the fierce last months of Sri Lanka’s civil war.”[70] The AP found that “Sri Lanka has never prosecuted a single soldier for sexual assault or sexual misconduct while serving in a peacekeeping mission abroad.” (emphasis added) Undeterred by the accusations against the general and the lack of discipline in the Sri Lankan army, the U.N. still accepted Dias as the investigator and said they were “working with the Sri Lankan government on enhanced screening for prospective peacekeepers,”[71] such as providing a backlog for all soldiers they send over so they could be screened by the UN.

While the mission ended in 2017[72], there were still lingering effects, especially for the children who had been fathered by peacekeepers. Haitians created new terms to describe them, “bébés casques bleus (blue helmet babies) or ‘les enfants abandonnés par la MINUSTAH’ (the children who are abandoned by the MINUSTAH),”[73] something that denotes how they were ‘othered’ in a way and a group distinct from average Haitians.

The peacekeepers created major rifts in Haiti, as they would make lavish promises to girls, “they would say that they are going to pay for their school, allow them to go to the university”[74] but nothing would materialize.

These false promises would lead to frustration later on for women who wound up birthing these peacekeeper’s children, where the mother would be the sole provider. Many of these girls were under the age of 18 at the time of their relationships with UN troops and when they had children with them, which caused a rift in not only their familial relations, as was expounded upon by one woman:

Now, the child is 4 years old and I haven’t ever received support from an NGO, from the Brazilians, from the Haitian state. It’s only me that’s giving to the child to eat because I can’t pay for school for the child… When I was with the Brazilian, I was 14 years old. I went to school at a Christian school. When I became pregnant, my father kicked me out of the house. And now I do work for someone who gives me 25 gourdes [about $0.35 USD] so that me and my child can eat.[75]

While the soldiers left, the scars of abuse echoed and lingered, casting a dark, haunting shadow over the island nation.

Sudan

In 2005, following the implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, which formally ended Sudan’s 21 year civil war, the UN dispatched soldiers in order to aid in its implementation, demine areas, and help repatriate refugees.[76]

Within two years, the UN was already sending soldiers back home. January 2007 saw four Bangladeshi soldiers being sent home for alleged sexual abuse.[77] That same month, it was reported that “peacekeeping and civilian staff based in Juba are accused of picking up young children and forcing them to have sex,”[78] with peacekeepers raping and abusing children as young as 12, with it having begun in 2005 and indications emerging within months of international troops initially arriving. Due to the economic disparities, some people who were abused want to continue the situation in order to have at least some money, such as was with one 14 year old boy by the name of Jonas who told of his own abuse.

"A man in a white car drove past and asked me if I wanted to get into the car with him. I saw that the car was a UN car because it was white with the black letters on it. The man had a badge on his clothes. When he stopped the car, we got out, he put a blindfold on me and started to abuse me. It was painful and went on for a long time. When it was over we went back to the place we had been, and he pushed me out of the car and left."

Jonas now returns to the same place regularly in the hope of being picked up and paid something for his services. "I know it is a terrible thing to do but I see the UN cars around late at night by the drinking places and I sit there in the hope of being picked up. If I get 1000 SD ($3) a day then that is a good day."[79]

Not much abuse was reported, but the fact that something like this was going on for two years coupled with there being known cases of under-reporting, only shows that abuse was occurring, but not reported on in the media. The very fact that victims would continue their own abuse to have money highlights the desperation and depravity of the situation.

While the UN Sudan mission ended in 2011, when South Sudan became its own nation[80], forces remained in Darfur until 2020.[81] Still, another mission was set up immediately in the new nation of South Sudan. The UN still has ongoing missions and in those can be seen an echo of cold and uncaring environment for victims that has been perpetuated for three decades.

Notes

[1] United Nations Peacekeeping, Ethiopia and Eritrea - UNMEE – Background, https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/mission/past/unmee/background.html

[2] United Nations, UN Mission in Ethiopia, Eritrea to probe misconduct charges against former peacekeeper, https://news.un.org/en/story/2001/08/11652-un-mission-ethiopia-eritrea-probe-misconduct-charges-against-former-peacekeeper (August 27, 2001)

[3] Elise Fredrikke Barth, Karen Hostens, Louise Olsson, Inger Skjelsbæk, Gender Aspects of Conflict Interventions: Intended and Unintended Consequences, Peace Research Institute Oslo Center on Gender, Peace, and Security, https://gps.prio.org/utility/DownloadFile.ashx?id=1133&type=publicationfile, pg 13

[4] The New Humanitarian, Annan asks for 15,000 UN peacekeepers for Liberia, https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/report/46188/liberia-annan-asks-15000-un-peacekeepers-liberia (September 16, 2003)

[5] Relief Web, Sexual exploitation in Liberia: Are the conditions ripe for another scandal? https://reliefweb.int/report/liberia/sexual-exploitation-liberia-are-conditions-ripe-another-scandal (April 20, 2004)

[6] The New Humanitarian, UNMIL investigating alleged sexual misconduct by peacekeepers in four incidents, https://www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news/2005/05/03/unmil-investigating-alleged-sexual-misconduct-peacekeepers-four-incidents (May 3, 2005)

[7] Colum Lynch, “U.N. Faces More Accusations of Sexual Misconduct,” Washington Post, March 13, 2005 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A30286-2005Mar12.html)

[8] David Fickling, “Aid staff abusing Liberian children, charity says,” The Guardian, May 8, 2006 (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2006/may/08/westafrica.davidfickling)

[9] Ibid

[10] Jenny Kleeman, “Liberia’s childhood horror,” The Guardian, October 16, 2009 (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/oct/16/liberia-rape)

[11] James Butty, “UN Peacekeepers in Liberia Accused of Buying Sex,” Voice of America News, June 12, 2015 (https://www.voanews.com/africa/un-peacekeepers-liberia-accused-buying-sex)

[12] UN News, UN in Liberia report shows decline in sex abuse allegations; envoy says some progress, https://news.un.org/en/story/2007/03/211582-un-liberia-report-shows-decline-sex-abuse-allegations-envoy-says-some-progress (March 9, 2007)

[13] Kathleen M. Jennings, Protecting Whom? Approaches to Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in UN Peacekeeping Operations, Fafo Research Foundation, http://lastradainternational.org/lsidocs/fafo_approaches_abuse_0309.pdf (2008), pg 25

[14] Ibid, pg 26

[15] Ibid, pg 28

[16] Thelma Awori, Catherine Lutz, Paban J. Thapa, Final Report: Expert Mission to Evaluate Risks to SEA Prevention Efforts  in MINUSTAH, UNMIL, MONUSCO, and UNMISS, https://web.archive.org/web/20150709034934/http://www.aidsfreeworld.org/Newsroom/Press-Releases/2015/~/media/Files/Peacekeeping/2013%20Expert%20Team%20Report%20FINAL.pdf (November 3, 2013), pg 3

[17] Ibid

[18] Ibid, pg 7

[19] Kate Grady, “Sex, Statistics, Peacekeepers and Power: UN Data on Sexual Exploitation and Abuse and the Quest for Legal Reform,” Modern Law Review 79:6 (November 2016), pg 936

[20] Ibid

[21] Ibid, pg 937

[22] Ibid

[23] United Nations, General Assembly, Special measures for protection from sexual exploitation and abuse: a new approach, A/71/818, February 28, 2017 (https://peacekeeping.un.org/sites/default/files/sg_report_a_71_818_special_measures_for_protection_from_sexual_exploitation_and_abuse.pdf), pg 11

[24] UN Peacekeeping, The United Nations in Burundi: Peacekeeping Mission Completes its Mandate, https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/mission/past/onub/photos.pdf (December 31, 2006)

[25] Relief Web, IRIN interview with Carolyn McAskie, head of the UN peacekeeping mission in Burundi, https://reliefweb.int/report/burundi/irin-interview-carolyn-mcaskie-head-un-peacekeeping-mission-burundi (November 5, 2004)

[26] Global Policy Forum, UN Reforms Aim to End Sexual Abuse by Peacekeepers, https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/199/40951.html (May 25, 2005)

[27] BBC, UN sex abuse sackings in Burundi, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4697465.stm (July 19, 2005)

[28] Joe Bavier, "U.N. closes Ivory Coast mission, security remains fragile," Reuters, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ivorycoast-un-peacekeepers-idUSKBN19L1VK (June 30, 2017)

[29] Claudia Parson, “Moroccan UN troops accused of abuse in Ivory Coast,” Reuters, July 20, 2007 (https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=ja&u=https://jp.reuters.com/article/idUSN20327686&prev=search&pto=aue)

[30] Corinna Csáky, Save The Children UK, No One To Turn To: The Under-reporting of Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by Aid Workers and Peacekeepers, https://www.savethechildren.org.uk/content/dam/global/reports/education-and-child-protection/no-one-to-turn-to.pdf (March 2008), pg 5

[31] Ibid, pg 6

[32] Ibid, pg 16

[33] Daily Mail, UN peacekeepers 'traded food for sex with underage girls' in west Africa, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2032951/WikiLeaks-releases-U-S-diplomatic-cable-exposing-scandal-U-N-peacekeepers-traded-sex-food-underage-girls.html (September 2, 2011)

[34] Defence Web, United Nations bars 16 peacekeepers from Benin following Ivory Coast sex abuse claims, https://www.defenceweb.co.za/joint/diplomacy-a-peace/united-nations-bars-16-peacekeepers-from-benin-following-ivory-coast-sex-abuse-claims/ (September 6, 2011)

[35] BBC, Peacekeepers 'abusing children,’ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7420798.stm (May 27, 2008)

[36] Carla Ferstman, Criminalizing Sexual Exploitation and Abuse by Peacekeepers, United States Institute of Peace, https://www.usip.org/sites/default/files/SR335-Criminalizing%20Sexual%20Exploitation%20and%20Abuse%20by%20Peacekeepers.pdf (2013), pg 4

[37] Scott Cooper, Annals of American Imperialism: The 1991 Coup in Haiti, Left Voice, https://www.leftvoice.org/annals-of-american-imperialism-the-1991-coup-in-haiti (September 29, 2020)

See also: Ansel Herz, Kim Ives, “WikiLeaks Haiti: The Aristide Files,” The Nation, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/wikileaks-haiti-aristide-files/ (August 5, 2011)

[38] UN Peacekeeping, MINUSTAH Fact Sheet, https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/mission/minustah

[39] Relief Web, Haiti: Sexual exploitation by peacekeepers likely to be a problem, https://reliefweb.int/report/haiti/haiti-sexual-exploitation-peacekeepers-likely-be-problem (May 7, 2005)

[40] Haiti Democracy Project, U.N. Soldiers Suspended in Prostitution Incident, https://haitipolicy.org/2005/02/u-n-soldiers-suspended-in-prostitution-incident (February 24, 2005)

[41] Sarah Martin, Must Boys Be Boys? Ending Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in U.N. Peacekeeping, Refugees International, https://web.archive.org/web/20051023224811/http://www.refugeesinternational.org/files/6976_file_FINAL_MustBoys.pdf (October 2005), pg 5

[42] Ibid, pg 6

[43] Ibid, pg 7

[44] Royce A. Hutson, Athena R. Kolbe, “Human rights abuse and other criminal violations in Port-au-Prince, Haiti: a random survey of households,” The Lancet 368:9538 (2006), pg 872

[45] BBC, UN troops face child abuse claims, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6195830.stm (November 30, 2006)

[46] BBC News, Fears Over Haiti Child ‘Abuse,” http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6159923.stm (November 30, 2006)

[47] Ibid

[48] Reed Lindsay, “U.N. effort dogged by sex claims / Peacekeepers based in Haiti the latest accused of abuse,” SF Gate, https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/U-N-effort-dogged-by-sex-claims-Peacekeepers-2481908.php (December 22, 2006)

[49] Democracy Now, Video of U.N. Peacekeepers’ Sexual Assault of Haitian Prompts Calls to Focus on Post-Quake Rebuilding, https://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/6/video_of_un_peacekeepers_sexual_assault (September 6, 2011)

[50] Trenton Daniel, Raul O. Garces, “Haiti: Boy Who Claims Sexual Assault By Uruguay Peacekeepers Supported By Demonstrators,” Huffington Post, September 6, 2011 (https://www.huffpost.com/entry/haiti-sexual-assault-un-peacekeepers_n_950159)

[51] Ansel Hertz, Matthew Mosk, Rym Momtaz, “U.N. Peacekeepers Accused of Sexually Assaulting Haitian Teen,” ABC News, September 2, 2011 (https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/peacekeepers-accused-sexually-assaulting-haitian-teen/story?id=14437122)

[52] Huffington Post, September 6, 2011

[53] Ansel Herz, Matthew Mosk, Brian Ross, “Haiti Outrage: UN Soldiers from Sex Assault Video Freed,” ABC News, January 6, 2012 (https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/soldiers-held-sex-assault-freed/story?id=15306826)

[54] Maha Hilal, Fawwaz Mustafa, Michelle Seyler, Zoe Walden, Tipping The Scales: Is The United Nations Justice System Promoting Accountability in the Peacekeeping Missions or Undermining It? Government Accountability Project, https://web.archive.org/web/20140418010726/https://whistleblower.org/sites/default/files/FinalTippingTheScales.pdf (September 2012)

[55] Ibid

[56] UN News, Haiti: Three UN peacekeepers repatriated for sexual abuse, https://news.un.org/en/story/2012/03/406312-haiti-three-un-peacekeepers-repatriated-sexual-abuse (March 13, 2012)

[57] Amnesty International, Convictions Against UN Peacekeepers in Haiti Do Not Serve Justice, https://www.amnesty.org/en/press-releases/2012/03/convictions-against-un-peacekeepers-haiti-do-not-serve-justice/ (March 15, 2012)

[58] Jake Johnston, UN Points to MINUSTAH as “Model of Accountability” for Sexual Abuse Cases, Center For Economic and Policy Research, https://cepr.net/un-points-to-minustah-as-model-of-accountability-for-sexual-abuse-cases/ (May 27, 2015)

[59] Justin Moyer, “Report: U.N. peacekeepers in Haiti had ‘transactional sex’ with hundreds of poor women,” Washington Post, June 11, 2015 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/11/report-u-n-peacekeepers-in-haiti-had-transactional-sex-with-hundreds-of-poor-women/)

[60] United Nations, General Assembly, Special measures for protection from sexual exploitation and sexual abuse, A/70/729, February 26, 2016 (https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/a_70_729.pdf), pg 2

[61] Ibid, pg 7

[62] Ibid, pgs 15-16

[63] Somini Sengupta, “U.N. Plans Reforms to Stamp Out Sexual Abuse by Peacekeepers,” New York Times, March 8, 2017 (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/08/world/americas/united-nations-antonio-guterres-peackeepers.html)

[64] UN Permanent Missions, SG launches new strategy to fight Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, https://www.un.int/news/sg-launches-new-strategy-fight-sexual-exploitation-and-abuse (March 9, 2017)

[65] UN News, ‘We must not allow protectors to become predators’ – UN field support chief, https://news.un.org/en/story/2016/03/523592-we-must-not-allow-protectors-become-predators-un-field-support-chief (March 4, 2016)

[66] Reuters, Peacekeepers Accused of Abuse in Haiti, https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-un-abuse-srilanka/peacekeepers-accused-of-abuse-in-haiti-idUKN0259118620071102 (November 2, 2007)

[67] Paisley Dodds, “UN child sex ring left victims but no arrests,” Associated Press, April 12, 2017 (https://apnews.com/article/e6ebc331460345c5abd4f57d77f535c1)

[68] Ibid

[69] Ibid

[70] Katy Daigle, Paisley Dodds, “UN Peacekeepers: How a Haiti child sex ring was whitewashed,” Associated Press, May 26, 2017 (https://apnews.com/article/96f9ff66b7b34d9f971edf0e92e2082c)

[71] Ibid

[72] Somini Sengupta, “U.N. Votes Unanimously to End Peacekeeping Mission in Haiti,” New York Times, April 13, 2017 (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/13/world/americas/un-peacekeeping-haiti-cholera.html)

[73] Susan Bartels, Sabine Lee, “They Put a Few Coins in Your Hand to Drop a Baby in You: A Study of Peacekeeper-fathered Children in Haiti,” International Peacekeeping 27:2 (December 2019), pg 182

[74] Ibid, pg 190

[75] Ibid, pg 192

[76] United Nations, Security Council, Security Council Establishes UN Mission in Sudan for Initial Period of Six Months Unanimously Adopting Resolution 1590, SC/8343, March 24, 2005 (https://www.un.org/press/en/2005/sc8343.doc.htm)

[77] ReliefWeb, Sudan: Four peacekeepers accused of sex abuse already repatriated - UN mission in Sudan, https://reliefweb.int/report/sudan/sudan-four-peacekeepers-accused-sex-abuse-already-repatriated-un-mission-sudan (January 4, 2007)

[78] Kate Holt, Sarah Hughes, “UN staff accused of raping children in Sudan,” The Telegraph, January 4, 2007 (https://web.archive.org/web/20080608090750/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1538476/UN-staff-accused-of-raping-children-in-Sudan.html)

[79] Ibid

[80] UN Peacekeeping, UNMIS: United Nations Mission in Sudan, https://peacekeeping.un.org/en/mission/past/unmis/

[81] Michelle Nichols, “U.N., African Union peacekeeping mission in Sudan's Darfur to end Dec. 31,” Reuters, December 23, 2020 (https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/un-african-union-peacekeeping-mission-in-sudans-darfur-to-end-dec-31/ar-BB1caayO)

Blood, Breastmilk, and Dirt: Silvia Federici and Feminist Materialism in International Law

By Miriam Bak McKenna

Republished from Legal Form: A Forum for Marxist Analysis of Law

If the politics of gender have been dragged front and centre into public discourse of late, this shift seems to have evaded international legal scholarship, or legal scholarship for that matter. Outside feminist literature, discussions of gender continue to be as welcome as a fart in a phonebox among broader academic circles. Unfortunately, Marxist and historical materialist scholarship fare little better. Despite periods in the 1960s and early 70s when their shared belief in the transformative potential of emancipatory politics flourished, Heidi Hartman had by 1979 assumed the mantle of academic marriage counselor, declaring that attempts to combine Marxist and feminist analysis had produced an “unhappy marriage”. [1] Women’s interests had been sidelined, she argued, so that “either we need a healthier marriage, or we need a divorce”. [2] Feminists pursued the latter option and the so-called “cultural turn”–a move coinciding with the move away from the “modernist” agenda of early second-wave feminism towards postmodern perspectives.

Not all feminists, however, took the cultural turn or wholeheartedly embraced postmodernism. Many continued to work within broadly materialist frameworks. Silvia Federici, known prominently for her advocacy of the 1970s Wages for Housework demand, continued the Marxist feminist momentum in her advocacy and scholarship by overseeing a revision or perhaps even reinvention of materialist feminism, especially in the United States. Federici’s work on social reproduction and gender and primitive accumulation, alongside a small but active group of materialist feminists (particularly Wally Seccombe, Maria Mies and Paddy Quick), brought a new energy to materialist feminism, making the capitalist exploitation of labour and the function of the wage in the creation of divisions within the working class (starting with the relation between women and men) a central question for anti-capitalist debate. Drawing on anti-colonial struggles and analyses to make visible the gendered and racialized dimensions of a global division of labour, Federici has sought to reveal the hierarchies and divisions engendered by a system that depends upon the devaluation of human activity and the exploitation of labour in its unpaid and low-paid dimensions in order to impose its rule.

