Betty Makoni’s mission is to give girls who have been raped the confidence to transform from victims to survivors to leaders. Through her organization, Girl Child Network Worldwide (GCNW), she has built up a small group of girls in a rural school in Zimbabwee into a force of young women spanning three continents: Africa, Europe, and North America.

The video to the left is the first in a four part series on YouTube describing Marconi and her work in Zimbabwe (1 2 3 4). GCNW is modeled on her work in Zimbabwe and accomplishes its mission with a unique blend of peer empowerment, adult role models, cultural tradition, modern human rights philosophy, and social advocacy. The project began in 1998 when Makoni was working as a teacher. She noticed that there were twice as many boys as girls in her classes and girl students often attended irregularly. One day she decided to start asking the girls why this was so and found out that they were carrying the weight of many of Zimbabwe’s social ills: parents who had AIDS, abuse at home, early marriage, or shame and trauma from rape.  Rape of young girls is especially common in Zimbabwee because as many as 1 in 10 men believe that the blood of a virgin with cause them to prosper financially or heal them from AIDS.

Makoni, an English teacher, decided that her job as a teacher required her to educate the entire child and not just the child’s brain. She started meeting separately with the girls in her class and they began to figure out ways to support each other so that they could come to school. The concept spread to other schools and within a year there were 100 groups meeting in schools around Zimbabwe based on the model used with her own original 10 students.

Makoni’s passion had its roots in her own experience. She knows violence first hand. At six, she and her friends were lured into a shop and then raped by the shop keeper. Her mother, fearful of her husbands rage and social stigma for the family and her daughter, told Makoni to keep silent. Three years later she watched her father murder her mother. She managed to stay in school despite all this with the help of some Roman Catholic nuns who arranged to help her continue her education. Two university degrees later she became a teacher.

Makoni feels that she was always meant to be a teacher but the experience of her childhood made her hunger for other roles as well. Her activism allows the teacher and the other roles to come together in a single mission:

Even though I was meant to be a teacher, I always wanted to act like a lawyer seeking justice; I always wanted to act like a policeman knocking on the door of a rapist saying come out to the jail; I always wanted to act like a magistrate who gives a sentence to a man who has raped. I didn’t manage to be the three things I wanted to be. Then I set up an organization called the Girl Child Network where I became an activist. What’s so exciting about what I am doing with all my heart and all my energy is I’ve got the magistrate, I’ve got the police, I’ve got social services all of them pulled together to help the little girl. When a little girl smiles, mission accomplished. I’m not looking for anything more.  (World Vision Report, April 17, 2010)

In 1999, she acquired land and set up the first girl’s empowerment village. The residential villages provide a safe place where a young girl can take refuge or get help after she had been raped. The village provided legal, medical, and emotional support. If the girl does not have money or resources for school, they provide that as well. Successful women come and talk with the girls and they are encouraged to aspire to become teachers, lawyers, doctors, police officers, and business women.

The villages are modelled on a vision of womenhood that blends traditions from Markoni’s own tribe with modern human rights practice. In her own tribe 400 years ago, chieftains reserved positions of power for princesses of royal families.

Markoni also looks beyond the girls themselves to the wider society. She successfully convinced fathers and local male leaders to advocate for equal rights of women in 10 different districts of Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwe branch of GCNW also works to change police practice and rape laws. They have also set up information cafes that coordinate media outreach and provide information about rape and sexual assault to the general population.

In 2008, Makoni was forced to flee Zimbabwe. Her work with rape victims became politicized when some of the girls who sought her help had been raped by powerful political leaders. She is currently living in the UK and is working to expand the program she started in Zimbabwe globally. In an interview with Munashe Gumbonzvanda of TechMasai, she described her vision in a global context.

Makoni observes that gender imbalances exist throughout the world and not just in Africa. Girls need to be represented in technology, polity, and business because without their involvement, girls cannot design solutions to meet their needs. They are limited to using what others have designed for them. Additionally, when gender imbalances exist the world does not work as it should. Women become visible only as victims and beauty objects. The truth worth of women is hidden. She concludes: “Girls have inner strength and power. That is what I want to unleash worldwide.”