In this post, I argue that Federici’s work offers a rich resource for redressing the conspicuous absence of a gendered perspective within academic scholarship on materialist approaches to international law. Materialist analyses of systematic inequalities within the international legal field are as relevant now as they ever were, yet the sidelining of gender and feminism within both traditional and new materialism has long been cause for concern. A gendered materialism in international law, which casts light on the logic of capitalist socialization and which affords the social reproductive sphere equal analytical status, allows us to access a clearer picture of the links between global and local exploitation at the intersections of gender, race, and nationality, and provides new conceptual tools to understand the emergence and function of international legal mechanisms as strategies of dominance, expansion, and accumulation.

A Brief Portrait of a Troubled Union

In 1903 the leading German SPD activist Clara Zetkin wrote: “[Marx’s] materialist concept of history has not supplied us with any ready-made formulas concerning the women’s question, yet it has done something much more important: It has given us the correct, unerring method to explore and comprehend that question.” [3] In many respects this statement still rings true. While Marxism supplied means for arguing that women’s subordination had a history, rather than being a permanent, natural, or inevitable feature of human relations, it was quickly criticized for marginalizing many feminist (and other intersectional) concerns. Feminist scholars in particular called attention to the failure of some forms of Marxism to address the non-economic causes of female subordination by reducing all social, political, cultural, and economic antagonisms to class, and the tendency among many traditional Marxist scholars to omit any significant discussions of race, gender, or sexuality from their work.

Marxist feminists (as well as critical race scholars and postcolonial theorists) have attempted to correct these omissions with varying degrees of success. The wave of radical feminist scholarship in the 1960s produced a number of theories of women’s domestic, sexual, reproductive, and cultural exploitation and subordination. Patriarchy (the “manifestation and institutionalization of male dominance over women and children in the family and the extension of male dominance over women in society in general” [4]) emerged as a key concept that unified broader dynamics of female subordination, while gender emerged as a technique of social control in the service of capitalist accumulation. Within this logic some proposed a “dual-system theory” wherein capitalism and patriarchy were distinct systems that coincided in the pre-industrial era to create the system of class and gender exploitation that characterizes the contemporary world. [5] Others developed a “single-system theory” in which patriarchy and capitalism “are not autonomous, nor even interconnected systems, but the same system”. [6]

During the 1970s, discussions turned in particular to the issue of women’s unpaid work within the home. The ensuing “domestic labour debate” sought to make women’s work in the home visible in Marxist terms, not as a private sphere opposed to or outside of capitalism but rather as a very specific link in the chain of production and accumulation. By exploring its strategic importance and its implications for the capitalist economy on a global scale, this analysis helped show that other forms of unpaid work, particularly by third world peasants and homeworkers, are an integral part of the international economy, central to the processes of capital accumulation. However, the Wages for Housework Campaign was criticized for failing to engage with broader social causes and effects of patriarchal oppression, as well as for essentializing and homogenizing the women it discussed. [7] These criticisms contributed to deep divisions between feminist thinkers on the left. A majority were to follow the lead of those like Hartman, arguing that Marx’s failure explicitly to examine domestic labour, coupled with the “sex-blind” analysis of most Marxist theorists, had prevented Marxism from adequately addressing women’s working conditions. Describing this period, Sue Ferguson noted that the “festering (and ultimately unresolved) issue” fueling socialist feminist thought was the place of Marxist analysis. [8] This shift, meanwhile, was overtaken by the cultural turn in social theory and the question of “how women are produced as a category” as the key to explaining their social subordination, in which materialist issues such as the debate over domestic labour were largely discarded. [9]

WWF: Wages, Witches, and Fanon

Among the Marxist feminist scholars who stayed the course during the broader scholarly shift towards structuralism, a small group of materialist feminists, including Silvia Federici, began to expand the debates over the relationship between patriarchy and capital by integrating the complexities of various forms of reproductive labour into their work. Led by such notable figures as Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James, Leopoldina Fortunati, Maria Mies, Ariel Salleh, and Federici herself, their work on the sphere of social reproduction, which had largely been neglected in Marxist accounts, brought new energy to the materialist debate. In particular, responding to the above-mentioned critiques, they shifted their perspectives to develop situated accounts of the role of women in the global geopolitical economy that incorporated overlapping issues of imperialism, race, gender, class, and nationality.

The arc of Federici’s scholarship mirrors to a large extent the broader shifts within late-twentieth century Marxist feminism. Inspired to pursue a PhD in the United States after witnessing the limitations placed upon her mother, a 1950s housewife, her arrival coincided with an upswing of feminist activity in U.S. universities. Federici’s first publication, titled Wages Against Houseworkand released in 1975, situated itself within the domestic labour debate, drawing on Dalla Costa and James’ arguments that various forms of coerced labour (particularly non-capitalist forms) and generalized violence, particularly the sexual division of labour and unpaid work, play a central function in the process of capitalist accumulation. This structural dependence upon the unwaged labour of women, noted Maria Mies, meant that social reproduction is “structurally necessary super-exploitation”–exploitation to which all women are subjected, but which affects women of colour and women from the global South in particularly violent ways. [10]

In Wages Against Housework, Federici expanded these social reproduction insights into a theory of “value transfer”, focusing on the dependence of capital on invisible, devalued, and naturalized labour. Contrary to the prevailing ideology of capitalism, she argues, which largely depicts labour as waged, freely undertaken, and discrete, the reality is that–especially where women are concerned–labour is often coerced, constant, proliferating, and uncompensated. “We know that the working day for capital does not necessarily produce a paycheck and does not begin and end at the factory gates”, she explains together with Nicole Cox in “Counterplanning from the Kitchen”. [11] Capitalism infiltrates and becomes dependent upon the very realm that it constructs as separate: the private life of the individual outside of waged work.

Central to Federici’s thesis is the need to analyze capitalism from the perspective of both commodity production and social reproduction in order to expand beyond traditional spaces of labour exploitation and consider all of the spaces in which the conditions of labour are secured. As Federici argues in Caliban and the Witch, traditional Marxist categories are inadequate for understanding fully processes of primitive accumulation. [12] She notes that “the Marxian identification of capitalism with the advent of wage labor and the ‘free’ laborer…hide[s] and naturalize[s] the sphere of reproduction”, and further observes that “in order to understand the history of women’s transition from feudalism to capitalism, we must analyze the changes that capitalism has introduced in the process of social reproduction and, especially, the reproduction of labor power”. [13] Thus, “the reorganization of housework, family life, child-raising, sexuality, male-female relations, and the relation between production and reproduction” are not separate from the capitalist mode of organization, but rather central to it. [14] The conflation and blurring of the lines between the spaces of production of value (points of production) and the spaces for reproduction of labour power, between “social factory” and “private sphere”, work and non-work, which supports and maintains the means of production is illustrated through her analysis of the household. Housework, Federici declares (and I am sure many would agree here) is “the most pervasive manipulation, and the subtlest violence that capitalism has ever perpetrated against any section of the working class”. [15] Housework here is not merely domestic labour but its biological dimension (motherhood, sex, love), which is naturalized through domestic violence, rape, sexual assault, and most insidiously through “blackmail whereby our need to give and receive attention is turned against as a work duty”. [16] For Federici, the situation of “enslaved women … most explicitly reveals the truth of the logic of capitalist accumulation”. [17] “Capital”, she writes,

Has made and makes money off our cooking, smiling, fucking”. [18]

In Federici’s historical analysis of primitive accumulation and the logic of capitalist expansion, both race and gender assume a prominent position. For Federici, both social reproductive feminism and Marxist anticolonialism allow historical materialism to escape the traditional neglect of unwaged labour in the reproduction of the class relation and the structure of the commodity. As Ashley Bohrer has explored, Federici, like many other Italian Marxist feminists, has drawn explicitly on the work of post-colonial scholars, most prominently Frantz Fanon [19], in developing their theories of gendered oppression. [20] In the introduction to Revolution at Point Zero, Federici explains how she and others drew on Fanon’s heterodox economics in expanding their analyses beyond the scope of the traditional capitalist spaces:

It was through but also against the categories articulated by these [civil rights, student, and operaist/workerist] movements that our analysis of the “women’s question” turned into an analysis of housework as the crucial factor in the definition of the exploitation of women in capitalism … As best expressed in the works of Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank and Frantz Fanon, the anticolonial movement taught us to expand the Marxian analysis of unwaged labour beyond the confines of the factory and, therefore, to see the home and housework as the foundations of the factory system, rather than its “other”. From it we also learned to seek the protagonists of class struggle not only among the male industrial proletariat but, most importantly, among the enslaved, the colonized, the world of wageless workers marginalized by the annals of the communist tradition to whom we could now add the figure of the proletarian housewife, reconceptualized as the subject of the (re)production of the workforce. [21]

Just as Fanon recasts the colonial subject as the buttress for material expansion among European states, so Federici and others argue that women’s labour in the home creates the surplus value by which capitalism maintains its power. [22] Federici contends that this dependence, along with the accentuation of differences and hierarchies within the working classes for ensuring that reproduction of working populations continues without disruption, has been a mainstay of the development and expansion of capitalism over the last few centuries, as well as in state social policy. Colonization and patriarchy emerge in this optic as twin tools of (western, white, male) capital accumulation.

Expanding upon Fanon’s insights about the emergence of capitalism as a much more temporally and geographically extended process, Federici regards the transition as a centuries-long process encompassing not only the entirety of Europe but the New World as well, and entailing not only enclosures, land privatization, and the witch hunts, but also colonialism, the second serfdom, and slavery. In Caliban and the Witch, she presents a compelling case for the gendered nature of early primitive accumulation, by excavating the history of capital’s centuries-long attack on women and the body both within Europe and in its colonial margins. For Federici, the transition was “not simply an accumulation and concentration of exploitable workers and capital. It was also an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as ‘race’ and age, became constitutive of class rule and the formation of the modern proletariat”. [23] According to Federici, the production of the female subject is the result of a historical shift of economic imperative (which was subsequently enforced by those who benefited from such economic arrangements), which set its focus on women, whose bodies were responsible for the reproduction of the working population. [24] The goal was to require a “transformation of the body into a work-machine, and the subjugation of women to the reproduction of the work-force” [25], and the means “was the destruction of the power of women which, in Europe as in America, was achieved through the extermination of the ‘witches’”. [26] The witch–commonly midwives or wise women, traditionally the depository of women’s reproductive knowledge and control [27]–were targeted precisely due to their reproductive control and other methods of resistance. The continued subjectification of women and the mechanization of their bodies, then, can be understood as an ongoing process of primitive accumulation, as it continues to adapt to changing economic and social imperatives.

While a rich and engaging tradition of feminist approaches to international law has emerged over the past few decades, it has shown a marked tendency to sideline the long and multifaceted tradition of feminist historical-materialist thought. Similarly, within both traditional and new materialist approaches to international law, there has been a conspicuous sidelining of gender and feminism, along with issues of race and ethnicity. The argument for historical materialism in the context of international legal studies is not, as some critics have claimed, that women’s oppression ought to be reduced to class. Rather, the argument is that women’s experiences only make sense in the explanatory context of the dynamics of particular modes of production. However, this requires an adequate theory of social relations, particularly of social production, reproduction, and oppression, in order to sustain a materialist analysis that “make[s] visible the various, overlapping forms of subjugation of women’s lives”. [28]

It is my contention that Federici’s social-reproductive and intersectional theory of capitalism provides a path toward a more nuanced and sustained critique of the logic and structure of capitalism within the international legal field. This approach foregrounds the social–that is, social structures, relations, and practices. But it does not reduce all social structures, relations, and practices to capitalism. Nor does it depict the social order as a seamless, monolithic entity. Moving beyond traditional class-reductionist variants of historical materialism, capitalism emerges here as one part of a complex and multifaceted system of domination in which patriarchy, racism, and imperialism are fundamental, constitutive elements, which interact in unpredictable and contradictory ways.

As Federici’s scholarship has stressed, the importance of foregrounding social reproduction as part of the dynamic of capitalist accumulation, as facilitated by states and international institutions, is essential to any materialist analysis, including one of the international legal field. This is necessary for exploring women’s specific forms of oppression under capitalism, particularly as they are facilitated by the family and the state. For example, Federici’s insights into the domain of unpaid social reproduction and care work are useful for understanding women’s subordinated incorporation into labour markets, especially in the global South and in states affected by structural adjustment. Indeed, while the state largely facilitates women’s entry into the workforce, their categorization as “secondary” workers–“naturally” suited to care work and the fulfillment of physical and emotional needs, and “naturally” dependent upon men–has continually been reproduced to the detriment of their labour situation. [29]

While Federici’s social reproduction theory begins with women’s work in the home, she demonstrates that capitalism’s structural dependence upon unwaged and reproductive labour extends to regimes of domination predicated upon social control on the global plane (from slavery through the exploitation of immigrant workers to the genocide of indigenous peoples). In her account of primitive accumulation, power relations sustained through the construction of categories of gender, race, sex, and sexuality facilitate the creation of subjects predicated upon capitalism’s systemic needs. While the heterosexual family unit is one of the more visible ways in which this domination is socially reproduced, the relationship, Federici argues, is reproduced in many settings. The transformations of the neoliberal era–particularly the global reorganization of work fueled by the drive to impose the commodity form in ways that seek to harness and exploit labour in its unpaid and low-paid dimensions–are characteristic of this dynamic. Federici has also emphasized the fact that domestic workers and service providers have consistently been devalued as workers. [30] In doing so, she highlights one of the rhetorical gaps in the contemporary feminist movement: when women enter the waged work-force, they often enter into an exploitative relationship with other women (and men) with less social power. It is the latter’s labour, bodies, and time that provide the means for access to better conditions within the labour market.

This relation of exploitation is also prevalent in neocolonial forms of exploitation–called “the new enclosures” by Federici–which ensure that the affluent North benefits from social and economic conditions prevailing in the global South (for example, through transnational corporations’ access to cheap land, mineral, and labour resources). Capitalism, Federici argues, depends not only on unwaged housework, but on a global strategy of underdevelopment in the global South, one that relies upon the stratification of and constructed division between otherwise common interests. “Wagelessness and underdevelopment”, she argues, “are essential elements of capitalist planning nationally and internationally. They are powerful means to make … us believe that our interests are different and contradictory.” [31]

Federici’s depiction of patriarchy, the state, and capitalism as interacting forces, together with her focus on relational, overlapping regimes of domination and their attendant systems of control, points the way toward a new way of understanding intertwined techniques and discourses of power in the international legal field. Capitalism’s reliance upon multiple types of exploitation, multiple forms of dispossession, and multiple kinds of subjects is visible in broader themes of international law. It is, for instance, visible in the overlapping dynamics of control that mark the history of colonial expansion, as well as the emergence in the nineteenth century of sovereign hierarchies and various legal mechanisms that ensure patterns of dominance, expansion, and accumulation in the international sphere.

An examination of the historical and contemporary role of international law in perpetuating these dynamics of oppression prompts us to address the specific processes whereby these categories are produced and reproduced in international law. Examples include norms surrounding marriage and the family, the production of the category of the temporary worker, and the illegal immigrant whose disenfranchisement is the necessary condition of their exploitation. Much the same can be said for trade, property, taxation policy, welfare and social security provision, inheritance rights, maternity benefits, and support for childcare (or the lack thereof). In the context of the gendered dynamics of globalization, we can examine the manner in which the devaluation of female labour has been facilitated by international institutions, notably the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and through development initiatives such as micro-finance and poverty reduction strategies. Federici has also revealed the complicity of ostensibly neutral (and neutralizing) discourses such as development, especially when pursued with the stated objective of “female empowerment”, in glossing over the systemic nature of poverty and gendered oppression. These dynamics are ultimately predicated upon law’s power to create, sustain, and reproduce certain categories.

Usefully, Federici’s relational theory of subjectivity-formation also allows us to move beyond gender and race as fixed, stable categories, encouraging a new understanding that helps us detect more surreptitious gendered tropes and imaginaries in the structure of international legal practice and argumentation. One example is the set of narratives that surround humanitarian intervention. Indeed, as Konstantina Tzouvala has suggested, one of the glaring deficiencies in the socialist feminism proposed by B. S. Chimni is the absence of an explanation of how gender, race, class, and international law form an inter-related argumentative practice. [32]

Conclusion

Writing some ten years after David Schweickart lamented that analytical Marxism “remains a discourse of the brotherhood” [33], Iris Marion Young noted that,

[O]ur nascent historical research coupled with our feminist intuition tells us that the labor of women occupies a central place in any system of production, that the gender division is a basic axis of social structuration in all hitherto existing social formations, and that gender hierarchy serves as a pivotal element in most systems of social domination. If traditional Marxism has no theoretical place for such hypothesis, it is not merely an inadequate theory of women’s oppression, but also an inadequate theory of social relations, relations of production, and domination. [34]

Young’s defense of a “thoroughly feminist historical materialism” [35] is as relevant today as ever. While great in-roads have been made within materialist approaches to various disciplines, including international law, the continued tendency to marginalize issues of gender (along with issues of race and sexuality) greatly undermines the soundness of such critiques. In pointing to issues of social reproduction, racism, sexual control, servitude, imperialism, and control over women’s bodies and reproductive power in her account of primitive accumulation, Silvia Federici highlights issues that must occupy a prominent place in any materialist treatment of international law.

Miriam Bak McKenna is Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in International Law at Lund University.

Notes

1. Heidi Hartman, “The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism” [1979], in Lynn Sargent (ed.) Women and Revolution: The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism–A Debate on Class and Patriarchy (London: Pluto, 1981) 1.

2. Ibid., 2.

3. Clara Zetkin, “What the Women Owe to Karl Marx” [1903], trans. Kai Shoenhals, in Frank Meklenburg and Manfred Stassen (eds) German Essays on Socialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Continuum, 1990) 237, at 237.

4. Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 239.

5. Pat Armstrong and Hugh Armstrong, “Class Is a Feminist Issue”, in Althea Prince, Susan Silvia-Wayne, and Christian Vernon (eds), Feminisms and Womanisms: A Women’s Studies Reader (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1986) 317. See, for example, Hartman, “Unhappy Marriage”; and also Sylvia Walby, Gender Segregation at Work (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1988).

6. See, for example, Lise Vogel, Marxism and the Oppression of Women: Toward a Unitary Theory (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983); Iris Marion Young, “Beyond the Unhappy Marriage: A Critique of Dual Systems Theory”, in Lydia Sargent (ed.), Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981) 43.

7. See Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Random House, 1981).

8. Sue Ferguson, “Building on the Strengths of the Socialist Feminist Tradition”, 25 (1999) Critical Sociology 1, at 2.

9. See, for example, Rosalind Coward and John Ellis, Language and Materialism (London: Routledge, 1977) and Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975).

10. Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, 1st edition (London: Zed Books, 1986).

11. Nicole Cox and Silvia Federici, Counterplanning from the Kitchen: Wages for Housework–A Perspective on Capital and the Left (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975), 4.

12. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (New York: Autonomedia, 2004), 8.

13. Ibid., 8–9.

14. Ibid., 9.

15. Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 16.

16. Silvia Federici, Wages Against Housework (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1975), 20.

17. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 89.

18. Federici, Wages Against Housework, 19.

19. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004 [1961]).

20. Ashley Bohrer, “Fanon and Feminism”, 17 (2015) Interventions 378.

21. Federici, Revolution at Point Zero, 6–7 (original emphasis).

22. Ibid., 7.

23. Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 64 (original emphasis).

24. Ibid., 145.

25. Ibid., 63.

26. Ibid.

27. Ibid., 183.

28. Chandra Talpade Mohanthy, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 28.

29. Daniela Tepe-Belfrage, Jill Steans, et al., “The New Materialism: Re-Claiming a Debate from a Feminist Perspective”, 40 (2016) Capital & Class 305, at 324.

30. Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Oakland: PM Press, 2012), 65–115.

31. Ibid., 36.

32. Konstantina Tzouvala, “Reading Chimni’s International Law and World Order: The Question of Feminism”, EJIL: Talk! (28 December 2017).

33. David Schweickart, “Book Review of John Roemer, Analytical Marxism“, 97 (1987) Ethics 869, at 870

34. Iris Marion Young, “Socialist Feminism and the Limits of the Dual Systems Theory”, in Rosemary Hennessy and Chrys Ingraham (eds), Materialist Feminism: A Reader in Class, Difference and Women’s Lives (New York: Routledge, 1997) 95, at 102.

35. Ibid (original emphasis).

Women and Capitalism: Revisiting Silvia Federici's 'Caliban and the Witch'

By Natasha Heenan

Republished from Progress in Political Economy.

In high school, like many young women, my friends and I developed a fascination with witches. Years before we knew what feminism was, a sense of foreboding had developed among us, about our place in the world and our power relative to adults and to our male peers. As ambitious teen girls wary of how we were perceived in the adult world, we sought solace in the idea that we could harness a secret and subversive power to change things. After school we concocted potions, conducted rituals and created secret languages. For a time we believed in magic.

Unknown to us, in her ground-breaking book, Caliban and The Witch, Silvia Federici argues that the witch hunts of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries served to create and enforce a newly established role in society for women, who were consigned to unpaid reproductive labour to satisfy the needs of an ascendant capitalist order. Published in 2004 and based on a research project started in the 1970s with Italian feminist Leopoldina Fortunati, Federici draws upon an eclectic mix of historical sources, re-reading the transition to capitalism from a Marxist-feminist viewpoint.

Federici presents a close reading of the European witch-hunts, in order to re-appraise the function and nature of primitive accumulation in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Her most important contribution in this regard is to reveal the mechanisms by which production was separated from reproduction, and how the resulting sexual division of labour had to be created and enforced through extreme violence. This account of primitive accumulation challenges Marx and other subsequent interpretations of the transition to capitalism as a progressive and necessary shift in social relations. Federici foregrounds the experience of women (painted as witches) and colonised people (the metaphorical Caliban, from Shakespheare’s Tempest) to show that this was in no way a progressive moment in changing social relations and that at every stage of capitalist expansion, new rounds of primitive accumulation involving violence and expropriation of land can be observed.

One of the most devastating parts about reading Caliban and the Witch is the recognition of everything that women lost in terms of social power in the transition to capitalism. Witches embodied everything “that capitalism had to destroy: the heretic, the healer, the disobedient wife, the woman who dared to live alone, the obeah woman who poisoned the master’s food and inspired the slaves to revolt” (p. 11). Federici documents the changes in women’s social status, how they were encouraged not to walk alone on the streets or sit outside their homes, how ale-brewing (traditionally women’s work) came to be seen as men’s work, how the word gossip shifted its meaning from ‘friend’ to acquire a negative connotation (also see Hanna Black who has written more about the etymology of the word gossip in this context here). This all formed a part of the “intense process of social degradation” women were forced to undergo, in order to be remade in the image of capital (p. 100).

One revelation of this book is that in numerous ways, women refused to take their place in the emerging capitalist reordering of society, just as they refused the reconstitution of the body as a machine. Women tore down hedges and fences and reclaimed the commons, they engaged in non-reproductive sex and led peasant revolts. They met at night on hilltops, around bonfires, stole food and clothing, and they gossiped. Federici argues that the witch hunts, rather than representing the last dying breaths of feudal order and the attendant superstitions of feudal societies, were a tool to discipline and shape the emerging working class and hence were integral to the transition to capitalism. Federici concludes that only by ignoring the experience of women, slaves and indigenous people in the transition to capitalism can primitive accumulation be viewed as progressive. The women singled out for public burning were often poor peasants accused by their landlords or other wealthy community members of witchcraft, which Federici links to documented instances of poor women begging for or stealing food. As Federici notes, “the witch-hunt grew in a social environment where the ‘better sorts’ were living in constant fear of the ‘lower classes’” and their potential for insubordination (p. 173).

Throughout the book Federici shifts between centuries, sometimes bringing us all the way to the present, in order to show how this violence continues in the form of structural adjustment programs and in new rounds of land enclosures in developing countries. In seeking to uncover a “hidden history that needs to be made visible” Federici foregrounds the “secret” of capitalism, women’s unpaid reproductive work, slavery and colonisation (p. 13). The use of violence in the witch hunts, allowed the state to establish a level of control over women’s bodies and lives that was unprecedented, as seen in the rise of census taking and population monitoring, and the demonising of abortion and contraceptives. Federici further argues that “the persecution of the witches was the climax of the state intervention against the proletarian body in the modern era” and that the “human body… was the first machine invented by capitalism” (pp. 143, 146). That the violence of slavery and colonisation in the New World was parallel to the patriarchal violence of Europe is a difficult argument to make and is one of the more unconvincing parts of Federici’s book. The relation between early capitalism and slavery and genocide is an area well explored by historians and critical race scholars, which could have been better utilised to extend the appraisal of primitive accumulation from the point of view of colonised people and slaves.

The members of this semester’s Past & Present Reading Group had diverse reactions to Caliban and the Witch. The book stimulated lively and important discussions about feminist re-readings of history, questions about the nature of feudal life, and critiques of Federici’s comparison between patriarchal oppression and white supremacy. Most of all Federici inspired a desire to question many other theories of history, to take her analysis even further back in time and trace developments in ideologies of racism, white supremacy, misogyny and witch hunting prior to early capitalism. The group ultimately received the book as it was given, that is, as a ‘sketch’ of a theory, needing further exploration and refinement, but powerful nonetheless.

The horrifying scale and brutality of the witch hunts is difficult to comprehend, especially given their status as “one of the most understudied phenomena in European history” (p. 163). In an ironic twist of fate (and clearly inspired by Charmed and Sabrina the Teenage Witch), my friends and I embraced the idea of magic without fear that the charge of witchcraft would lead to our torture and death. Perhaps this is because today women’s unpaid reproductive labour is so immutable, capitalists no longer perceive witchcraft to be a threat to the sexual division of labour within firmly capitalist social relations of production. However, this does not mean that new, if at times more subtle forms of subordination and control of women aren’t apparent. On the contrary, renewed attacks on reproductive rights and rights to bodily autonomy, the violation of livelihood rights by mining and agricultural companies in developing countries, and the daily assault by the state on indigenous lives in Australia and black lives in the U.S, all work in different ways to reaffirm the marginalised status of women and people of colour (Alicia Garza, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, has written powerfully on this subject and others here).

Caliban and the Witch is a reminder that it is the task of feminists and Marxists alike to demand that the sphere of reproduction and continuing forms of colonialism be seen as key sources of value for capitalism and therefore as key sites of struggle against it.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Limits of Neoliberal Feminism

[Photo credit: Danita Delimont Photography/Newscom]

By Matthew John

Republished from dialogue & discourse.

On September 18, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died from complications related to pancreatic cancer. She was 87 years old and was surrounded by loved ones at the time of her death. Thousands attended a vigil outside the Supreme Court building and innumerable additional events took place in her honor throughout the country. Ginsburg was the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court and became known as a feminist icon and a pioneering advocate for women’s rights due to her dissenting opinions in cases like Gonzales v. Carhart, Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co., and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores. An email I received from Black Lives Matter Global Network the following day concisely encapsulated public sentiment:

“Last night, we lost a champion in the fight for justice and gender equality: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Justice Ginsburg was a giant in the fight for equality and civil rights — she embodied everything that our movement stands for. We stand on the accomplishments of her life’s work that have continued to amplify the need to protect and expand equal rights for women and underserved communities. And we celebrate women having a voice in the workforce while also having the ability to make decisions for their own health and wellbeing because of the work of Justice Ginsburg.”

In the wake of this national tragedy, Ginsburg’s life and legacy took center stage in political discourse and rampant speculation ensued regarding how this event might influence the nation’s future. Democratic campaign contributions skyrocketed and Republican leaders began calculating and scheming to fill the vacant court seat. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that Ginsburg would be the first woman to lie in repose at the Supreme Court and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that the state would erect a statue in her honor. Politicians and pundits memorialized the fallen titan, who had become a cultural icon known fondly by the moniker “Notorious R.B.G”, while others found inspiration in idiosyncratic elements of Ginsburg’s persona.

As is the case with other beloved American heroes, the national discourse surrounding the death of Ginsburg included every detail imaginable other than her cumulative record in public service. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court tenure of Ruth Bader Ginsburg encompassed more than just pussyhats and rainbows. As with any prominent figure, we must account for the “problematic” aspects of Ginsburg’s legacy as well. These include her disparaging statement regarding Colin Kaepernick’s racial justice efforts, her positive statement regarding former colleague Brett Kavanaugh (who was credibly accused of rape), her designation of flagrant reactionary Antonin Scalia as her “best buddy”, and her final case on SCOTUS, in which she agreed with the decision to fast-track President Trump’s deportations. In terms of Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s comprehensive legacy on the Supreme Court, the well-known, progressive dissenting opinions are dwarfed by her extensive résumé of anti-indigenous, anti-worker, pro-cop, and “tough on crime” decisions. (Unless otherwise noted, the following bullet points are quoted or nearly quoted from this Current Affairs article, which I’d recommend reading for more details and context.) For instance:

• In Heien v. North Carolina, the court held that the police may justifiably pull over cars if they believe they are violating the law even if the police are misunderstanding the law, so long as the mistake was reasonable.

• In Taylor v. Barkes, the Court held that the family of a suicidal man who was jailed and then killed himself could not sue the jail for failing to implement anti-suicide measures.

• In Plumhoff v. Rickard, the court held that the family of two men could not sue the police after they had shot and killed them for fleeing a police stop.

• In Samson v. California, the Court decided the issue of whether police could conduct warrantless searches of parolees merely because they were on parole. Instead of joining the liberal dissenters, Ginsburg signed onto Clarence Thomas’s majority opinion in favor of the police.

• In Kansas v. Carr, the Kansas Supreme Court had overturned a pair of death sentences, on the grounds that the defendants’ Eighth Amendment rights had been violated in the instructions given to the jury. SCOTUS informed Kansas that it had made a mistake; nobody’s Eighth Amendment rights had been violated, thus the defendants ought to have continued unimpeded along the path toward execution. The Court’s decision was 8–1, the lone dissenter being Sonia Sotomayor. Ginsburg put her name on Justice Scalia’s majority opinion instead.

• In Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation, the court ruled against the Oneida Tribe over a dispute regarding its territorial claim. Ginsburg’s majority opinion stated, “We hold that the tribe cannot unilaterally revive its ancient sovereignty, in whole or in part, over the parcels at issue.” Ginsburg referenced the Eurocentric, racist, and colonialist “Doctrine of Discovery” in her comments. (Source)

• In Salazar v. Ramah Navajo Chapter, Ginsburg dissented, disagreeing with the ruling that that the United States government, when it enters into a contract with a Native American tribe for services, must pay contracts in full, even if Congress has not appropriated enough money to pay all tribal contractors. (Source)

• In Kiowa Tribe v. Manufacturing Technologies, Ginsburg once again dissented, opposing the ruling, which stated that the Kiowa Tribe was entitled to sovereign immunity from contract lawsuits, whether made on or off reservation, or involving governmental or commercial activities. (Source)

• In Inyo County v. Paiute-Shoshone Indians, the Bishop Paiute Tribe of California asserted that their tribe’s status as a sovereign nation made them immune to state processes under federal law and asserted that the state authorized the seizure of tribal records. Ginsburg joined the majority in dismissing the tribe’s complaint. (Source)

• In Alaska v. Native Village of Venetie Tribal Government, the court unanimously ruled against a tribal council that wanted to collect a tax from non-tribal members doing business on tribal lands. The Court claimed the land (which was owned by the tribe) was not subject to the tribal tax because it was not part of a Native American reservation. (Source)

• In C & L Enterprises, Inc. v. Citizen Band, Potawatomi Indian Tribe of Oklahoma, the court held that the tribe waived its sovereign immunity when it agreed to a contract containing an arbitration agreement. (Source)

• In Navajo Nation v. United States Forest Service, the court ruled against the Navajo Nation, who have consistently protested the encroachment of a ski resort on Navajo territory (San Francisco Peaks). In short, the decision upheld the Ninth Circuit Court’s ruling that the use of recycled sewage water was not a “substantial burden” on the religious freedom of American Indians. (Source)

• In Integrity Staffing Solutions, Inc. v. Busk, the court ruled that workers didn’t deserve paid compensation for being required to watch theft security screenings. (Source)

• In Brogan v. United States, the court ruled that the Fifth Amendment does not protect the right of those being questioned by law enforcement officials to deny wrongdoing falsely. (Source)

• In Chadrin Lee Mullenix v. Beatrice Luna, Ginsburg sided with the majority opinion which granted immunity to a police officer who unnecessarily shot and killed a suspect. (Source)

• In Bush v. Gore, the contentious decision that decided the 2000 presidential election, Ginsburg’s draft of her dissent had a footnote alluding to the possible suppression of Black voters in Florida. Justice Scalia purportedly responded to this draft by flying into a rage, telling Ginsburg that she was using “Al Sharpton tactics.” Ginsburg removed the footnote before it saw the light of day.

• In Davis v. Ayala, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote a lengthy concurrence condemning solitary confinement. Most notably, Justice Kennedy made no reference to any particularly vulnerable group, instead suggesting that long-term solitary confinement may be unconstitutional for all. Justice Ginsburg did not join the concurrence.

• Scott v. Harris involved a motorist who was paralyzed after a police officer ran his car off the road during a high-speed chase. Ginsburg concurred with the majority that deadly force was justified. (Source)

• In Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic & Institutional Rights, Inc., Ginsburg approved allowing the government to threaten the withdrawal of funding in order to punish universities that ban discriminatory job recruitment by the military.

The list goes on. Of course, no one is perfect. Everyone has flaws. However, when evaluating any prominent or powerful individual, it seems the proper outlook is to weigh the harm inflicted by their actions against the positive results of their actions. For instance, Abraham Lincoln’s passage of the Emancipation Proclamation helped end the most prominent form of slavery in the U.S. (but not all forms), and because of this, many Americans are willing to forgive his racist views and perceive his overall contributions positively. By this measure, it is dubious at best to suggest that Ginsburg’s full record contains more — simply put — good than bad. That is to say, it seems that her career as a whole caused more harm to vulnerable people than any positive impact her rare instances of dissent may have had.

The simple aforementioned formulation — cumulative good vs. cumulative harm — may be a bit naïve when compared to the manner in which most citizens evaluate public figures and the process by which these figures are often lionized despite their substantial misdeeds. The cult of personality surrounding Ruth Bader Ginsburg is certainly a notable phenomenon that can be explored in sociological and cultural contexts, but the whitewashing of her record is a crucial aspect of this process that is worth analyzing.

This unfettered, liberal adulation of Ginsburg can stem from a conscious attempt to conceal the unsavory aspects of her record, from plain ignorance, or from a third, more insidious place: acquiescence to the brutality that is “baked into” the American political system and our nation’s history more broadly. This is a system founded by white supremacists who enslaved and tortured Africans on stolen, blood-soaked land — a system by and for economic elites. In this sense, Ginsburg’s consistently anti-indigenous voting record might be perceived by liberals as a “necessary evil” — a simple extension of the settler-colonial mentality and the vestiges of “Manifest Destiny.” The same critique applies to her conservative rulings that harmed immigrants, people of color, and the working class in general.

Beyond Neoliberal Feminism

It is usually the case that about half of any large population is comprised of women. When speaking of feminism, we often forget that universal issues are also women’s issues; healthcare, housing, and wages, for instance. Under neoliberalism, exploitation, austerity, vicious imperialism, and state violence are systemic aspects of daily reality. We must remember that this includes the experiences of women, and often to a greater degree. Why don’t we take into account the indigenous women, or the immigrant women, or the women experiencing poverty when discussing Ginsburg’s record or government policy more broadly?

Let’s break this down even further. Recognizing these demographics, is it “feminist” to continue displacing and attacking the sovereignty of native women? Is it “feminist” to rule in favor of employers rather than female employees? Is it “feminist” to deport women back to countries we destroyed with sanctions and military coups? Just as the lofty, foundational American ideals were designed by and for white, property-owning men, this elite notion of feminism only applies to certain groups of women under certain circumstances. This superficial feminism is a far cry from a Marxist feminism that seeks a more holistic approach to liberation and empowerment. As Martha E. Gimenez wrote:

“As long as women’s oppression and other oppressions occupy the center of feminist theory and politics, while class remains at the margins, feminism will unwittingly contribute to keeping class outside the collective consciousness and the boundaries of acceptable political discourse. To become a unifying, rather than a divisive, political and ideological force, twenty-first-century Marxist feminism needs to become an overtly working-class women’s feminism, in solidarity with the working class as a whole, supporting the struggles of all workers, women and men, and gender-variant people of all races, national origins, citizenship statuses, and so on, thus spearheading the process toward working-class organization and the badly needed return to class in U.S. politics.”

American Institutions and Systemic Violence

Deifying political figures like Ginsburg not only whitewashes their crimes against marginalized people — it also further legitimizes a fundamentally elitist, unjust, and undemocratic political system. As political scientist Rob Hunter wrote, “The Supreme Court is a bulwark of reaction. Its brief is to maintain the institutional boundaries drawn by the Constitution, a document conceived out of fear of majoritarian democracy and written by members of a ruling class acting in brazen self-interest.”

A sober analysis of Ginsburg’s rulings clarifies that America has never strayed from its roots as a genocidal, hyper-capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal settler-colonial project with economic elites running the government and blue-clad henchmen violently enforcing this agenda through state-sanctioned terror. Some wonder if it has always been this way. Has it gotten better? Worse? Has slavery just been repackaged? What’s clear is that the advent of neoliberalism has heightened the perilous and precarious conditions of this crumbling society while technology has allowed strangers to share the visceral horrors contained therein.

It is time to stop normalizing this barbarism. Performative identity politics and the ubiquitous brand of white, neoliberal feminism are façades used to conceal the profound violence of a dying empire and to paint the “moderate” wing of capital as somehow more humane and enlightened. A society founded on land theft, on commodifying basic human needs, on exploiting, enslaving, and brutalizing the vulnerable, is a society that should not be celebrated. And it is a society where the realization of true feminism has — thus far — proven to be out of reach. As Thomas Sankara once said, “The status of women will improve only with the elimination of the system that exploits them.”

Breonna Taylor and the Framing of Black Women as "Soft Targets" in America

By Ameer Hasan Loggins

Originally published at the author’s blog.

12:38 a.m. was the last peaceful minute of Breonna Taylor’s life.

On March 13, 2020, at 12:38 a.m., Breonna Taylor and her partner Kenneth Walker were asleep in bed. At 12:39 a.m. officers beat on her door for approximately one-minute. During that 59-seconds of banging, Taylor screamed “at the top of her lungs,” “Who is it?” But no one said a word. “No answer. No response. No anything.” The boogeymen kept beating on her door. By 12:40 a.m. Plainclothes Louisville Metro Police Department Officers Myles Cosgrove and Brett Hankison, as well as Sgt. Jonathan Mattingly, shattered the forest green front door of Breonna Taylor’s apartment with a battering ram.

“Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.”

The police blindly shot over 20 rounds of bullets into the home of Breonna Taylor. Eight of those officers’ bullets found their way into Breonna’s Black body.

Sgt. Mattingly spoke to Louisville Police internal investigators roughly two weeks after Breonna’s killing. During that conversation he said officers were told her ground floor apartment was a “soft target” and that Taylor too was a soft target, because she, “should be there alone.”

A “soft target.”

A soft target is a person, location, or thing that is deemed as unprotected. As vulnerable. As powerless against military or terrorist attacks. Attacking soft targets are meant to, “disrupt daily life, and spread fear.” They are meant to target, “identities, histories and dignity.” They are meant to ambush and bring unexpected carnage. In 1845, attacking soft targets is how James Marion Sims, who is considered to be “the father” of modern gynecological studied, was permitted to experiment on enslaved Black women without consent, without anesthesia, and without consideration of their humanity. In 2015, attacking soft targets is what lead to 13 Black women testifying against Officer Daniel Holtzclaw. They spoke of how Holtzclaw targeted them during traffic stops and interrogations. How the officer forced them into sexual acts in his police car or in their homes. Prosecutors spoke to how Holtzclaw, “deliberately preyed on vulnerable Black women from low-income neighborhoods,” while committing his acts of sexual terrorism. 170 years separates the hellish acts of Sims and Holtzclaw, but what bridges the gap in time between those two men serially targeting the identities, dignities, and humanhood’s of these Black women is an unbroken history of war being waged on their entire self.

I cast my mind back to Malcolm X’s rebuking of this nation in 1962, when he said, “The most disrespected person in America is the Black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the Black woman. The most neglected person in America is the Black woman.” Here we are, in the year 2020, and the Louisville Police are framing Breonna Taylor as a “soft target.” It’s as if Brother Malcolm was talking about Breonna’s death before she was even born into this world. Before she was awakened by police pounding on her front door. Before she had a name that needed to be said. While Malcolm’s words may feel prophetic in their preciseness, they are not. They were painfully predictable. Malcolm lived, and died in anti-Black America. He was a scholar of America’s history of anti-Blackness.

There has never been a period in the history of America where Black women’s bodies, hearts, minds and beings have not been reduced to being treated as soft targets.

Black women have always been exploited in America. Violated in America. Terrorized in America. Killed in America. The relationship between Black women and America was birthed in targeting and torture.

In Antebellum America, white owners of enslaved African women freely and with legal impunity raped them, often in front of their own families and fictive kin. In Jim Crow America, close to 200 Black women too were murdered by lynch mobs in the American South, many of whom had been raped before having their necks bound and burned by knotted nooses before being hanged to death.

Black women too, were strange fruit.

Black women like Eliza Woods. Woods was a cook. A cook, who in 1866, was accused of poisoning a white woman to death by the woman’s husband. She was arrested and taken from the county jail by a lynch mob. She was stripped naked. She was hung from an elm tree in the courthouse yard. Her lifeless body was then riddled with bullets as over a thousand spectators watched.

In 1899, the husband admitted that he poisoned his wife — not Woods.

Black women like Laura Nelson. Nelson allegedly shot a sheriff, in 1911, to protect her 14-year-old son. A mob of white people seized Nelson along with her son, and lynched them both. Laura Nelson, “was first raped by several men. The bodies of Laura and her son were hung from a bridge for hundreds of people to see.”

Elderly Black women like 93-year-old Pearlie Golden (2014), 92-year-old Kathryn Johnson (2006), 66-year-old Eleanor Bumpurs (1984), and 66-year-old Deborah Danner (2016), all were in their homes and shot to death by the police. Michelle Cusseaux (2014) was 50-years-old. Kayla Moore (2013) was 41-years-old. Aura Rosser (2014) was 40-years-old. Tanisha Anderson (2014) was 37-years-old. Natasha McKenna (2015) was 37-year-old. Alesia Thomas (2012) was 35-years-old. Miriam Carey (2013) was 34-years-old. Charleen Lyles (2017) was 30-years-old. India Kager (2015) was 28-years-old. Sandra Bland (2015) was 28-years-old. Atatiana Jefferson (2019) was 28-years-old. Mya Hall (2015) was 27-years-old. Meagan Hockaday (2015) was 26-years-old. Shantel Davis (2012) was 23-years-old. Korryn Gains (2016) was 23-years-old. Rakia Boyd (2012) was 22-years-old. Gabriella Nevarez (2014) was 22-years-old. Janisha Fonville (2015) was 20-years-old.

The police did not give a damn about the ages of these Black women. They did not care if they had nearly lived for a century on this earth, or if they were just a few years removed from their high school graduation. They killed them just the same. The police have shown that anybody, at any age, can be on the fatal end of their force, if you were born with Black skin.

Aiyana Mo’nay Stanley-Jones was only seven-years-old. On May 16, 2010, at 12:40 am, a Detroit Police Department Special Response Team Officer ended her life. Her last peaceful minutes in this world were spent sleeping on the couch, near her grandmother. That’s before a no-knock warrant (at the wrong apartment) was executed. That’s before law enforcement threw a flash-bang grenade through her family’s front window. That’s before the grenade burned the blanket covering Aiyana’s body. That’s before the wooden front door exploded under the force of police boots. That’s before Officer Joseph Weekley fired a single shot, that entered Aiyana’s head and exited through her neck — all while an A&E crew were filming an episode of the cop- aganda program, The First 48.

There is no softer target in this world than a sleeping child.

Aiyana never had the chance to reach womanhood, but had she, her “soft target” status, both in perceived personhood and lived location, would have left her vulnerable to domestic anti-Black police terrorism attacks. The disturbing truth is that, as Kimberlie Crenshaw notes, “about a third of women who are killed by police in the United States are Black, but Black women are less than ten percent all women,” in this country. This speaks directly to the hazard level and susceptibility to anti-Black police terrorism faced by Black women of all ages in America. The devil is in the details. Look directly into the data, and see how many of the law enforcers who have killed Black women have been convicted of committing a crime. The American Judicial System does not protect Black women. It too treats them as soft targets. The lack of Black women’s names being said in conversations surrounding anti-Black police terror speaks directly to their deaths and narratives as being deemed as unworthy of outrage. Of newsworthiness. Of action.

Breonna Taylor’s killers are free. Brett Hankison, Jonathan Mattingly, and Myles Cosgrove are walking the streets…free. Breonna was shot dead in her home in March, and we are in the month of August. 143 days have passed…and her killers are free. There is no justice to be had for Black women when the intersections of their Blackness, their class, and their gender mark their bodies, their homes, and their narratives as “soft targets” to be attacked with little to no consequences.

The politics of Black women being unprotected against targeting in America, predates America being a sovereign nation. It goes as far back as Virginia’s December 1662 decree, “that the children of enslaved Africans and Englishmen would be ‘held bond or free according to the condition of the mother’ which, in effect, monetarily incentivized the sexual terror against Black women, “as their offspring would swell planters’ coffers — a prospect boon to countless rapes and instances of forced breeding.” One must understand, when you witness Black women passionately protesting on behalf of Breonna Taylor, yes, it is a fight for Black women today, but it is also a part of the uninterrupted fight Black women have always faced in America — the fight against being casualties of “soft target” terrorists attacks.

Disturbing the Peace: UN Peacekeepers and Sexual Abuse

By Devon Bowers

Author’s Note: This article and series focuses on sexual abuse and assault, with some graphic descriptions of such acts. Reader discretion is advised.

The United Nations is an organization in which the main goal is to “maintain international peace and security” and “to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace”[1] as a means to those ends. However, what has cropped up time and again, most recently with a 2019 New York Times article[2] focusing on UN peacekeepers in Haiti, is sexual abuse. It’s something that has not just plagued the organization for decades, but has utterly shattered, destroyed the lives of poor women around the world where they lay forgotten, often not seeing justice meted out to the ones who harmed them.

This problem, along with analyzing past and present plans to fight against this scourge, should be examined along with possible solutions. The purpose is not to ‘bash the UN’ in particular, but rather to study the systemic problems within UN peacekeeping and how it can be fixed or at least put on such a path.

Cambodia

In 1991, the UN formed the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) with the goal of “[taking] control of [Cambodia’ government] and [setting] up and run national elections” and to “help bring about a ceasefire between the various warring factions, disarm their forces and repatriate thousands of refugees languishing in camps on the Thai border.”[3] The mission seemed simple and yet problems occurred.

During this time period, there was a large resurgence of prostitution in Cambodia that was fueled by the economy but also the appearance of UN peacekeepers, which greatly increased the numbers from 10,000 in 1990 to 20,000 in 1993 when the UN exited the country.[4]

There were also allegations of sexual abuse by peacekeepers. Raoul M. Jennar, then-director of the European Far Eastern Research Center in Belgium, reported that “in the Preah Vihear hospital, there was for a time a majority of injured people who were young kids, the victims of sexual abuse by UN soldiers.” The situation was never handled, though women did come forth with rape and sexual abuse allegations, they were often days or weeks after the fact and so fact-finding and gathering evidence was a struggle.[5]

Besides the time lapse, such activity was openly supported by the chief of UNTAC, Yasushi Akashi, who argued that the peacekeepers “have a right to drink, enjoy themselves, and chase ‘young, beautiful beings of the opposite sex.’” This was in direct opposition to over 100 Cambodians and Westerners who alleged that sexual harassment of women occurred with disturbing frequency in any and all settings.[6]

It was this lax, uncaring, and cold attitude towards prostitution and sexual abuse that would set the tone for the UN’s peacekeeping missions.

Bosnia/Kosovo

In 1992, the United Nations established a peacekeeping force as to “provide security for the flows of humanitarian aid that were flowing into Bosnia from the international community.”[7] Approximately 40,000 UN personnel from a variety of nations were sent to aid in this goal.

Again, sexual abuse reared its ugly head. The Washington Post reported in 1993 that some UN peacekeepers, in visiting a Serb-run brothel, “took sexual advantage of Muslim and Croat women forced into prostitution, according to Muslim witnesses and the local Serb commander.” [8] The spokesman for UN forces in Sarajevo, LTC Bill Aikman, argued that such talk was nothing but “disinformation,” further stating that he didn’t “think U.N. troops could have done that.”

However, this was in direct conflict with eyewitnesses who, when being interviewed by Newsday, stated that in the summer and fall of 1992, they say on numerous occasions “saw young Muslim or Croat women being forced into U.N. armored personnel carriers or civilian cars that followed the U.N. vehicles to an unknown destination.”[9] Apparently the situation was never formally investigated by the UN, with an informal inquiry being dismissed “because ‘there was no grounds for pursuing it.”[10] Such logic is rather strange, deciding that there should be no further investigation because there isn’t any ‘real basis’ to do so, despite there not having been any formal inquiries into the matter.

Some years later, the US House of Representatives launched a formal investigation into the entire situation of prostitution and sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers and the full extent of the corruption of the UN was revealed.

The UN’s International Police Task Force was regularly involved at such aforementioned brothels. A raid of three nightclubs was done in November 2000, which found a total of six IPTF monitors in the clubs and it was revealed, according to verbatim statements from five of the women rescued from these brothels that IPTF monitors had been among the clients of these captured women.[11] When discussing the matter, UN officials contradicted themselves by denying allegations that their forces were involved in sex trafficking but “admitted that members of the force were found to have been involved in the use of young girls' services and that sometimes the children were unwilling participants.”[12]

The situation worsened due the fact that there was an active cover-up by the UN of such activities by the IPTF.

David Lamb, a human rights investigator for the UN, tore back of the curtain on the UN’s operations in Bosnia, directly linking it to sexual abuse. He even went so far as to say that:

U.N. peacekeepers' participation in the sex slave trade in Bosnia is a significant, widespread problem, resulting from a combination of factors associated with the U.N. peacekeeping operation and conditions in general in the Balkans. More precisely, the sex slave trade in Bosnia largely exists because of the U.N. peacekeeping operation. Without the peacekeeping presence, there would have been little or no forced prostitution in Bosnia. [13](emphasis added)

The Bosnian prostitution industry was organized in such a manner that there was no difference between victims of sex trafficking or women who had been forced into prostitution, creating a situation where anyone who engaged with prostitutes aided the sex slave trade.

The United Nations, on an organizational level, was completely complicit in the sex slave trade, with Lamb noting that he and others “experienced an astonishing cover-up attempt that seemed to extend to the highest levels of the U.N. headquarters.” Investigators would not only be rebuffed by those they were investigating, but the UN would launch “formal investigations against the investigators while giving no support to the original investigation, a scenario which was not new to the U.N. Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”[14] (emphasis added) So rather than punish the people who were committing crimes, the UN found it easier to harass and intimidate the investigators.

Lamb’s testimony bolstered previous claims. In December 2001, it was reported that the UN “quashed an investigation earlier this year into whether U.N. police were directly involved in the enslavement of Eastern European women in Bosnian brothels, according to U.N. officials and internal documents.”[15] During this time, Lamb noted that “his preliminary inquiry found more than enough evidence to justify a full-scale criminal investigation,” however it was killed by higher-ups. The UN even argued that there wasn’t enough evidence to point to systemic police involvement, in spite of the previous November 2000 raid.

Such activities weren’t just occurring on Bosnia, but also in neighboring Kosovo. Amnesty International reported within months of UN soldiers arriving in 1999 to aid in the aftermath of the Bosnia-Kosovo war, brothels sprung up and Kosovo “soon became a major destination country for women trafficked into forced prostitution.”[16] The situation persisted over a decade later, with UN forces being blamed for the growth of the sex slave industry in which many under-age girls were viciously tortured, raped, and abused.[17]

The biggest hurdle towards obtaining justice for the women and children who had been abused was that issue of legal immunity. Foreigners that were part of the UN mission, whether as a military/police force or a civilians, had near-absolute legal immunity. Specifically, Article 6 of the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the U.N.” provides immunity from personal arrest or detention and from seizure of personal baggage, and in respect to words spoken or written and acts done by them in the course of the performance of their mission, immunity from legal process of every kind.”[18] Thus, the perpetrators of so much horror were never able to be brought to justice.

This only compounded the situation for the victims as not only was there a cover up by the UN, but the legal immunity created a situation in which they would never get to take their abusers to court.

Mozambique

Due to an ongoing civil war, which displaced over six million Mozambicans, the UN was called in an attempt to create a situation where both sides, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique as the legitimate government and the rebels known as the Mozambican National Resistance, could come to talks.[19]

Similar to Cambodia and Bosnia, the very presence of the peacekeepers was argued to have led to an increase in prostitution and while there were investigations which resulted in some soldiers being expelled from the country, not a single one of them was actually prosecuted.[20]

These arguments were later confirmed when then-UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali had a formal inquiry conducted into peacekeepers involvement in child prostitution which found that “after the signing of the peace treaty in 1992, soldiers of the United Nations operation in Mozambique recruited girls aged 12 to 18 years into prostitution”[21] as well as the linkage between the arrival of peacekeepers and growth in child prostitution.

The year UN forces left, 1994, it came out that Italian soldiers were engaging in sexual misconduct with child prostitutes, as young as twelve to fourteen years old.[22] This incident was simply the one which was put on blast. International NGO Save The Children conducted an investigation into the matter of Italian soldiers being involved in sexual abuse.

The report explained that suspicions were raised and questions asked when the Italian soldiers engaged in commercial sex, but the matter became even more serious “when the soldiers started to make a clear request for sex with minors and recruited street children for all kind of services: domestic work (at a marginal fee), shopping, procuring illegal goods for trade and as mediators (pimps) for commercial sex,”[23] with the situation evolving to the point where the Italians had one of their liaison officers act as a mediator between the soldiers and the pimps/girls.

It goes on to note the disposition of soldiers, prices paid, and punishments for speaking out, which should be quoted at some length.

Most girls in the trade were aged between 13 and 18 years. Private conversations with the soldiers indicated that this was because of `more fun and excitement' and due to the fear of AIDS. Rates for sex differed. Generally, the price was 1.00 US Dollar for sex with a condom and $ 1.10 without. Some soldiers started a liaison with girls, and arranged a flat, room or other venue for them for regular encounters. […] The military doctor of the Italian Contingent Albatroz who served in Chimoio from October 1993 till early 1994, got reprimanded by the (Italian) Regional ONUMOZ Commander Mazzaroli when he reported in writing on the developments. In fact, the doctor was to serve till May 1994 in Chimoio and it is believed that he was repatriated to Italy at an earlier stage due to his critical attitude.[24] (emphasis added)

By late 1993, the Italians became so comfortable and lax that the local staff of NGO Redd Barna (presently known in Mozambique as Save The Children), the Norwegian branch of the International Save the Children Alliance, noticed them having sex with minors in uniform, in and on UN vehicles in the city of Chimoio, with houses even being rented for parties and sex.[25]

In response to this, on September 24, 1993 the head of the Mozambique branch of Redd Barna contacted the head of the main organization to discuss the situation. After visiting Chimoio to get first-hand knowledge of the activities of Italian soldiers, the Secretary-General of Redd Barna joined forces with elements of the International Save the Children Alliance resulting in, most importantly, a letter being written to head of UN forces in Mozambique regarding the situation.

This letter was released by the Children Alliance in December 1993, which the very next month, January 1994, was quoted in an independent Mozambique newspaper, specifically that the letter had been faxed from a high official in the headquarters UN Mozambique to the newspaper. The anonymous official even told Redd Barna that this was done because senior UN staff were “making all possible attempts” to hide and cover up the incidents.

This article was subsequently picked up by various outlets including Associated Press, CNN, NBC, and Reuters. In the immediate aftermath, Italian soldiers were confined to their respective bases. On January 26, 1994, the UN Mozambique contingency issued a statement in which they said, in part, that because “no concrete evidence or information was supplied by the initiators of this accusation, it has not been possible to complete the investigation.”[26]

It should be noted here that the language used is far from neutral, by referring to Redd Barna as “initiators of this accusation” it creates a tone where the NGO is seen as spreading rumors and hearsay. It also leads to the question of how they can’t complete an investigation unless concrete evidence has been supplied. One would think that their investigators, given the serious nature of the situation, would actively be looking for such evidence.

An investigative commission was formed by UN Mozambique and actively utilized Redd Barna to aid in its investigation. This, coupled with them having been the main source, along with the Save the Children Alliance, of the situation going public, painted a target on the organization’s back.  This resulted in Italian soldiers intimidating Redd Barna workers, threatening phone calls, telephone lines and the radio network being tapped when transferring fax messages, and feeding disinformation to journalists.

There was a reveal of a civilian-military divide in that on the week of February 18, 1994, the departing UN commander, Lélio Gonçalves, gave interviews where  he actively denied that UN peacekeepers were engaging in “sexual abuse of minors and sneered about [the International Save The Children Alliance’s] and Redd Barna's concern.” It should be noted that such statements were made “while his superior, [the special representative of the UN Secretary-General, Mr A.Ajello], had already confirmed the involvement of [UN] personnel.”[27] In addition, more and more UN staff approached the organization to provide information, yet were often despised and harassed by colleagues and superiors.

Still, after all of that, nothing was done. The actors just moved deeper into the darkness. After the publication of the investigative report, the Italian soldiers simply continued to engage in their sick practices in more hidden and remote locations and senior officers would intimate girls, forcing them to sign statements saying that the Italians weren’t engaging in any wrongdoing.[28]

Somalia and Haiti

The UN mission in Somalia, only lasting from 1992 to 1995, revealed that even when soldiers were caught in the wrong, their respective nation’s militaries wouldn’t mete out full justice.