Her work is widely respected by adults and children alike. In 2007 she was awarded The World’s Children’s Prize for the Rights of the Child. The prize is awarded on the basis of children around the globe. In 2007, over 5 million children participated in the vote. In 2009, CNN named her one of their top 10 heros.

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Forty years ago on May 4, 1970, 4 students were killed and 11 injured when the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a students protesting the Vietnam war on the campus of Kent State Univerisy. The shootings divided the USA. Some wondered how a nation could treat its own children in this manner. Others unconditionally accepted whatever decisions were made by the National Guard. College campuses exploded with demonstrations and within a week 100,000 marched on the US capital to protest.

That day four families lost a child.

• Doris and Arthur lost their daughter Allison Krause. Laurel lost her older sister. On her tomb they wrote “flowers are better than bullets” because only a few days before she had placed a lillac in a friendly soldier’s gun barrel using those words.
• Louis and Florence Schroeder lost their son, Bill. Bill Schroeder was an ROTC student who had committed himself to 10 years in his countries service: 4 as a ROTC student, 4 as a full-time officier, and 2 in reserve.
• On the day of the shootings, Elaine Holstein, Jeff Miller’s mother, was listening to the car radio as she drove home. She heard that four had been killed, never dreaming that one would be her own son. They had both been concerned about the tensions, and she decided to ask him to come home. When she got home, she called his fraternity and asked for her son. A boy answered “He’s dead”.
• Sandy Scheuer was simply passing through on her way to class when the bullets began to fly. Her parents were Holocaust refugees who had come to the US expecting to live in a state that would protect them.

Dean Kahler survived the attack but the bullet in his spine put him in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. In the years immediately following his parents struggled with overprotectiveness and he worked to overcome his anger at the loss of the use of his legs. Even with the anger, the shooting only served to strengthen his conviction that there must always be an alternative to violence and war. To work through his anger he became active in wheelchair sports and helped out with his school’s disability office.

The political allegiances that split the nation also fed the blame-the-victim mentality that so often affects the survivors of violent crimes. Along side many, many letters of support, Dean Kahler received hate mail. Some letters even wished he had died. Joseph Lewis, Jim Russell, and Robert Stamps, belonged to families that were certain that the National Guard was in the right. Their families responded to their injuries with anger and judgment rather than support.

But loss is only the beginning of the story. Kent State has turned into a historic event because the survivors found ways to turn their loss into both personal and social healing. Some worked to preserve the memory of what happened. Some fought to make the government accountable for its actions. Some saw Kent State as a symbol for deeper social problems and sought to address them.

In the 1970’s survivors fought all the way to the Supreme court to give families the right to sue the Governor and the National Guard (Scheuer v. Rhodes). Separate suits by the families were later united into a single suit, Krause v. Rhodes. Though the case was settled out of court in 1979, the judicial decisions along the way set new standards for government accountability.

In April, Alan Canfora (shot in the wrist) and Terry Strubbe (witness) announced efforts to reopen the investigation on the basis of a tape which allegedly has an audible “Right here, Get Set, Aim, Fire”. The government investigation in the early 1970’s had concluded that soldiers fired without orders, but the timing of the start and end of the fire – a tight volley of shots over the course of 13 seconds suggests otherwise.

During the first week of May, Doris and Laurel Krause, Dean Kahler, and Tom Grace (shot in the foot) and several other witnesses are participating in a Truth tribunal , modelled on truth and reconciliation commissions used to address government violence in Africa and South America. The proceedings will be documented by Emily Kunstler, daughter of the William Kunstler, the civil rights attorney that helped the survivor families in their 1970’s legal battles.

A 40 year battle for justice may seem extreme, but Joe Lewis, shot in the leg and stomach, puts it this way:

Many think it should be buried, and they tried to do that by building the gym. You can’t bury what happened. You have to live with it. not necessarily to dwell on it but go on with our lives and incorporate what we all have, or should have, learned that May 4.

The lessons learned from Kent state extend well beyond Kent State and well beyond the 1970’s. Mike Alwitz, a witness to the shootings, became an artist and has dedicated much of his life to painting peace and justice murals in urban centers and areas of conflict. The Kent May 4 Center, lead by Alan Canfora, has a ten point mission statement that includes both Kent State Shooting remembrances and promoting the importance of student social activism on and off campus.