Belgian peacekeepers accused of torturing Somali children, Italians, of raping Somali women. The Italian situation was so bad that two generals resigned as evidence of torture mounted and a day after photo evidence of an Italian soldier raping a Somali woman were published.[29]

In 1993, a Belgian paratrooper “allegedly procured a teenage Somali girl as a birthday present to a paratrooper. She was reportedly forced to perform a strip show at a birthday party and to have sexual relations with two Belgian paratroopers.”[30] A military court in 1998 sentenced that paratrooper to one year imprisonment (six months were suspended), a fine, and discharged them from the army. Meanwhile, even though the Italian government conducted a commission which “found credible evidence of a number of instances of gang-rape, sexual assault, and theft with violence,”[31] nothing was done to actually punish those troops.

In Haiti, months after international forces arrived in 1994, a number of women’s organizations petitioned the Justice Ministry to investigate the foreign soldiers as it was public information that “several cases of abuse of women and girls by soldiers in several towns throughout the country” had taken place. A former UN staff member even confided that observers had told their superiors in 1995 in Port-au-Prince of “allegations of sexual abuse committed by French and [Caribbean] UN ‘peacekeepers,’ only to be promptly ordered to desist from exploring the claims any further.”[32]

So on one instance we see just what happens when military personnel are subjected to their justice system, in which a slap on the wrist of sorts occurs and on the other we see still the UN covering up and stonewalling investigations into abuse.

East Timor

In 1999, international forces were deployed to East Timor to oversee its transition to becoming a fully independent country and to deal with the Indonesian intervention which consisted of backing guerrilla groups.[33]

Three years into the mission, it was reported at least two soldiers from Jordan had been accused of sexually assaulting an unknown number of boys. When asked if any investigations regarding these allegations had been conducted, the senior UN military observer, LTC Paul Roney, stated that he was unable to answer the question.[34]

The Jordanian peacekeepers were a major problem as “[interviews] by UN investigators [made claims of] Jordanian involvement in several alleged rapes of boys and women.”[35] This was known by the UN administration in East Timor itself, with the administrator Sergio Vieira de Mello, doing his best to keep the matter quiet.

An incident paralleling Bosnia took place in 2003. A UN police force raided an illegal brothel and found 23 Thai women who had been trafficked into the country, some even being underage, along with six UN police officers. The UN made the incredibly weak argument that the officers were just getting massages and didn’t know it was an illegal brothel.

Specifically, the UN’s Acting Deputy Operations Commissioner, Alan King, stated that the officers came “from a country where massage is quite a legitimate business and in many cases here in East Timor massage parlors exist and they are quite legitimate” and there was no indication “that they went there for anything other than a legitimate purpose.”[36]

Just like so many of the other cases, not a single person faced justice. Daily Australian outlet The Age reported in 2006 that “Sukehiro Hasegawa, the top UN official in East Timor, has acknowledged for the first time that the UN system failed to bring anyone to justice for crimes that included sex abuse of children and bestiality.”[37] Hasegawa announced that a ‘zero tolerance’ policy towards sexual abuse by any and all UN forces would be put into motion immediately.

The abuse of women in East Timor had long lasting impacts. There were approximately 20 cases of children who had been fathered by peacekeepers, however, no national record exists to get a better grasp of the situation.[38] Soldiers had made promises to marry the women, but would simply return to their home countries. The women and children were left behind to deal with being shunned by their community.

In 2003, the UN put out a bulletin putting the entire entity on notice that sexual abuse would not be tolerated, including that exchanging money for sexual favors “or other forms of humiliating, degrading or exploitative behavior, is prohibited.”[39] It established that the head of the mission in question would be responsible for fostering an environment in which such activities would be discouraged and prevented, ensuring each staff member would receive a copy of the bulletin to ensure that there is no excuse of someone not knowing the rules, and that a system would be established to report on sexual abuse cases. Still, this would have no serious effect on sexual abuse.

Sierra Leone

To deal with rebel elements in Sierra Leone and aid in the creation of a unity government comprised of the rebels and legitimate government, forces were sent to the country in 1999.[40]

The entire situation amounted to a horror show for the women of Sierra Leone. The Telegraph made known a report from Human Rights Watch.

But it found evidence of sexual atrocities being committed by troops from the regional intervention force, Ecomog, and the UN peacekeeping mission.

Women were used by all sides as chattels, kidnapped from their homes often in rural areas and forced to act as sex slaves for the troops as well as domestic maids responsible for cooking and household chores.

"To date there has been no accountability for the thousands of crimes of sexual violence or other appalling human rights abuses committed during the war in Sierra Leone," the report said.[41]

There was no reprieve for women here, the very people that were supposed to protected them were also the ones raping and abusing the

That same report revealed a number of crimes done by international forces. In April 2002, “witnesses saw a woman apparently being raped by two Ukrainian peacekeepers near the eastern town of Joru. There was no formal investigation into the matter.” (emphasis added) [42] In June, an officer from Bangladesh was accused of sexually assaulting a 14 year old boy, but a formal investigation found results to be inconclusive and the officer was soon sent back to his home country.

During March 2002, UN spokesperson Margaret A. Novicki, stated that the mission in Sierra Leone was going about conducting an ongoing training program for military personnel which focused on women’s rights and the zero tolerance policy for sexual exploitation and abuse and that the military command was visiting sector and contingent commanders to emphasize the need to police soldiers’ conduct.[43] The previous month, however, the a probe from the UN Human Right Council and the UK arm of the organization Save The Children revealed just how much the conduct of peacekeeping forces had deteriorated.

The joint investigation found a major disconnect between what was being said and what was going on the ground. A UN officer stated that “Every soldier, officer has been read and shown the code of conduct; no one can plead ignorance.”[44] Thus, while knowing the code of conduct, peacekeepers still engaged in abuse by exchanging money and food with children for sexual services, paying between $5 and $300 USD. Witnesses “spoke of teenage girls being asked to strip naked, bath and pose in certain positions while the peacekeepers took pictures, watched and laughed. Some are alleged to have had sex with the girls without using condoms.”[45]

There were several incidents of peacekeepers going to extremes in that they would meet with the child’s parents, feigning good intentions, but would leave abruptly, give the parents money to take care of the girl, or even shower the girl with gifts. The victims, on all levels, were the girls. While they were being abused by the peacekeepers, the community would respond by parading and publically shaming the girls in town.[46]

There was a separate inquiry conducted by the UN in late 2002 where it came to light that “there was no encouragement for staff or other persons to report ethical issues to management, nor for that matter is there a particular office or person with whom this type of problem can be discussed,”[47] but there were slight improvements such as the formation of a Personal Conduct Committee to examine cases of misconduct for UN workers, both military and civilian. Yet, it was known that sexual abuse cases were underreported. The Office of Internal Oversight Services found a single allegation of such abuse, but with over 17,000 soldiers, it shows that there are serious deficiencies with the reporting system rather than a lack of cases.[48]

A Human Rights Watch report documented several cases of rape by peacekeeping troops.

A Sergeant Ballah, from Guinea, was alleged to have engaged in the rape of a twelve year old girl according to the Sierra Leone police. The victim was raped in March 2001 “when she asked for Sgt. Ballah’s assistance in securing a ride to Freetown at the checkpoint that he was manning”[49] and even though Ballah went to court, he was simply sent back to Guinea. In a separate case, a Bangladeshi peacekeeper allegedly raped a fourteen year old boy (the rape had ben medically confirmed) and the police began to conduct an investigation, “until the UNAMSIL provost marshal took it over. The provost marshal concluded that there was no conclusive evidence to link the crime to the perpetrator.”[50] The inquiry was conducted haphazardly, with members of the Bangladeshi contingent speaking with the victim, despite the fact that they shouldn’t have been able to, nor did the UN mission even issue the victim or his family an apology, much less provide compensation or note the outcome of the investigation. This lines up with the summary that there was “reluctance on the part of UNAMSIL to investigate and take disciplinary measures against the perpetrators.”[51] Despite setting up a code of conduct and reinforcing a zero tolerance policy, we see that such acts were half-hearted measures given incorrect investigation methods and flat out interference in cases.

The UN even noted that charges against its own personnel and humanitarian workers working at UN camps, such as forcing women and children to provide sexual favors for food, medicine, and relief supplies, were investigated by the Office of Internal Oversight Services but dropped on the grounds that there wasn’t enough evidence.[52] It seems that the OIOS acts as many internal investigatory groups: covering up incidents and protecting criminals.

Congo

Peacekeepers were sent to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to aid in the implementation of a ceasefire between several warring factions starting in 1999.[53]

In mid-2002, Human Rights Watch published the report The War within the War: Sexual Violence against Women and Girls in Eastern Congo, where several acts of sexual assault were recorded. One such incident occurred in December 2001, when a Congolese woman dropped off an eleven year old girl to a Moroccan soldier, who proceeded to sexually assault the girl, but was kept at his post.[54] Though the zero tolerance policy had been in effect and there was an increase in gender awareness training and even a gender advisor, the mission still lacked any training strictly revolving around the sexual violence.

During July 2004 the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services began to investigate a number of accusations, ranging from a child prostitution ring being ran out of a UN airport to Nepalese soldiers raping minors and even allegations of a Tunisian officer soliciting sex from minors.[55] Most of the allegations revolved around the town of Bunia.

The UN seems to have ignored the situation until it reached a critical mass as The Independent obtained documents which showed that in August 2003, the child-protection office sent a memo to the UN’s Congo headquarters “detailing their fears about the allegations of sexual exploitation by [UN] forces. No action was taken.” Children were put at risk as despite allegations of Moroccan troops engaging in “child pornography, organized sex shows and the rape of babies,” they were still sent to Bunia where in 2004 it was found that “19 out of 50 cases of sexual violence against minors in Bunia were carried out by [Moroccan] troops.”[56] By transferring the Moroccan’s despite such extreme allegations, it could be argued that the UN on some level played a role in these sexual violence cases having occurred.

Horrors against the most vulnerable of Congolese society continued unabated. The New York Times reported in December 2004 on a 12-year-old girl, Helen, and a 13-year-old girl, Solange, both of whom were raped by UN peacekeepers who lured the girls in using food.[57]

In January 2005, the UN conducted an investigation into the matter, finding that “Congolese women and girls confirmed that sexual contact with peacekeepers occurred with regularity, usually in exchange for food or small sums of money.”[58] Unfortunately, the vast majority of allegations were unable to be substantiated. The Office of Internal Oversight Services complied a total of 20 cases and was able to corroborate only seven cases, as in remaining cases the victims and witnesses weren’t able to positively identify perpetrators.

Shockingly, while this investigation was going on, peacekeepers were still engaging in sexual acts, “evidenced by the presence of freshly used condoms near military camps and guard posts and by the additional allegations of recent cases of solicitations brought to the attention of the OIOS team during the last days of the investigation.”[59]

Out of the report came several recommendations, among them were: to create and implement a prevention program, “establish a rapid-response detection program, utilizing personnel experienced in such cases,” ensuring that UN administrators and officers can demonstrate that current rules and regulations aimed at preventing sexual abuse/exploitation are being enforced, and creating a program to “provide regular briefings for troops on their responsibilities to the local population and on prohibited behaviors”[60] so that everyone, from peacekeepers on up, would be on the same page.

Due to this report, a sexual abuse focal-point element was created for all UN agencies in the Congo, a website was established to educate staff on exactly what constituted sexual abuse/exploitation, and a strict curfew was put in place. In March 2005, the UN Security Council issued a resolution focusing on the Congo, which in part they asked the Secretary General to ensure compliance to the zero tolerance policy on sexual abuse, that perpetrators be investigated and punished.[61]

The UN began looking into the alleged child prostitution ring in August 2006. While many of the patrons were Congolese soldiers, early testimonies from victims revealed that ring leaders became interested in the presence of UN forces and the money they had as a catalyst for creating the ring.[62]

There were further child prostitution ring allegations surround a contingency from India two years later, but the soldiers were found innocent by Indian courts.[63] In another instance of abuse by Indian soldiers, there were allegations that they had fathered nearly 12 children after DNA tests were conducted and showed the children having distinct Indian features. While one soldiers was punished as it was found that his DNA sample matched with one of the children born, others only had administrative action recommended and others still were given a clean slate.[64]

Despite sexual abuse allegations having been on the decline[65], the situation seemed to continue to deteriorate as The Globe and Mail reported that in February 2011, two teenaged orphans were attacked with two Congolese soldiers beating one of the girls, while the other was gang raped and impregnated.[66] The UN soldiers were still out in the field even after the incident.[67]

Overall, there was a complete lack of punishment for soldiers that engaged in abuse and exploitation. The Independent reported in 2007 that nearly 200 peacekeepers had been disciplined in sexual abuse cases since 2004, but not a single one had been prosecuted. In fact, of the 319 people that had been investigated in the 2004-2007 time frame for sexual misconduct, 180 had been either dismissed or sent back to their home countries.[68]

Just for the missions launched in the 1990s, there were cover ups, lies, and even an outright acceptance of blue helmets engaging in abuse. Unfortunately, for the missions that started up in the 2000s, the women and girls of a myriad of nations would be subject to abuse, no more so than in Haiti. 

Notes

[1] United Nations, Chapter 1: Purposes and Principles, https://www.un.org/en/sections/un-charter/chapter-i/index.html

[2] Elian Peltier, “U.N. Peacekeepers in Haiti Said to Have Fathered Hundreds of Children,” New York Times, December 18, 2019 (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/18/world/americas/haiti-un-peacekeepers.html)

[3] Kevin Ponniah, “In 1993, the UN tried to bring democracy to Cambodia. Is that dream dead?,” BBC News, July 28, 2018 (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-44966916)

[4] Donna M. Hughes, “Welcome to the Rape Camp: Sexual Exploitation and the Internet in Cambodia,” Journal of Sexual Aggression 6 (Winter 2000), pg 4

[5] Sandra Whitworth, “Gender, Race and the Politics of Peacekeeping,” in Edward Moxon-Browne, editor, A Future in Peacekeeping? (New York, New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1998), pg 179

[6] Anne Orford, “The Politics of Collective Security,” Michigan Journal of International Law 17:2 (1996), pgs 378-379

[7] Globalization 101, Peacekeeping in Bosnia, http://www.globalization101.org/peacekeeping-in-bosnia/

[8] Roy Gutman, “U.N. Forces Accused of Using Serb-run Brothel,” Washington Post, November 2, 1993 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1993/11/02/un-forces-accused-of-using-serb-run-brothel/78414de2-36d0-41c0-9081-c3a5ee513078/)

[9] Ibid

[10] Susan Dewey, Hollow Bodies: Institutional Responses to Sex Trafficking in Armenia, Bosnia, and India (West Harford, CT: Kumarian Press, 2008), pg 101

[11] U.S. Congress, House, Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on International Relations and Human Rights, The U.N. and the Sex Slave Trade in Bosnia: Isolated Case or Larger Problem in UN System (Washington D.C.: Subcommittee on International Relations and Human Rights, House Committee On International Relations, 2002) (http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/intlrel/hfa78948.000/hfa78948_0f.htm), pg 47

[12] Ibid, pg 8

[13] Ibid, pg 66

[14] Ibid, pg 68

[15] Colum Lynch, “U.N. Halted Probe of Officers' Alleged Role in Sex Trafficking,” Washington Post, December 27, 2001 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/12/27/un-halted-probe-of-officers-alleged-role-in-sex-trafficking/2e2465f3-32b4-42ff-a8df-7a8108e4b9ee/)

[16] Amnesty International, Kosovo (Serbia & Montenegro) “So does that mean I have rights?” https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/96000/eur700102004en.pdf (May 6, 2004), pg 7

[17] Ian Traynor, “Westerner troops fuelling Kosovo sex trade,” Irish Times, May 7, 2004 (https://www.irishtimes.com/news/westerner-troops-fuelling-kosovo-sex-trade-1.1139448)

[18]Human Rights Watch, Hope Betrayed: Trafficking of Women and Girls to Post-Conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina for Forced Prostitution, https://www.hrw.org/report/2002/11/26/hopes-betrayed/trafficking-women-and-girls-post-conflict-bosnia-and-herzegovina (November 26, 2002), pg 46

[19] William Gehrke, “The Mozambique Crisis: A Case for United Nations Military Intervention,” Cornell International Law Journal 24:1 (1991), pg 135

[20] A.B., Fetherson, UN Peacekeepers and Cultures of Violence, Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine, https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/un-peacekeepers-and-cultures-violence (May 1995)

[21] United Nations, General Assembly, Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Children, A/51/306, August 26, 1996 (https://www.refworld.org/pdfid/3b00f2d30.pdf), pg 31

[22] Stanley Meisler, “Prostitution Report Accuses U.N. Troops in Mozambique,” Los Angeles Times, February 26, 1994 (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-02-26-mn-27378-story.html)

[23] Ernst Schade, Report On Experiences With Regards to the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces in Mozambique, November 20, 1995, pg 13

[24] Ibid

[25] Ibid, pg 14

[26] Ibid, pg 17

[27] Ibid, pg 20

[28] Ibid, pg 21

[29] Raf Casert, “In Italy, Belgium and Italy, Somalia peacekeeping scandals growing,” Associated Press, June 24, 1997 (https://apnews.com/deea729ccf6dfe142799ed245261b675)

[30] Ingrid Westendorp, M. W. Wolleswinkel, Ria Wolleswinkel, eds., Violence In The Domestic Sphere (Holmes Beach, FL: Gaunt Inc), 2005, pg 15

[31] Ibid

[32] Ibid

[33] Government of Canada, International Force in East Timor (INTERFET), https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/services/military-history/history-heritage/past-operations/asia-pacific/toucan.html

[34] Ginny Stein, Allegations against Jordanian peacekeepers, Australian Broadcasting Company, https://www.abc.net.au/am/stories/s317953.htm (June 25, 2001)

[35] Mark Dodd, “Hushed Rape of Timor,” The Weekend Australian, March 26, 2005 (https://web.archive.org/web/20050328014753/https://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,12655192%5E2703,00.html)

[36] Nick McKenzie, Claim UN officers customers in East Timor sex slave brothels, Australian Broadcasting Company, https://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2003/s898377.htm (July 9, 2003)

[37] Lindsay Murdoch, “UN acts to stamp out sex abuse by staff in East Timor,” The Age, August 30, 2006 (https://www.theage.com.au/world/un-acts-to-stamp-out-sex-abuse-by-staff-in-east-timor-20060830-ge3114.html)

[38] Sofi Ospina, A Review and Evaluation of Gender-Related Activities of UN Peacekeeping Operations and their Impact on Gender Relations in Timor Leste. PeaceWomen, http://peacewomen.org/sites/default/files/dpko_timorlesteevaluation_2006_0.pdf (July 11, 2006), pg 44

[39] United Nations, Secretary-General’s Bulletin, Special measures for protection from sexual exploitation and sexual abuse, ST/SGB/2003/13, October 9, 2003 (https://undocs.org/ST/SGB/2003/13), pg 2

[40] World Peace Foundation, United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone Brief, https://sites.tufts.edu/wpf/files/2017/07/Sierra-Leone-brief.pdf

[41] Tim Butcher, “UN troops accused of 'systematic' rape in Sierra Leone,” The Telegraph, January 17, 2003 (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/sierraleone/1419168/UN-troops-accused-of-systematic-rape-in-Sierra-Leone.html)

[42] Human Rights Watch, World Report 2003, https://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k3/pdf/sierraleone.pdf, pg 70

[43] Global Policy Forum, UN Takes Action Against Peacekeepers’ Misconduct, https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/203/39393.html (March 18, 2002)

[44] United Nations Human Rights Council, Save The Children-United Kingdom, Sexual Violence & Exploitation: The Experience of Refugee Children in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, https://www.unhcr.org/en-au/3c7cf89a4.pdf (February 2002), pg 6

[45] Ibid

[46] Ibid, pg 7

[47] United Nations, General Assembly, Investigation into sexual exploitation of refugees by aid workers in West Africa, A/57/465, October 11, 2002 (https://undocs.org/en/A/57/465), pg 16

[48] Ibid

[49] Human Rights Watch, “We’ll Kill You If You Cry: Sexual Violence in the Sierra Leone Conflict, https://www.hrw.org/report/2003/01/16/well-kill-you-if-you-cry/sexual-violence-sierra-leone-conflict (January 2003), pg 48

[50] Ibid, pg 49

[51] Ibid, pg 4

[52] Michael Fleshman, Tough UN Line on Peacekeeper Abuses, United Nations, https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/april-2005/tough-un-line-peacekeeper-abuses (April 2005)

[53] United Nations, United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, https://peacekeeping.un.org/mission/past/monuc/

[54] Human Rights Watch, The War within the War: Sexual Violence against Women and Girls in Eastern Congo, https://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/drc/Congo0602.pdf (June 2002), pg 95

[55] Children & Armed Conflict: Impact, Protection, and Rehabilitation Research Project, Abuse by UN Troops In D.R.C. May Go Unpunished, Report Says, http://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/childrenandwar/news_abuse_by_un_troops.php (July 12, 2004)

[56] Kate Holt, Sarah Hughes, “Will Congo's women ever have justice?” The Independent, July 12, 2004 (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/will-congos-women-ever-have-justice-46938.html)

[57] Marc Lacey, In Congo War, Even Peacekeepers Add to Horror,” New York Times, December 18, 2004 (https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/18/world/africa/in-congo-war-even-peacekeepers-add-to-horror.html)

[58] United Nations, General Assembly, Investigation by the Office of Internal Oversight Services into allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse in the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, A/59/661, January 5, 2005 (https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/SE%20A%2059%20661.pdf), pg 1

[59] Ibid, pg 11

[60] Ibid, pgs 12-13

[61] Susan A. Notar, “Peacekeepers as Perpetrators: Sexual Exploitation and Abuse of Women and Children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” Journal of Gender, Social Policy, and the Law 14:2 (2006), pg 420

[62] United Nations News, UN investigates allegations of child prostitution involving peacekeepers in DR Congo, https://news.un.org/en/story/2006/08/189322-un-investigates-allegations-child-prostitution-involving-peacekeepers-dr-congo (August 17, 2006)

[63] Kwame Akonor, UN Peacekeeping in Africa: A Critical Examination and Recommendations for Improvements (New York, NY: Springer, 2017), pg 39

[64] Gautam Datt, “Indian army's shame: Indictment of 4 Indian peacekeepers for 'sexual misconduct' on a UN posting in Congo dents the army's honor,” India Today, November 5, 2012 (https://www.indiatoday.in/india/north/story/indian-army-shamed-action-against-jawan-for-fathering-child-congo-india-today-122447-2012-11-25)

[65] UN News, Sexual abuse allegations decline against UN peacekeepers in DR Congo and Liberia, https://news.un.org/en/story/2011/07/382842-sexual-abuse-allegations-decline-against-un-peacekeepers-dr-congo-and-liberia, July 27, 2011

[66] Gerald Caplan, “Peacekeepers gone wild: How much more abuse will the UN ignore in Congo?” The Globe and Mail, August 3, 2012 (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/second-reading/peacekeepers-gone-wild-how-much-more-abuse-will-the-un-ignore-in-congo/article4462151/

[67] Matthew Russell Lee, On UN Report of Peacekeeper Rape in Congo, Ladsous' DPKO Says Nothing, Inner City Press, http://www.innercitypress.com/ladsous1congorape080712.html (August 7, 2012)

[68] Ruth Elkins, Francis Elliot, “UN Shame Over Sex Scandal,” The Independent, January 7, 2007 (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/un-shame-over-sex-scandal-431121.html)

Socialist Revolution, Women’s Liberation, and the Withering Away of the Family

By Tatiana Cozzarelli

Originally published at Left Voice.

In college, I read a lot of theorists who called Marxism “class reductionist.” They claimed that socialism only attacks economic problems and ignores oppression. But, as I began to study Marxism, I found these oft-repeated tropes about Marx only addressing class are far from the truth. 

From the very beginning, Marxists have taken up the question of gender oppression — sometimes with more clarity, sometimes with less, but always discussing it. A brief overview: In 1879, August Bebel wrote Woman and Socialism. In 1884, Friedrich Engels wrote The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in which he traces the roots of gender oppression to the creation of private property. He argues that there is nothing biological about patriarchy, monogamy, or the two-parent family unit. Later, Clara Zetkin was the editor of the German Social Democratic Party’s women’s newspaper Equality. She fought for women to become subjects of the struggle against capitalism and patriarchy. 

But for me, it is the Russian Revolution that best illustrates Marxist ideas made reality in relation to the fight against sexism and for women’s rights. It demonstrates that for leading Marxist thinkers such as Lenin and Trotsky, revolution alone was insufficient to rid society of patriarchy. Rather, revolution was just the beginning of a profound social transformation of women’s role in society, as well as a transformation of all social values and culture. This is demonstrated by the laws enacted by the Bolshevik Party that led the revolution, as well as the broad debates about women’s rights within the party. 

Yet, as Lenin put it, equality in law does not mean equality in life. As a result of the civil war that followed the revolution, and the international isolation of the first workers’ state, the economic conditions for women’s equality did not exist. Under these dire circumstances, Stalinism took hold, erasing workers’ victories and especially women’s victories won in the Russian Revolution. The emergence of Stalinism created the false idea that Marxism, and socialism more broadly, are unconcerned with sexism and patriarchy. 

Women as the Spark for the Russian Revolution

The context of the Russian Revolution of 1917 is one of complete misery for the country and its people. Russia had gone through a series of wars: with Japan in 1904-05, a failed revolution in 1905, and World War I in 1914. During the World War, prices went up 131% in Moscow and women spent hours waiting in the biting cold for basic necessities like wheat and sugar. 

Marx believed that the socialist revolution would begin in advanced industrialized nations. Russia, however, lagged far behind the economic and productive power of countries such as Germany. Peasants made up 80% of the population — mostly illiterate and isolated from the political debates in the cities. Peasant life was based on a strict division of labor and women were taught to be obedient to their father and later their husband. It was only after 1914 that women were allowed to separate from their husband, but only with a man’s permission; likewise, women could only get a passport or a job with a man’s permission. 

There was a small but strong proletariat in Russia’s cities. World War I played an important role in increasing the weight of women workers in the Russian proletariat: as men went off to war, more and more women joined the workforce. Women made up 26.6 percent of the workforce in 1914, but nearly half (43.4 percent) by 1917. On top of the miserable working conditions, women industrial workers also faced gendered inequality. They earned lower wages and were not allowed to organize in the same unions as their male colleagues.

However, women were the spark that ignited the Russian Revolution which would topple the Tsar and create the conditions for the Bolsheviks to take power. In late February 1917, the women in Petrograd factories left their workplaces, going to neighboring factories calling on the men to also leave their jobs and join the strike. The Bolshevik newspaper Pravda stated, “The first day of the revolution — that is the Women’s Day, the day of the Women’s Workers International! All honor to the International! The women were the first to tread the streets of Petrograd on that day!”

After the February Revolution, workers organized delegate assemblies, called soviets, to make decisions about the burgeoning movement. Women participated in the soviets, although to a lesser degree than men. The Bolshevik paper Rabotnitsa (The Woman Worker) was relaunched in May 1917 and discussed equality of the sexes, as well as the need for the state to provide communal facilities for taking care of household chores, traditionally imposed on women. 

The stage for the October Revolution, which ended the provisional government and brought about the world’s first workers’ state, was prepared by women’s radical activism. It was the tireless organizing work of Bolshevik women such as Alexandra Kollontai that allowed the Bolsheviks to win over the majority in the soviets and take power in the October Revolution. Women also participated in the October Revolution by providing medical help and even joining the Red Guard. 

What Did the Bolsheviks Think About Women’s Issues? 

The Bolsheviks saw women’s role in a given society as a measure of the society as a whole; it wouldn’t be until women had achieved full equality that they could consider the socialist revolution ultimately successful. After the revolution, immediate measures for women’s liberation were taken. The Bolsheviks put forward four primary means to support women’s equality: free love, women’s participation in the workforce, the socialization of domestic work, and the withering away of the family.

The Bolsheviks believed that women should not be coerced to marry or to remain in a marriage as a result of family obligations or economic pressures. Relationships should be based exclusively on love, not social coercion. The Bolsheviks did not believe that they could immediately take up the task of building new types of relationships, recognizing that the revolution alone would not do away with centuries of patriarchal traditions, beliefs, and morals. Rather, they sought to destroy the  social basis of the bourgeois family and the inherited beliefs that keep women oppressed. Furthermore, they believed that women should have complete equality with men in the workplace and encouraged women to organize, vote, and run for positions of leadership in unions and soviets. 

Long before the Wages for Housework campaign, a global feminist movement that grew out of the International Feminist Collective in Italy in 1972, the Bolsheviks argued that there was nothing natural or biological about women doing domestic work or even raising children. This was an ideology perpetuated by capitalism that had no place in a socialist society. Liberating women from “domestic slavery” was a central discussion within the party. Trotsky writes,

The revolution made a heroic effort to destroy the so-called “family hearth” — that archaic, stuffy and stagnant institution in which the woman of the toiling classes performs galley labor from childhood to death. The place of the family as a shut-in petty enterprise was to be occupied, according to the plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, creches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations, hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organizations, moving-picture theaters, etc. The complete absorption of the housekeeping functions of the family by institutions of the socialist society, uniting all generations in solidarity and mutual aid, was to bring to woman, and thereby to the loving couple, a real liberation from the thousand-year-old fetters. 

Unlike the Wages for Housework campaign, the Bolsheviks sought to take housework out of the hands of individuals and put it in the hands of the workers state. The Bolsheviks did not want to maintain domestic work in the realm of the household, equally dividing those banal tasks between men and women. Rather, they wanted to divorce these tasks from the family unit and socialize domestic labor. In this way, the family and women in particular would shed much of their “reproductive” role. 

Equality in Law

The Bolsheviks put ideas into practice. In 1918, less than a year after the revolution, the Family Code was passed, which historian Wendy Goldman calls the “most progressive family legislation ever seen in the world.” It took the church out of the business of marriage and made matrimony a civil affair. It not only legalized divorce, but made it accessible to every married person without requiring a reason. The code ended centuries-old laws that assigned all property to men and provided equal rights to children born outside of a registered marriage. If a woman did not know who the father of her child was, all of her sexual partners would share responsibilities for child support. Importantly, it made women equal to men in law. A law as progressive as this has not been won to this day in the United States, as the Equal Rights Amendment was not confirmed by enough states. The author of the family code, Alexander Goikhbarg saw this law as transitory —it was not meant to strengthen either the state or the family, but to be a step towards the extinction of the family. 

In 1920, abortion was legalized, making the Soviet Union the first country in the world to do so. Prostitution and homosexuality were no longer banned in the USSR either. Additionally, the Bolsheviks opened public cafeterias, laundromats, schools, and day care centers as a step towards the abolition of women’s double shift at the workplace and at home. It was a step towards socializing domestic work, liberating individual women from the responsibility. 

Furthermore, the Bolsheviks saw women’s political participation as central to the advancement of the Soviet Union. They organized Zhenotdel, the women’s section of the party, made up of workers, peasants, and housewives who organized women at the local level. Delegates from Zhenotdel were elected for internships in the government as well. As Wendy Goldman argues, it was an important way for thousands of women to get involved in the party, as well as in politics more broadly. 

Equality in Life

Although the Bolsheviks made major advances by passing laws, they were very conscious that this was insufficient to guarantee true equality. Lenin says,

Where there are no landlords, capitalists and merchants, where the government of the toilers is building a new life without these exploiters, there equality between women and men exists in law. But that is not enough. It is a far cry from equality in law to equality in life. We want women workers to achieve equality with men workers not only in law, but in life as well. For this, it is essential that women workers take an ever increasing part in the administration of public enterprises and in the administration of the state… The proletariat cannot achieve complete freedom, unless it achieves complete freedom for women.

Although the Bolsheviks stressed the material basis for inequality, they also knew that a profound personal change would have to occur in members of the new Soviet society. However, this change in people’s ideas was not divorced from the changes in the organization of society — a social reorganization won by proletarian revolution. In this sense, it is a reminder to us that simply changing people’s ideas is insufficient to create true equality. Sexism does not only exist in people’s minds, but in institutions and the organization of society. 

The Struggles of a Young Worker’s State

The young workers’ state faced considerable challenges in its first years. It was attacked by 14 imperialist armies and survived because of sacrifices made by workers and peasants in the Red Army. After a world war and then a civil war, the people of the Soviet Union faced starvation and high unemployment. 

Women suffered the most under these conditions. Although under explicit orders not to do so, women were laid off before their male colleagues. The 13th Congress of the Bolshevik Party discussed this problem explicitly, making new regulations to protect women’s employment. They said, “that the preservation of women workers in production has political significance.” 

A tenet of communism — to each according to his need and from each according to his ability — can only work in a society of plenty. Advanced capitalist mass production provides such a basis. However, when there isn’t enough, a select group will decide who has and who does not — a bureaucracy. This is why Lenin and so many other Bolsheviks placed their hopes in a German revolution, which would ensure that the USSR would not remain isolated. It would put German industry and the goods it produced under the control of the working class. However, the German revolution was squashed, leaving the Soviet Union to fend for itself. It is from the conditions of scarcity that the counter revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy emerged, reversing the advances made during the early years after the Russian Revolution. Stalinism went on to play a counterrevolutionary role around the world, based on the theory of “socialism in one country.”

Stalinist Counterrevolution and Women’s Rights

The Stalinist bureaucracy staged a counterrevolution which murdered the Left Opposition inside the Bolshevik Party, locking up, exiling, or killing those who attempted to carry on the legacy of the 1917 revolution. Theorists who wrote about the withering away of the family such as Nikolai Krylenko were arrested and murdered, while the author of the 1918 Family Code was imprisoned in an asylum. 

At the same time that Stalin began to put forth the idea of socialism in one country, he also re-criminalized homosexuality and prostitution. In 1936, Stalin ended women’s right to an abortion, with Stalinist leaders arguing that women had the “honorable duty” to be mothers.

In order to put forward such reactionary ideas about gender, Stalin squashed the women’s department within the Central Committee of the Communist Party, as well as all women’s organizing on the local level. His government campaigned to bring back traditional gender roles, the very gender roles that the Bolsheviks had worked to break with. By 1944, Stalin had organized awards for women based on how many children they had. The “Order of Maternal Glory” was created for women with seven to nine children, and the title “Mother Heroine” for those with ten or more. 

The Left Opposition and the Bolshevik Legacy

As Stalin continued to play a counterrevolutionary role around the world, Trotsky created the Fourth International, a grouping of communists dedicated to the legacy of the Bolsheviks. The Fourth International was against the Soviet bureaucracy and for power to the working class, not just in one country — as Stalin wanted — but around the world. 

The Transitional Program, which laid out the tasks for the Fourth International, argues that women’s rights are central for the socialist revolution. Trotsky says, 

Opportunist organizations by their very nature concentrate their chief attention on the top layers of the working class and therefore ignore both the youth and the women workers. The decay of capitalism, however, deals its heaviest blows to the woman as a wage earner and as a housewife. The sections of the Fourth International should seek bases of support among the most exploited layers of the working class; consequently, among the women workers.

Far from any class reductionism, Trotsky sees the organization of women in a revolutionary party as a central task for communists.

What Can We Learn?

One hundred years have passed since the Russian Revolution and it has been decades since a revolution has been able to shake capitalism. Some believe that revolution is impossible. Others believe that a workers’ revolution will create laws based on the racist, sexist, or homophobic attitudes that some workers hold today. Many equate Marxism with the struggle against exploitation, not the struggle against oppression. 

Yet when the Bolsheviks took power and immediately made laws supporting women’s rights, they knew the revolution did not and should not stop there. They had no illusions about even the most progressive gender legislation in the history of the world, on its own, ending patriarchy. The Bolsheviks knew that these laws created the foundation for liberation, but were not libration in itself. Instead, they had lively debates about how to organize the material conditions of the new society to root out oppression against women. They wanted to make sure women had full participation in work, education and politics— but not by taking on a double or triple burden of housework, childcare and paid work. They discussed socialized childcare and domestic work, as well as the withering away of the family as an organizing unit of society. Even the young workers’ state did not yet have the material conditions to realize this dream, but they took real and substantive steps in that direction. Stalinism put an end to all these dreams, reverting the Soviet Union to patriarchal norms. 

It’s been a long time since the Russian Revolution. There are a lot of thinkers who have made key contributions to socialist feminist thought since then, especially in the realm of sex, sexuality and queer theory. Social reproduction theory builds on key Marxist ideas, and there have been huge developments in a discussion of desire, sexuality and queer theory. These are all important to thinking about a socialist revolution in the 21st century, which would create the material foundations for the liberation of gender and sexuality. 

But we cannot leave the legacy of Marxism to those who pervert its meaning to crude class reductionism. We cannot allow Marx’s legacy to be mired by Stalinism and the patriarchal, counterrevolutionary view of gender and society that it upheld. We should draw lessons from the Bolshevik’s revolutionary tradition for women’s liberation. 

See ME and Not Just Stereotypes: Perceptions of Black Women Travelers

By Cherise Charleswell

I’ve always had a great interest in cultural anthropology, history, human evolution, and geography, and this has led me to travel to over 30 countries in the world; mostly solo. And, I have to admit that the greatest challenge and impact that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on my life is the fact that it has left literally grounded and stuck in the United States; the country with the highest rates of COVID-19 infections and deaths (See here for a running count), the result of a delayed, disjointed, and failed response to this global pandemic. This pandemic couldn’t have struck the United States at a worse time. The country is led by a Presidential administration that chooses to politicize this public health crisis, bully, intimidate,  silence, and dismiss well respected scientists and public health officials, and have a President who is so much of a compulsive liar that he has no credibility when he speaks.

And many of us wish that he would step back, stop speaking, and allow the experts to do that.  Instead he is disgruntled and combative; holding press conferences where he attacks members of the press for asking basic questions — you know, simply doing their job; and he shows the most contempt for women of color. Examples here, here, here, and here.

All of this is deeply depressing for an avid traveler like myself, who actually NEEDS to take constant breaks from the United States. The reality is that I now live in a country that is the global hotbed for this disease, and that means that it may be quite some time before anyone will be able to embark on international travel from the United States. For a country that likes to rank others and post travel     advisories the United States is now the focal point of many travel advisories. The greatest example of this was an Advisory Facebook post made by The Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where the following was stated, “In accordance with the recommendations from the Ministry of      Foreign Affairs (UD), NTNU strongly recommends that all NTNU students who are outside Norway return home,” the message read. “This applies if you are staying in a country with poorly developed health services and infrastructure and/or collective infrastructure, for example the USA. The same applies if you do not have health insurance.”

The shade was real and well deserving!