Mary Ann Vecchio, who was standing right beside Jim Miller when he was shot comes to campus each spring to talk to students and shares these words:

I tell them it shows what can happen if the evildoers get too much power. They can take your freedom away. You could be walking to school, and what happened back then could happen to you

Barry Levine who was by the side of his girlfriend Allison Krause when she was killed teaches both the necessity and risks of challenging authority:

You need to be conscious of the fact that questioning authority anywhere can be a benign learning experience, or it can be dangerous, because a government is always going to act to preserve itself. But do I think it’s still vital to question authority? Always, from the beginning to the end of time.”

Arthur Krause, Allison Krause’s father, spoke often about how Kent State taught him the true cost of apathy:

I feel a great sense of guilt because I realized what was going on but didn’t do a damn thing about it. Like most Americans these days, we sit on the fence and depend on the lawyer, the church, and the government to do whatever should be done, but if the government doesn’t have the right people on the job, nothing will be done …. and we, the people, have to make the government good. Apathy will not be part of my make-up anymore. Apathy is what caused Kent State.

In memory of those who died and in gratefulness for those who lived, may we also say: “Apathy will not be part of our make-up anymore.”

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Looking back, there can be no question that he did something awful. It was a terrible thing to do to a young girl. But it was also 25 years ago — 26 years next month. And, honestly, the publicity surrounding it was so traumatic that what he did to me seemed to pale in comparison….

I know there is a price to pay for running. But who wouldn’t think about running when facing a 50-year sentence from a judge who was clearly more interested in his own reputation than a fair judgment or even the well-being of the victim? … My attitude surprises many people. That’s because they didn’t go through it all; they don’t know everything that I know. People don’t understand that the judge went back on his word…..

The one thing that bothers me is that what happened to me in 1977 continues to happen to girls every day, yet people are interested in me because Mr. Polanski is a celebrity. That just never seems right to me. It makes me feel guilty that this attention is directed at me, when there are certainly others out there who could really use it.

Looking back at all the verbage spilled over the Polanski rape case I’m wondering why so little is being written on these questions. We say child rape should be punished strongly because it is so hurtful to victims. But aren’t we also hurting a victim by ignoring her questions? The first rule of compassion is to give what a person needs and not what we want or expect them to need.

Rape and the media. Geimer declares that the media treatment was more traumatic than the rape. Was she merely exaggerating? Should we not take her at her word? She seems to mean it. In October, 2009, shortly after Polanski’s arrest she was back in the news, pleading to be left alone and warning that the media circus that accompanies celebrity rapes discourages victims of celebrities from filing complaints.

Rape media coverage can be brutal, especially when the alleged rapist is a celebrity. Anyone following the shenanigans of Ben Roethlisberger in the US or Jack Tweed in the UK knows this. To see just how brutal, take a look at our in depth review of the trial coverage and scroll down to the description of the Daily Mail’s equal opportunity slam. Or alternative enter “Ben Roethlisberger Andrea McNulty” into google. Even when the coverage isn’t hostile, excessive attention can be very disruptive. She is raising a very important point and she is being ignored.

I’m not the only victim in town. We’ve also largely ignored Geimer’s worry that society marginalizes rape unless there is a celebrity involved. There are other cases that have just as much or more need for attention than hers.

Geimer isn’t the only one whose raised the question. Way back in September, ABC interviewed UCLA law professor Peter Arnella. Why, he asked, would a prosecutor spend so much energy and money going after a one-time offender from 30 years ago when it is cash strapped? The prosecutor brushed it aside as a case where principle matters more than economics: “offenders don’t get to choose their punishment”.

But in this case, do principles really matter more than economics? What is the opportunity cost of pursuing Polansky? How many below-the-poverty-line kids have abusers that aren’t being prosecuted because it would divert resources from the Polanski case? How many prosecutions are only half prepared because there isn’t enough money budgeted for the case? How many local crimes are we going to prevent by spending money on legal sparring with Polanski rather than on locking up that local guy breaking parole by hanging around outside of school playgrounds?

A deal is a deal. Geimer contends that the judge made a promise and then reneged on it. Lies and broken promises by an authority figure are a key element of Geimer’s rape complaint. They are a key element of almost any non-violent rape. Assuming she is telling the truth about a deal, is it any wonder she should react negatively to a judge’s broken promises? Is she being overly sensitive? Or are we minimizing? Can we really afford to treat her concerns about judicial deception lightly?