And I’ve had much time to think about all of this, after watching all four seasons of Netflix’s The Last Kingdom in a matter of days, and adhering to Federal, state, and Los Angeles’s county’s Shelter-At-Home directives. I’m actually enjoying the peace, quiet, and solitude. If I’m going to be stuck here, this is how I prefer to spend my days.

And I’m always asked about whether or not I get lonely or find traveling alone to be difficult.

The answer is always – NEVER! I’m a “people watcher” and despite being a bit of an introvert, when traveling I find myself more open to engaging and speaking to people, and while I’m observing others, I certainly pay attention to who and how others are observing me.

I realize that for some people that I come across as an abnormality or something that is different and exotic in every way It may be their first time seeing a woman who looks like me: amber colored     sun-kissed brown skin, afro texture hair, tall, unaccompanied by a male, and completely unapologetic about taking up space, up close. Unfortunately, many who observe me have often already been     exposed to stereotypes and misconceptions about Black women, and all of this shapes how they see me.

So, what are these stereotypes?

Within the United States social scientist often reference jezebel, sapphire, & the mammy when        explaining historical stereotypes about Black women. These and other stereotypes about Black women are so embedded in the U.S. that a major movie studio green-lighted the production of “Loqueesha”, a film that resolves around a white male radio Dj pretending to be a “ghetto” Black woman after he couldn’t find work due to stations in his area practicing affirmative action & wanting to only hire non-white people.

Yes! This is actually the basis of an actual movie that was slated for release in the Summer of 2019.

However, similar stereotypes about Black women being masculine and more aggressive,                 hypersexual, and untrustworthy are seen in other parts of the world. One only has to look at the racist, or more appropriately misogynorist portrays of Serena Williams, arguably one of the best athletes in history, to see examples of how these stereotypes continued to be used against Black women, regardless of socioeconomic status and celebrity.

The truth of the matter, and something that I have certainly noticed in every country that I have     traveled to, is that just about every country in the world has been impacted by the notion of white   supremacy and the belief that whiteness/European features is the standard of beauty. This may of course be the remnants of European colonialism, imperialism, and the transatlantic slave trade. I noticed this while watching telenovelas in Panama where all of the actresses were fair skinned “white” Latinas– in a country where the population mostly consists of people are varying shades of brown, including those who were as brown as or much darker than me. I recognized this as child listening to Caribbean men speak about their love of “clear, red, Frenchie, and brown (meaning light) women. I was reminded about this while on a crowded bus in Milan Italy when two West African women were attempting to squeeze past my mother and I. Their blotchy, discolored bleached, and mutilated skin made me recoil. And I couldn’t help shaking-my-head and laughing with others while on the beach in Mykonos Greece, while watching Chinese tourists who were so fearful of the slightest tan, marched around the beach with umbrellas, never removing their wide brim hats, and wearing long-sleeved shirts down to their wrists. They simply rolled up the bottom half of their pants – to wade briefly in the water, and remained like this on the beach for over an hour.

In a 2019 Huffingpost article, “I’m a black woman living in Asia. This is what it’s like to date”, writer, Niesha Davis, shared the following regarding her experiences with white beauty ideals in Asia, and how that impacts her dating life:

“Dating locals hasn’t been very fruitful for me either. South Korean and Chinese cultures both seem to worship all things having to do with whiteness, from skin bleaching to double eyelid surgery. As a black woman, I don’t fit into either society’s standards of beauty.”

As a globetrotting Black woman it is impossible for me to ignore these things, and I realize that there is no place in the world, not even on the continent of Africa, where I will not come across or experience anti-Blackness, racism, colorism, and/or misogynoir. And because other nations and regions of the world have bought so deeply into white supremacy, one may come across the greatest challenges with anti-Blackness outside of Europe.

It could be the concierge of a Caribbean hotel or an African safari operator ignoring and catering to the needs of White travelers instead of you, due to lingering stereotypes and effects of white supremacy. It could be coming across the 2015 posters for Star Wars: The Force Awakens and realizing that they went to great lengths to remove the image of John Boyega who happens to be Black and one of the stars of the film.

Despite the influence of reggae, dancehall, hip hop, and other forms of Black music in the Middle East and Asia, which is certainly seen with K-Pop bands, the region continues to retain a degree of anti-Blackness, and stereotypes about Black womanhood, particularly those about hyper-sexuality, being sexually available & crass, which have unfortunately been bolstered by misogynoir-laden hip hop videos that often reduce Black women to body parts. This is why it is not unusual to hear Black expats lament about not being able to find a job in certain countries or regions, because job posts specifically state “No Blacks” in countries like Vietnam. These reasons are also why I constantly had to endure being referred to as a “Real Housewife” throughout the United Arab Emirates. All this, despite the fact that absolutely nothing about my dress, speech, and demeanor comes close to what is exhibited on a show like Real Housewives of Atlanta, but for an international audience, that is often their only reference point; and it is one steeped in stereotypes. And now during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, which started in China, Black Africans have shamefully been targeted and discriminated against; and this again comes with great irony, considering the fact that countries in Africa have some of the lowest rates of infection, and once again the pandemic began in China!

THE EFFECTS

I often think about the effects of these stereotypes, and how they may help to bolster the fascination and at times fetishization of my Black body, as well as the fixation on my curves, complexion, and full features. I have no problem with being seen as exotic, because the connotation includes the notion that something is unique, rare, and thus more desirable. I have posed for pictures with so many people around the world, and I would really like to know what they are doing with my pictures. I’ve even had an indigenous woman in Peru hand me her baby for a photo-op. In Singapore I readily understood why so many women flocked to my brown body while at a night club: touching me, trying to grind on me, and trying to impress me with their dance moves. We were listening to Black music. They’ve seen all of the videos, and here was there chance to twerk and grind on a real front-to-back shaped, thick thighs, small waist, full chest, thick lips, and round-ass having Black woman!! I understood the excitement, and made a point to not disappoint; accepting and killing the challenge to their little “dance off”.

Did I mention that I’m an African-Caribbean Latina? As such, I’ve been dancing since I learned to walk.

However, I still cringe when I come across people in the U.S. or abroad who feel the need to “pet me” by randomly touching my hair, or those who touch me without permission and run their hands across my brown body, as if they think that my color may magically rub off on them. I realize that the melanin that I possess is poppin’, but I still do not appreciate being stroke and being made to feel like “The Other”.

The most troublesome effect of these stereotypes is that they present real safety concerns for Black women. One of the most recent incidents that stands out in mind for me, occurred during a Spring 2019 trip to Hungary. While boarding the Line 1 train in Budapest headed towards Vörösmarty tér, a young man promptly entered the train after me, and upon seating he positioned his body right in front of mine, in a manner that left our feet entangled. This all occurred during an early morning ride where there were many available seats. In fact there may have been only 3 or 4 of us in the subway car that we were occupying. This man stared at me and was trying to be discreet about it, but he was also photographing me. I started to snap photos of him in return, to let him know that I noticed, and because I was thinking that I may have to gather evidence about the stalking and harassment.

When we came to my stop, I shook free of him and quickly exited the subway car, but he was on hot pursuit. His English was quite limited but he managed to state that I was “so beautiful” and then he touched himself and signaled for me to touch him too. All of this at the exit of a metro station! I said no, shook my head, and kept walking—quickly. And he followed! He caught up to me and presented money and again touched me, and I yanked my hand away from him, as he tried to kiss me, saying please. At this point, I really had enough, and began screaming at him to get away from me. I began scolding him like a child and he scurried away.

The entire time that my ordeal began with him, no one even bothered to “bat an eye” or come to my defense. And by the time that I was crossing a wide boulevard for a tram car, he re-appeared and kept repeating “please” and begging for a kiss. I was beyond livid and made even more of a scene that caused him to flee after an older woman finally stopped to ask if I was ok, and stated something to him in Hungarian.

This young man, who was closer to my baby sister’s age was not only disrespecting me, but he made the assumption that I was a prostitute or so sexually accessible to him that all he had to do was wave money in the air, and I would perform a sex act on him — a complete stranger at the exit of a metro station.

Unfortunately, being mistaken for or treated like a prostitute is not a rare occurrence for Black women, especially those of us who travel solo.

In the 2018 article, “20 Euros for Prostitution”, Karen Safo, Founder of the Black Voyager shared her horrific experience in Chatillon, a town on the outskirts of Paris France. After getting into a taxi she was informed that the the price would be much greater than what she expected, and with only 30 Euro remaining, she asked to get out of the car, but the driver refused. She eventually jumped out with her carry on bag and was followed by not only the taxi driver, but others who assumed that her Black body running from the cab, was the body a prostitute (Any another conversation I can unpack the problem of stigma and the dehumanizing women who have experienced commercial sexual exploitation):

This driver caught up with me and had recruited a group of men who grabbed me and my suitcase and screamed prostitute, prostitute ,prostitute you need to pay! My phone smashed, suitcase broken. They were punching me and I was punching them. The people in the town stopped and starred. I wasn’t embarrassed, I was disappointed. Nobody helped me. They believed the stereotype. Sniggering, disgusted and laughing.

After getting away from her attackers and boarding a bus she shared:

An Australian lady who understood English and French and a Black woman came and consoled me. They told me that that’s how the town are towards some black women and I shouldn’t worry. I then went to report it to the police station before my flight. It painted a bad picture of my trip. My mum said for 20 Euros you suffered this ordeal, why didn’t you just give it to him. But it’s the principle, and people cannot get away with such disgusting behavior. What would I do differently? Nothing. Stereotypes cause so much confusion and misunderstanding. This made me realize how dangerous the media is in creating stereotypes of different races. It’s time to create our own narrative.

In the article, “In Spain, I’m a prostitute”: Challenging the perception of black women who travel”, traveler and author Jeta Stephens shared this story:

I stood near the busy Puerta del Sol in Madrid, waiting to meet a  friend. Somehow, a man approached me, out of everyone in the area, and asked, “Are you selling something?” Initially, I thought he meant drugs, but when he invited me to a nearby brothel, I realized what he was actually soliciting was sex, and I quickly walked away. Prostitution isn’t illegal in Spain. However, the women on the prowl are usually dressed in miniskirts and go-go boots. My outfit of the night was a three-quarter-length pea coat and sneakers.

SEE ME

I’ve come to the understanding that when I travel that I have to engage, educate, and force the people that I come across to not only see ME, but to see Black women in a manner that moves beyond the stereotypes and the harmful images of us that have been projected around the world.

I plan to continue to travel near-and-far, across continents, in order to  help dismantle stereotypes, and force those that cross my path to not only recognize the fullness of Black women’s features and bodies, but the fullness of our womanhood. And I plan to do this as soon as The Outside finally reopens.

Socialist Feminism in the era of Trump and Weinstein

By Susan Ferguson

Originally published at New Socialist.

It wasn’t that long ago when news outlets were abuzz with the idea that feminism was dead, a relic of the past.

Young women who had reaped the benefits of the Second Wave – access to postsecondary education, non-traditional jobs, boardrooms, and more flexible household arrangements – saw, it was said, no need to fight for more equality, more freedom. It was a “post-feminist” world. (I put that word in scare quotes because, as I explain below, “post-feminism” actually means something else among critically inclined feminists).

Of course, those commentators were dead wrong. But if they could keep their heads in the sand back then, they certainly can’t today.

Just 14 months ago Americans – well 26 percent of eligible American voters anyway – elected a man who has yet to meet a woman he hasn’t ogled, insulted, demeaned or groped.

Then, in 2017, high-profile, powerful men fell like dominos because the women they work with (and generally work in positions of relative power over) have been emboldened to tell their stories of sexual harassment and assault.

And although it gets far less press, it is also the case in 2017 – as it was in the 1980s when the “post-feminist” era was first proclaimed – that millions of women living in the wealthiest nations of the world face poverty, violence and/or discrimination in their everyday lives.

So, the post-feminist era was always a myth.

Even the pundits no longer talk much about “post-feminism.” They’ve actually found a new feminist – Justin Trudeau. And, more appropriately, Time magazine has just named the #MeToo movement its “person of the year.”

Of course, some of us have known all along that there is nothing outmoded about the need for a feminist analysis and politics. We’ve been working throughout the last few decades, advocating in various ways to improve women’s lives.

It is those “various ways” that I want to look at here. For however much one set of feminist politics tends to dominate the public discussion, there’s a rich and diverse tradition from which we can draw our ideas and thinking.

I’m going to comment briefly on three faces of feminist politics that have emerged over these years, which I’m calling:

1. “Fearless girl” feminism

2. Allyship feminism

3. Anti-capitalist feminism from below

While there is plenty of overlap among these, we can trace their roots back to distinct theoretical and political premises – and in so doing, see how they support divergent notions of progress and freedom for women.

To signal where I’m going with this: while all three “faces” of feminism have generated substantive, material changes in women’s lives, it is the third approach – anti-capitalist feminism from below – that orients us to thinking about how to develop a transformative politics that grapples most directly with the systemic nature of oppression.

“Fearless girl” feminism

The title here refers to the bronzed statue of a small girl facing off against “Charging Bull,” the Wall St. icon installed two years after the 1987 market crash. The “fearless girl” statue (created by artist Kristen Visbel) was erected by State Street Global Advisors just as International Women’s Day was rolling around this year. It symbolizes a feminism that promotes women’s “empowerment” through economic independence and labour market opportunities.

State Street Global Advisors is an investment firm which manages $2.5 trillion in assets. It unveiled the statue as the launch of a campaign to add more women to corporate boards of directors. (Apparently, surveys have found deep resistance to the idea that women should comprise even 50 percent of a board, with 53 percent of directors surveyed responding that women should comprise no more the 40 percent of board membership.)

Why would State Street Global Advisors care? Well, it turns out, gender diversity has been shown “to improve company performance and increase shareholder value.”

This is, of course, the dominant face of feminism today. It is what Justin Trudeau trumpets when he fills half of his cabinet seats with women (you’ll remember his flippant but hard-to-argue-with reasoning, “Because it’s 2015”). Or, when he sits down with Ivanka Trump for a roundtable on so-called women business leaders. Or, again, when he insists that any free trade deal with China requires both parties sign on to gender equity provisions.  

And while many of us will roll our eyes at the superficiality of Trudeau’s feminism, few would argue, I suspect, that he shouldn’t take these positions.

In other words, it’s somewhat awkward, and complicated.

The so-called empowerment of women achieved by widening the corporate and political corridors to accommodate them is a result of decades of feminists trying to redress inequality through equal pay and pay equity legislation – legislation that has undoubtedly improved the lives of many, many women.

Yet, where has this gotten us? As the Trudeau/Trump collaboration attests, these feminist initiatives are easily coopted by a shallow exercise in corporate diversity management. And we see the broad societal impact of this uptake of “fearless girl” feminism in the widening gap between wealthy and average-income earning women.

Leslie McCall, a sociologist at Northwestern University, has tracked women’s wages in the US since the 1970s.

From: Leslie McCall, Men against Women: or the Top 20 percent against the Bottom 80, 7 June 2013, Council on Contemporary Families (https://contemporaryfamilies.org/top-20-percent-against-bottom-80/).  

When she started, women with college degrees earned less than men straight out of high school. But then, the effects of equal pay legislation (introduced in 1963 in the US) started to kick in.

Today, women still haven’t seriously dented the ranks of the 1 percent. They are, however, much more often found among top salary earners. Women’s earnings in the top 85th to 95th percentile (yearly incomes of about $150,000) have grown faster than men’s earnings in that category in every decade since the 1970s. For example, they’ve seen a 14 percent growth in the first decade of this century, compared to an 8.3 percent growth for those making average wages.

According to McCall, there have been “strong absolute gains for women in this elite group.”  

Meanwhile, median earnings of all full-time workers (men and women) didn’t change between 2001 and 2010. And the gap between high-earning women on the one hand, and middle- and low-earning women on the other, has been steadily growing.

So, while women who make about $150,000 a year are seeing their salaries continue to grow at robust rates, women (and men) who make about $37,000 or less a year have, for some time now, seen their incomes stall.

To be clear, then, we are talking about a very small proportion of women who have truly been “empowered” here:

• in 2013, according to a JPMorgan Chase researcher, only 3.25 percent of American women wage-earners took home more than $100,000 per year.

• That same year, according the US Social Security Administration, more than half of US wage-earners earned $30,000 or less. And you can bet that women, blacks, Latinos/Latinas, trans people, queers, and immigrants were over-represented in that group.

Yet, yet . . . I defend “fearless girl” feminism’s demand for pay equity and equal pay. One thing these figures don’t tell us – they can’t tell us in fact – is how much lower all women’s wages would have been had feminists not been fighting all along for economic parity and independence.

At the same time, it is awkward because while such policies have improved individual lives, they haven’t, and never could have, challenged the conditions which produce the tendency toward unequal pay in the first place – which is precisely why Justin Trudeau, Ivanna Trump, Hillary Clinton and Wall Street investment firms have no trouble with embracing and promoting them.

“Fearless girl” feminism is entirely consistent with the capitalist world order that Trudeau & Co. represent and defend. That is the same capitalist world order which can be pushed to accommodate some gender and racial equality, but cannot give up its life-blood: a vast and growing pool of low-waged, and no-waged, labour – and the racist, sexist and otherwise oppressive relations that ensure an ongoing supply of the same.

Allyship feminism

If we consider women’s experiences of violence and harassment over the same period that we looked at for changes in women’s wages (the 1970s to 2017), we find much less reliable statistical evidence. That’s because changes in women’s reporting levels fluctuate (recall how a couple high profile complaints at private sector companies led to the recent spike in reporting). It’s also because there have been shifts in how gendered violence is defined.

Still, we learn from a recent StatsCan report the following:

• Women’s reports to police of physical assault have fallen some, while reports of sexual assault are stable.

• The self-reported (on the General Social Survey) rate of violent victimization against women aged 15 years and over has remained relatively stable between 1999 and 2009.

Most significantly, we know that gendered violence and harassment continues at unacceptable levels today. A report by the Canadian Women’s Foundation tells us that:

• Half of all women in Canada have experienced at least one incident of physical or sexual violence since the age of 16.

• Approximately every six days, a woman in Canada is killed by her intimate partner.

• There are upwards of 4,000 murdered and missing Indigenous women in Canada.

• Young women (aged 18 to 24) are most likely to experience online harassment in its most severe forms, including stalking, sexual harassment and physical threats.

While there have certainly been missteps, and there is still much more that needs to be done, feminists have demanded and won resources for those vulnerable to gendered violence. They have also developed policies and practices that make meaningful differences in the lives of women, trans people and queers, allowing many to leave risky, abusive situations, to better negotiate legal systems, and to feel more secure at school, on the streets, and at work.

In recent years, much of that work has been informed by what I’m calling allyship feminism (though other forms of feminism certainly deserve credit too for progress on these fronts). By allyship feminism I mean to identify a politics that is grounded in a critique of intersecting systems of oppression. Similar to anti-capitalist feminism from below, this feminist perspective sees the powerful institutions and practices in our society – schools, courts, law, corporations, healthcare – as implicated in upholding racism, sexism and heterosexism, trans and queer phobia, ableism, settler colonialism, economic exploitation, and so on. [1]  

However, even though many feminist allies hold this radical, often even anti-capitalist, understanding of society, their political work usually stops short of challenging the systemic powers they critique.

The reason for this arguably has much to do with their commitment to the principle of allyship, and the ethos of “privilege” that informs it.