Is this really about Polanski? If we think the original deal gave too light a sentence, perhaps then we should be asking why the prosecutor made that deal in the first place?

A 90-day sentence for a drug facilitated rape of a minor should make us mad. But we shouldn’t take that anger out on the victim. We should place it where it belongs: on a judge who thought that Polanski deserved no more than a slap on the wrist. The transcript from sentencing reads:

The probation report discloses that although just short of her 14th birthday at the time of the offense, the prosecutrix was a well developed young girl who looked older than her years; and regrettably not unschooled in sexual matters. She has a 17 year old boyfriend, with whom she had sexual intercourse at least twice prior to the offense involved. The probation report further reveals that the prosecutrix was not unfamiliar with the drug quaalude, she having experimented with it as early as her tenth or eleventh year……..However, although the prosecutrix was not an inexperienced and unsophisticated young girl, this of course was not a license to the defendant, a man of the world, in his forties, to engage in an act of unlawful sexual intercourse with her

Do you see the hint of “it isn’t rape unless she’s a virgin” ?

A judge who truly understood rape would not care whether Geimer had tried sex or drugs before. The only thing that should have mattered was the gap in their ages. In essence the judge is saying “yeah, it is wrong, but not wrong-wrong. Sure, Polanski shouldn’t have done it, but It isn’t like we are spoiling a pure innocent child. He didn’t introduce her to sex or Quaaludes.” Is it any wonder the judge gave such a light sentence? Isn’t it time the State own up to its own mistakes?

Geimer wants the case closed because a deal is a deal. Polanski wants testimony about the sentencing decisions unsealed so he can prove a deal is a deal. The State wants to keep them sealed. Why? If the State behaved itself, what does it have to fear?

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The blogathon explored the experience of survivors from many perspectives: family, friends, the survivors themselves, art, poetry, music and social action. The blogathon posts show how coming to terms with rape is both a difficult and life renewing process. But these are more than just survivor stories. They are narratives that show the interaction between life experience and the creative processes that lead to art, literature, and social action:

• Angela, a documentary producer, goes in search of her namesakes across the country and finds her own story echoed in the women she meets, along with stories of courage and determination that have continued to inspire her. Her documentary, Searching for Angela Shelton won many awards, including the best independent documentary in the Austin film festival.
• Inwood writes of the creative interaction between developing the plot and character of a novel and her discovery of a need to heal from her own past. She concludes with some reflections on the role of collusion and silence in allowing rape and kidnapping to “happen” as well as the importance of speaking out and empowering people to confront rather than look away.
• Dannyn speaks with awe inspiring courage about events that take guts even to remember – witnessing the death of a friend, being left for dead by a rapist high on drugs, surviving a kidnapping. She reminds us of the meaning of grit and determination.
• Vanessa, the blogathon sponsor, tells how rape lead to her business as a designer of inspiring jewelry as well as many social action activities. Her story is rounded out with blog posts from her father and two close friends. Together they help us see that rape never affects only the victim. Everyone who loves and is close to a survivor is affected in one way or another. It is a wound in our social fabric and not just a wound to the individual.
• Kim Lampe tells her story both metaphorically and factually – she has a gift for writing that allows her story to go beyond its boundaries and draw together hints of life, death, suspense, mystery, uncertainty and hope.

A synopsis of the individual posts in chronological sequence follows:

This is the fourth in a series of 12 blogathons sponsored by members of Angela’s Army of Angels. The first of these was sponsored by Joanna Doane and used a classic “thon” fundraising model. Donors pledged dollar amounts for each hour of sustained blogging. There were a total of 48 posts, one each hour on the half hour. The project was so successful that it inspired the Army of Angels to turn it into a monhly event. The more recent blogathons are using an online donation service to collect one time donations rather than per-hour donations. Previous blogathons can be viewed at the following websites:

• January 9-10 – sponsored by Joanna Doane at Eyes Open
• February 6-7 – sponsored by Megan Fitzwater at Speaking Out
• March 27-28 – sponsored by Stephanie Chard at Finding My Voice

For upcoming blogathon events see the Army of Angel’s website.

The Angela Shelton Foundation sponsors a variety of projects aimed at inspiring survivors of sexual and domestic violence. The projects included The Survivors Manual – a website and blog featuring self-empowerment and healing tips for survivors of childhood sexual abuse and adult sexual assault, workshops, an annual conference for survivors, and Angela’s Army of Angels. They are also seeking to sponsor additional projects in the arts and media that aim to inspire survivors or end violence. Funding comes from revenue generated by the documentary Searching for Angela Shelton and survivor fundraising projects like this month’s blogathon.

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Threesome (Felix Nussbaum)

When I was a child I loved to read Holocaust stories. My parents were preoccupied with themselves and their dissolving marriage. I got teased a lot at school. The stories of young people who lived during the Holocaust reminded me of how much worse life could be. They helped me understand that no matter how frustrating my life was, I had the option of growing up and escaping.

At thirty, in the middle of the night on Rosh HaShanna, everything changed. The rape took only a half hour or so, but in those moments my understanding of the Holocaust changed forever.   It put me face to face with an evil I had never imagined.

Up until that point I had never noticed how easily we take the sacredness of human beings for granted. Even in our most selfish moments we still understand that another’s body and life are their own. If we do not like a person we keep our distance. Or we plot revenge but stop short of acting. Or we act out but we stop short of destroying. Something stops us, but we never think what.  We do not attempt to take their life or violate the boundaries of their body.

The man who raped me did both just for fun and just because he could. He took delight in treating a human life as lightly as one might take a candy bar. He casually tore away at my clothes as if they had no more meaning that the paper that wraps a candy bar and is quickly tossed into the garbage. He toyed with my life, strangling me until I had no choice but to choose between death and rape. He tore my body from my soul, and for the first time I understood that a human body could be owned by someone other than the soul that lived within it. Even after I chose rape over death, I did not know if I would leave that night alive or dead, because he strangled me once again for fun.

Nothing in my childhood prepared me for this. The misery of my childhood was the ordinary misery imposed when all too limited people conflict with one another. The rape was an evil of an entirely different sort. I was too frightened to be sad or angry or even afraid. Everything I had was devoted to staying alive, just in case it was an option. In ordinary misery we trip over boundaries we don’t even notice are there. This evil sought out boundaries just for the joy of violating them.

As much as we like to theologize the Holocaust and place it on a plane above all other evil, it isn’t. The horror of the Holocaust was built upon millions and millions of moments like the one I experienced that night. That night I learned that the evil that fueled the fires of the Holocaust and each of its daily indignities was alive and well, experienced by thousands each day around the world. We can only shoot at babies in the air and bodies standing naked in ditches if we loose our sense of sacredness and allow babies and bodies to become as insignificant as litter skipping across the street. Without the capacity for depersonalization, intolerance could never have created the Holocaust. Tyranny would be impossible.

The enormity of the Holocaust makes evil easy to see, but we must never see it as an evil apart. The capacity for depersonalization exists in us all, to a greater or lesser extent. But even worse, if we allow enormity to make suffering distinctive, somewhere there is a Holocaust victim whose suffering we have made insignificant. Six million did not suffer. One suffered six million times.

In Jewish thought to save a single life is to save the world. Because we are each in the image of God, the desecration of a single human is an infinite crime. To multiply the death of a single person by six or even eleven million is simply to multiply infinity by millions. No person should ever have to live through what I lived through that night. Not one. Not six million.

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Teri Hatcher in a charity triathlon

Teri Hatcher, one of the lead actresses in Desperate Housewives, has been on an empowerment kick since she decided to go to prosecutors with her story of childhood incest. In her latest move, she is partnering with Disney to start a website aimed at empowering women to enjoy life and themselves: www.gethatched.com.

In January, 2002 while helping her mother with a pre-moving day garage sale, Teri read an old newspaper story about an 11 year old girl who committed suicide after having been molested by the same man who had molested Teri more than 30 years early.

Coming forward was not easy. At the time she was out of work and she was afraid that the tabloids would hear about her conversations with the DA and paint her as an ex-star seeking attention. She also carried her own self-blame from her childhood. She pushed herself forward all the same in part to help the 11 year old girl’s grieving family, in part to tie up loose ends in her own story, and in part because she knew that in all the years between her molestation and the girls, he must have had many other victims.