Allyship feminism begins with listening to those who are directly disempowered in this multiple and complex matrix of “interlocking” oppressions (to use Patricia Hill Collins’ term). Listening is integral to a process of building relationships of trust and accountability with those feminists seek to be in allyship with. Once that relationship is on solid ground, then feminist allies engage their financial, organizational or other forms of resources to help strategize ways and means to support and protect the disempowered.

This approach is counter-posed to mainstream feminism, which tends to treat the marginalized as victims or clients, who can be helped by integrating them into existing institutions and systems. By contrast, the goal of allyship feminism is not to “save” or “integrate” people, but to work with them, on terms defined by the marginalized, to “challenge larger oppressive power structures.”

It is also counter-posed to the (presumed masculinist) socialist left. Rather than “impose” their systemic critique on the oppressed, and prioritize political confrontation and social change over meeting the self-defined needs of marginalized communities (as certain – though, significantly, not all – left traditions can be rightly singled out for doing), allyship feminists stress that their own political goals are secondary to those they seek to be allies with.  

Alongside offering resources, feminist allies actively work to recalibrate interpersonal relationships between themselves and marginalized people. This means, in the first instance, identifying and taking responsibility for one’s complicity in the wider social dynamics of oppression – for one’s “privilege,” say, as a white, able-bodied, cis-gendered student who is working with Indigenous women living in poverty.

“Checking one’s privilege” is not an optional or one-time feature of allyship feminism. According to the Anti-Oppression Network, allyship is “an active, consistent, and arduous practice of unlearning and re-evaluating, in which a person in a position of privilege and power seeks to operate in solidarity with a marginalized group.”

Self-consciousness, care and respect when working with vulnerable people is incredibly important. What’s more, there is no doubt that the work of feminist allies has made university campuses, workplaces, homes and streets safer for many women, queers, and trans people vulnerable to sexual assault and harassment. It has contributed to establishing and improving funding for community centres, safe spaces and educational materials about gendered violence. It has led to improved policies and procedures for those reporting sexual assault, and contributed a compelling defense of nongendered language to an often toxic public debate.

But, again, I find assessing allyship feminism to be a bit awkward and complicated. As with struggles for pay equity and equal pay legislation, this approach hasn’t been – and can’t ever be – enough. Allyship feminism comes up against the limits of its own premises.

First, the focus on using resources to support the goals of more marginalized people is laudable of course. But it can – and often does – work to bind feminist allies to the very power structures that perpetuate the inequality of resources that have made them “allies” and not members of the “more marginalized” communities in the first place.

Instead of confronting power, feminist allies tend to define their political work in terms of getting those in positions of authority onside with their agenda. They risk cultivating, that is, either a naïve trust in their bosses or political elites (who they believe they can influence), or a fear of alienating the support of their higher-ups by pushing for more radical demands.

Second, the politics of individual privilege risks diverting attention away from the broader forces sustaining the conditions of inequality and oppression. Feminist allies insist that “checking one’s privilege” is about taking responsibility for one’s own consciousness and behaviour, and not about confessing guilt for occupying a relatively advantageous social position.

But, as critics of this approach point out, the focus here is nonetheless on the individual. And not just any individual. Because it is their “self-changing” which becomes the centre of political work, say the critics, feminists from the dominant (usually white, academic) culture have (once again) made themselves the centre of anti-oppression politics – albeit not intentionally, nor in the same way as “second-wave” feminists did. Still, the irony is hard to miss.

In some ways, privilege politics grows out of another second wave feminist idea, the idea that the personal is political. Understood as a claim that our most intimate relations are conditioned by wider power dynamics, that maxim is, I believe, indisputable. But insofar as allyship feminism focuses on personal privilege as a site of political activism, it suggests something else. It suggests that power is everywhere – an idea most associated with the French political philosopher Michel Foucault (1926 – 1984).

According to this perspective, there is no essential difference between the “power” wielded by individuals caught up in systems of oppression on the one hand, and the power generated and/or sustained by broader political and economic dynamics on the other. Or, if feminist allies do consider these types of power as distinct in some ways, privilege politics tends to obscure the relationship between them. As a result, key questions about systemic change tend to go unanswered: does, for example, challenging individual interpersonal practices and language lead to wider, more systemic, change? If so, exactly how?

The limits of allyship feminism are thus considerable. Yet, it is hardly surprising that many of the most critically minded feminists are drawn to this set of politics today. For those limits reflect the general weakness of the wider left. They reflect a left that has largely lost the capacity to pose an alternative to the broader structures of power that allyship feminism critiques.

My point is not that we need to, or should, abandon the type of work so many feminists with a radical critique of society do. While we should challenge some of their strategies, I think they advance important lessons for the wider left about working for social change within institutions, and about building relationships with disempowered communities.

The key task is to figure out how such work can be part of a broader challenge to the systemic reproduction of multiple oppressions. How can this work help build the societal capacity, confidence and solidarity required to move beyond where we find ourselves today?

Anti-capitalist feminism from below

Of the three faces of feminism, this is certainly the least familiar. That’s in part because, for the last 50 years, socialist feminists have gone from being a coherent presence on the left to working within organizations dominated by other sorts of politics. Unions and labour councils have absorbed many, but so have some activist groups mobilizing around healthcare, education, and poverty. And you’ll still find socialist feminists, like myself, lingering in small left groups like the New Socialists and, of course, in the academy.

By “coherent presence” I mean that anti-capitalist, from-below, principles contributed to and sometimes guided feminist political action in the 1970s and 1980s. Certainly, in Toronto, the struggles to establish childcare centres at the University of Toronto, to get maternity leave provisions in contract negotiations, to demand access to abortion, and to oppose police raids on bath houses are great examples of that.

In all cases, socialist feminists argued for and won arguments about the need to call out and confront those in power through large mobilizations. The idea was not to ask for spaces and services so much as it was to collectively claim them.

I don’t mean to romanticize this. To begin, these gains, like those of all feminisms, are fragile. As well, there were lots of unresolved issues, including a marked inability (and less commonly, a refusal) to seriously deal with the multiple and sometimes contradictory forms of oppression. That failing contributed to the dismantling of socialist feminist organizations and the faltering confidence that a broader vision of freedom from oppression was even possible.

In the last five years or so, though, we’ve seen a smouldering interest in the ideas of a renewed socialist feminism. By renewed, I mean a socialist feminism that doesn’t simply repeat the insights of an earlier era, but learns from its shortcomings, and attempts to move beyond these – namely, to deal seriously with the complexity of oppression.

This renewal, however, has had only a limited political expression. Many anti-capitalist feminists from below working in community and labour organizations today have renewed this face of feminism in practice, by building solidarity among feminists, anti-racists, queers, trans people and others. But they have not often articulated the principles guiding their work in any sort of coherent set of socialist feminist politics.

That task has been taken up largely by those of us in the academy and parts of the organized left. We are now debating and discussing the version of social reproduction feminism that was initially framed by Lise Vogel, in her book Marxism and the Oppression of Women. More on that in a second.

While one might argue that the numbers of US women who rejected Hillary Clinton and her fearless girl feminism, and flocked instead to the Bernie Sanders campaign are a sign that times are ripe for such a feminism, to date, in North America, the most significant political expression of anti-capitalist from below feminist politics came with the March 8, 2017, call for an International Women’s Strike.

The North American organizers of that strike took their inspiration from three mass mobilizations in 2016: the Polish women’s strike, which stopped legislation to ban abortions in that country; the Black Wednesday strike called by the #NiUnoMenos, (Not One Less) movement in Argentina to protest male violence; and the 300,000 Italian women and supporters who mobilized on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.

The organizers also understood that the sea of people donning pussy hats in the Women’s March this past January were not just upset that Trump was in the White House instead of Hillary Clinton. Their chants and placards drew attention to the devastation neoliberalism has wrought on the lives of women, trans people, Indigenous peoples, blacks, queers, immigrants and migrants.

Building upon all this, a group of US-based socialist feminists took up the call (issued first by the organizers of the Polish strike) for an International Women’s Strike. The call for a “strike” was deliberate. It was intended, according to one of its organizers, Cinzia Arruza, “to emphasize the work that women perform not only in the workplace but outside it, in the sphere of social reproduction”. That is, it highlighted the unpaid and/or low-waged work of cleaning, cooking and childminding (among other things) that produces the key thing capitalism needs in order to realize a profit, the worker.

Anti-capitalist feminism from below takes that insight as its starting point – an insight of social reproduction feminism that is articulated particularly well by Lise Vogel. Briefly, Vogel argues that capitalism absolutely requires workers, but bosses do not directly control their production (that is, the daily and generational renewal of labour power). That renewal is organized in patriarchal, heterosexist and racialized ways primarily in households, but also in hospitals and schools, for example, and through migration regimes.

Moreover, the relentless drive to exert a downward pressure on wages (and also on taxes) means that although capitalism needs workers, it also cannot help but undermine the capacity of those workers to reproduce themselves. And it is this unresolvable contradiction between the production of value and the production of life that haunts capitalism, making oppression a systemic feature of its very existence.

The 2017 International Women’s Strike – in recognition of the centrality of women’s work to capitalism – called on women to withdraw their labour not just from the workforce but from sites of unpaid social reproduction too. And women around the world responded. Activists in fifty countries participated.

While mostly symbolic as one-day protests tend to be, the strike as a strategy drives home the point that feminism can have an insurgent face that calls out the systemic nature of oppression.

And if we agree that it is capitalism that limits the possibility of meeting the very real survival needs of people, that puts profits before need not just in the workplace but in our communities and homes, then confronting that system also requires confronting the racism, sexism and all oppressions that work in concert with capitalism and against life.

This means working for greater economic equality between men and women, and to provide safe spaces and adequate resources for marginalized people. But we need to organize the demands for these things in ways that also build peoples’ capacities to draw attention to the ways in which oppression is embedded in the capitalist mandate to put profit over the meeting of human need.

And the only way we will ever be able to challenge that is by drawing more and more people into struggle – building the confidence and capacity of everyone with a stake in a more just society – to claim back not only our workplaces, but also our communities (our hospitals, schools, streets and households).

This doesn’t mean imposing ideas on marginalized groups. It does mean discussing and debating the nature of social power with them – and then strategizing to find ways to build the collective confidence to claim back the economic, political and cultural resources needed to produce a better world.

To my mind, this is the key distinction between working in solidarity with groups and seeking out allyship with them. Building solidarity certainly involves listening and respecting the self-determination of distinct groups. But it also involves moving beyond offering support and help, to articulating shared goals and strategies based on the knowledge that (i) all our lives are organized in and through a broader set of distinct, but nonetheless unified power relations; and (ii) that the capitalist system organizing those relations denies us collective control over the resources required to socially reproduce ourselves and our worlds in a way that meets our (material, cultural, spiritual, physical – in short, human) needs.

Solidarity, then, means standing with those who are willing to disrupt the usual flow of power from top to bottom. Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, the Quebec Student Strike – these are all examples of recent efforts to reclaim social reproductive space and resources (our communities and schools) through movement building.

We can improve lives through influencing those in positions of authority to grant certain things – better services and education, higher wages and benefits. And we should continue to do that. But if we don’t link those struggles with others that also challenge more directly those who hold power over us, the patterns of inequality and oppression that keep far too many women, blacks, migrants, Indigenous and disabled people disempowered, and living in poverty and fear for the last fifty years, will still be evident over the next fifty.

In the era of Trump and Weinstein, we need the face of feminism to be insurgent and transformative.

Notes

[1] The feminist “post-feminism” that I referred to earlier (not to be confused with the media popularization of that term) takes its lead from intersectionality theory. Feminism is considered outmoded not because it is no longer needed or relevant, but because it is too narrow. That is, the implied privileging of gender relations is too narrow to adequately address the multiple, complex interaction of oppressions that more accurately describes people’s experiences.

Sue Ferguson is a member of the Toronto New Socialists, and writes on social reproduction feminism.

This article is based on a talk given on Dec. 8, 2017, sponsored by the Ottawa New Socialists and University of Ottawa PIRG.

India's Dowry System and Social Reproduction Theory

By Valerie Reynoso

The practice of paying dowries is rooted in ancient tradition. It began as a Hindu religious requirement in the Manusmriti, a text from around 1500 BC that dictated the way of life and laws for Hindus. Ancient Hindus would gift each other during a wedding as a cultural requirement. Fathers were obligated to gift expensive clothes and jewelry to their daughters and to gift a cow and a bull to the family of the bride. When a woman moved in with her husband, she was provided with money, jewelry and property to secure her financial independence after marriage.[1] Over time, the dowry system has developed into a fully-formed, patriarchal, capitalist mechanism in which Indian women are reduced to being socially-reproductive providers.

In modern-day India, dowry has shifted from financial independence for brides to a system of groom prices in which women have virtually no control over their finances within a marriage. Dowry prices are negotiated verbally between the families of the groom and the bride. The settled price is paid to the family of the groom once married; however, there is often further demand for more money once the bride moves in with the husband. When these new demands are not met, it can have fatal consequences for the bride. [2].

The social reproduction and commodification of women's bodies, as well as the enforcement of private property under capitalism, has resulted in women being rendered as tools for patriarchal exploitation. Social reproduction refers to the work that goes into producing workers who then have their labor exploited in the name of capitalism by the upper class. Social reproduction relates to feminism and gender power dynamics because women are socialized to carry the burden of housework, childcare, and socially reproducing their husbands who then go off to work. In the case of the dowry system and the Indian women subject to it, this dynamic is further intensified due to the demands for dowry and increased patriarchal violence when this demand is not met. Social reproduction theory is the understanding of the "production of goods and services and the production of life are part of one integrated process."[3] It is a historical-materialist analysis which builds on the premise that race, gender, and class oppressions are connected and occur simultaneously under capitalism. This theory explores the relationship between oppression and exploitation.

These oppressive systems have turned dowry culture from one rooted in ancestral tradition where women are socioeconomically uplifted to one where women are socioeconomically exploited, abused, and killed in the name of money and patriarchy. This deviation of the connotation dowry has also signifies how gender is informed by organizational violence, through which the submission of underclass women is maintained by means of financial, physical and psychological abuse. Indian women are seen as assets to elevate the hierarchical status of the men they marry through the forced provision of dowry.

The Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961 outlawed people from demanding or giving dowry as a pre-condition for marriage. Section 498a of the Indian Penal Code (IPC) states that any female death within the first seven years of a marriage will be automatically concluded to have been a result of dowry harassment. Section 304b IPC refers to cruelty against brides. These laws were designated preventative measures but they have evidently not been effective in implementation, as it is difficult for many dowry victims to make time to go to court in order to get help. [4]

According to the National Crime Records Bureau of India, 8,233 dowry deaths were reported in 2012, a rate that equals one victim every 60 minutes. This statistic does not include unreported dowry deaths, since women are discouraged from reporting abuses. Some ways women are abused in demands for dowry is by being blackmailed, beaten, burned alive, threats of having their children taken away, and murder. The National Crime Records Bureau also reported that police throughout India have charged around 93% of accused in dowry deaths and only 34% of them have resulted in convictions. In 2017 the Hindustan Times reported that there had been 15 dowry deaths in the capital of India alone between 2012-2017, but none of these cases resulted in conviction. There are approximately 27 million total pending cases in the Indian legal system, which delays the dowry cases of women even up to 20 years[5]

It is considered a stigma for women to return to their parents' home after marriage. Social norms enforce the "sanctity" of marriage along with a lack of financial independence, all of which prevent rural women from telling the truth about abuses over dowry. Many survivors of burnings are coerced to lie and say it was an accident or attempted suicide out of fear of further abuses by their husbands.[6]

Under the current Dowry system, women are seen as a burden to their families. It is common for families to save money for the future marriages of their daughters from birth, such as taking out loans, selling land, and going in debt in order to save for the daughter's dowry. Infanticides are rampant given that many girls are killed at birth because of the financial burden of dowry. Other families also perform sex-selective abortions if the baby is determined to be a girl. For girls who are not aborted or killed at birth, they typically live a life of poor nutrition, abuse, and illiteracy in rural areas of India particularly. Girls are starved in preference of their brothers and are also discouraged from pursuing an education because they are usually married off at a very young age in order for the family to collect, give, and solicit dowry. As a result, girls become financially dependent on their husbands at a young age. Even when doctors note that the burn patterns on women do not match their claims of self-infliction, they are not expected to report it and usually do not. In court, doctors are only asked to say whether or not the woman was fully conscious and able to make a statement to the police. Sometimes police harass women who report dowry abuse and discourage the women from reporting. [7]

The repression of women and girls under the current dowry system represents the relationship between the processes of producing human labor power and the processes of producing value, as indicated by the concepts defined by social reproduction theory.[8] Indian girls living a life of abuse and negligence, for the direct material benefit of their male counterparts, is similar to how capitalists need human labor power in order to extract profit from the value production they do not produce themselves .[9] Indian women are the bearers of the labor power it takes in order to socially reproduce financially dependent men, such that Indian girls are starved and denied education and job opportunities in the name of dowry, so that boys may take advantage of these instead. The dowry system provides Indian men with socioeconomic power that is derived from the physical exploitation of Indian women, who are controlled by financial subordination and sexist gender roles that limit them to the home. This cycle of social reproduction is continued when Indian girls are married off by their families to a husband to whom they will owe a life of servitude and financial dependence. Seeing that marrying off Indian girls at a young age is driven by the collection and solicitation of dowry, their bodies are being commodified as a vessel through which their families can accumulate capital. This happens until the woman is severely abused or murdered when demands for more dowry can no longer be satisfied.

Moreover, the price of dowry varies per one's socioeconomic status. Underclass grooms typically demand smaller dowries but it is still a financial burden for poor families who do not have the means of paying it. Parents will raise money for the dowry by selling land or going bankrupt after the marriage. Lower castes of India, such as the Dalit, obtain money for their daughters' weddings by leasing their sons into bonded labor. Many cotton farmers who have committed suicide in large numbers due to failing crops also did so due to the increased price of dowry, which also increased their debt to unmanageable levels. [10]

Solutions for the human rights epidemic surged by the current dowry system have been posed. In 2006, web entrepreneur Satya Naresh had created the first dowry-free matrimonial site in India and in 12 years only 5,399 men had registered. Naresh stated that not many people have registered for it due to greed - in many cases, even when a man does not want a dowry his parents will still want it and force him to undergo it. World Bank lead economist Dr. Vijayendra Rao stated that a substantial shift in gender norms is required in order to end dowry violence, such as reducing gender discrimination, and increasing female education and socioeconomic independence, in addition to further legal reforms[11].

Ultimately, dowry is a means of enacting socially reproduced violence against women in India through socioeconomic repression and misogyny. The elimination of socioeconomic disparities and gendered oppression, as well as a structural challenge to capitalist modes of production, are needed. This is the only path where Indian women may enjoy equal rights and protection.

Notes

[1] "A Broken Promise; Dowry Violence In India," Pulitzer Center, February 9th, 2019, https://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/broken-promise-dowry-violence-india

[2] Ibid.

[3] Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (London, UK: Pluto Press, 2017).

[4] Ibid.

[5] "'Death by dowry' claim by bereaved family in India, The Guardian, accessed February 9th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jul/18/death-by-dowry-claim-by-bereaved-family-in-india

[6] "A Broken Promise; Dowry Violence In India," Pulitzer Center, February 9th, 2019, https://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/broken-promise-dowry-violence-india

[7] Ibid.

[8] Tithi Bhattacharya, Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression (London, UK: Pluto Press, 2017).

[9] Ibid.

[10] Ibid.

[11] "'Death by dowry' claim by bereaved family in India, The Guardian, accessed February 9th, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jul/18/death-by-dowry-claim-by-bereaved-family-in-india