Her testimony convinced the man to plead guilty and he was sentenced to 14 years in jail. Had she not come forward, the molester would have walked free – the only witness in the case was dead.

Two years later, Teri was given a role in a new TV series, Desperate Housewives. Normally, she would have tried to figure out what the director wanted, but this time she simply let her vision of the role develop and acted out of that vision. She won the part despite her initially being far from a first choice candidate. By 2006, the show had become a huge hit and she was no longer an unemployed has-been actress.

With her career on an upswing she decided again to put the truth within her above what she thought others wanted of her. In the April, 2006 issue of Vanity Fair she told the story of her childhood molestation and the 2002 conversations with the DA. Initially she came forward because she was tired of being accepted for only a part of herself. She felt she needed to acceptance for all of who she is. Once again she was surprized by the impact. Within a day, the DAs office had calls from 25 other victims of the same man. In the months following she received thousands of letters from people who had decided to file reports of long lost crimes, just to have their story on record in case their abuser ever became a suspect.

Teri’s experiences have made her sensitive to the need all women have, herself included, for empowerment. In a special edition of Larry King featuring 12 celebrity survivors of childhood sexual abuse, she said

“These experiences that we have in our lives, both personally and professionally, leave us with a choice, a choice to use our experiences to enlighten and empower and change people’s lives and that is a choice that I am getting behind”.

In May, 2006, she published her book “Burnt Toast: And Other Philosophies of Life”. She says wrote the book to empower women to find ways to value themselves without taking away from others. She further explains her purpose:

“My purpose in writing this book was to try to help stop the pattern in women to take less than what they deserve.. I don’t think you have to be molested to be in pain as a woman, to feel like you don’t deserve good things… we are all women who don’t treat ourselves well enough. Women walk around feeling like everything is their fault.”

In 2006 she also appeared along with the Muppets in a PSA sponsored by the Will Rogers foundation, advertising a free brochure to help teens deal with stress. In October 2007 she wrote an article for Newsweek telling her own story. At the end of the article she encourages survivors still feeling shame and self blame to seek help from RAINN, a nationwide referral service for survivors of sexual assault.

In September, 2009 sponsored in part by Disney, she ran a triathlon to raise funds for Children’s Hopsital Los Angeles. She hoped to inspire other moms like herself and followed up the run with two articles in ModernMom.com, one comparing motherhood to running a triathlon and the other reflecting on competition and motivation.

Today Disney is sponsoring Hatcher in quite a bit more than a triathlon.

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For more information, please check out our two new resource pages, available in a drop-down list under “Resources” in the If She Cry Out website menubar:

• Survivors at Work
• Survivor Journeys

In the future we plan to followup with articles on individual activists, their artistic endeavors and the organizations they have started.

If you are a survivor of violent crime or a terror attack or are managing a project or organization started by one, please let us know what you are doing. For contact information, see the contact page.

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Like PG and R movie ratings, its purpose is to mark difficult material. The phrase “trigger warning” comes from literature on trauma recovery. Anything that symbolizes or reminds someone of a past painful experience has the potential to reawaken or “trigger” vivid memories and strong feelings associated with that experience.

Trigger warnings are meant to be like the highway signs warning of S-curves. They are meant to give a reader time to prepare themselves for emotional jolts. However, if we are not careful, they can start looking a lot more like an NC-17 movie rating.

Movie ratings are all too often used to express social judgments and exclusion. G may officially stand for “general audience”, but in most peoples minds it also means good clean family friendly fun. A movie with too much “bad” language is marked PG. Producers often prefer to release movies unrated rather than risk an NC-17 rating because many advertisers and theaters refuse to promote or show NC-17 movies as a matter of policy.

Sometimes this judgment may be merited. Often sex and violence in movies are gratuitous. It does nothing to push the message of the movie forward. It is added to increase sales or win artistic kudos for being “edgy”. It seeks to titillate and entertain and impress.

But what happens when the violence is not gratuitous? What happens when the violence is just real life? What happens if lessons learned from violence gave a person reason to dedicate their lives to seeking social justice? Should we be marking the lived experience of human beings with warnings? Are some experiences, however difficult, transformative and healing?

Isolation and even shame is a huge part of the pain of trauma. Stories of trauma and the lessons learned from them are not merely stories, but lived experiences. By marking lived experiences as triggers, we are essentially quarantining a part of that person. We are saying “This part of your life is so horrible that you are forbidden to talk about it unless you surround it with signs and rituals.”

So horrible? Or so sacred? We can also look at the signs and rituals, and see them as a demarcation of the sacred. When Moses tried to approach the burning bush, God said “Do not come closer…this is holy ground”. Then follows hell and hope: a recitation of the horrors of slavery, but also God’s promise to personally deliver Moses’ people from those horrors. (Exodus 3:1-8). God effectively gave Moses a trigger warning. But this was not to turn Moses back, but rather to empower Moses to play a role in God’s mission.

When Moses met God face to face on Mount Sinai, his face was so touched by the glory of God that his own people told him to cover his face – they could not look at it. How did Moses feel when he was effectively shunned by his own people, even his own brother Aaron (Exodus 34: 30-31)? There are times when we need to keep even holiness at a distance. None the less, the people continued to listen to Moses and include him. In fact his power grows. Though Moses was at a distance, he was not alone. The difference between feeling awe and passing judgment is found in our willingness to listen.

When a survivor of violence has found wisdom and hope, their experiences become sacred ground. They are a burning burn that speaks of hell, but also of hope. We can never share the experience of a survivor, but we can join in their mission. There is a limit to how close we may come, but that doesn’t mean we are without response. Moses took off his shoes to become more connected to holy ground. Moses’ people stood and listened. They acted even when they didn’t fully understand. Do we?

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Susanna and the Elders

Judith Beheading Holofernes

Self Portrait

Artemisia Gentileschi (1593 – 1652/1653) was the one of the most important early Baroque women painters and the first woman ever to be admitted to the esteemed Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence. She was a contemporary of Galileo and counted herself among his friends.

She is particularly well known for her portrayal of women. In Susanna and the Elders she defies the then current tradition of portraying Susanna as a seductress. Instead Susanna is clearly intimidated by the attention of the elders who look upon her with whispers and accusatory words. This is arguably the first painting in history that portrays unwanted sexual attention through a woman’s eyes.

Her painting of Judith’s slaying of Holofernes portrays the same scene as a well known painting by Carravagio, but shows much more powerful women. Carravagio’s Judith appears almost afraid of her own sword and her accomplice is an old woman who stands to the side. In Artemisia’s painting, Judith wields the sword with determination and her accomplice is her own age and bent over to help her.

Both painting were produced in the order displayed above at a particularly difficult time of her life. At 17 Artemisia’s father had tried to find a place for her to study at an artist’s academy but she was refused a place since she was female. Her father did not want her to stop painting so he apprenticed her to his friend, Agostino Tassi. Shortly after, she was raped by her teacher. Her father pressed charges and Tassi was tried and convicted for rape. A transcript of the rape trial exists to this day. Excerpts may be seen here. Shamed by the way the trial assaulted her reputation, Artemisia moved to Florence.

The third painting, sometimes titled “The Angel” or “Allegory of Inclination”, is believed to be a self portrait. It was painted in Florence two years after the trial. In the painting she holds a compass and looks to the distance with both sadness and expectancy. The original painting was a full length nude, the drapery was added a generation later in the name of modesty.

There is no way of knowing what was in her mind at the time of these paintings, but three paintings together portray a journey from shame to empowerment to determined hope. The last is the painting of a survivor whose determination to follow her inclinations and look towards her source of meaning cannot be stopped no matter what sadness her artistic inclinations have brought to her.

An additional 31 paintings with biographical and artistic commentary may be seen here.

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In mid March, 2008 media personality and rising model Katie Piper began dating a man she had met through Facebook. He seemed like a wonderful match, and she even called her mother to tell her how happy she was. But two weeks later when they finished a night of partying in London in a hotel room, he beat her, raped her, and held her hostage for 8 hours.

She managed to persuade him to release her by promising that they could continue to see each other. Like many women, she decided not to report, fearing that the police would discount her story since she voluntarily went to a hotel room with him. Even when she had to go to the hospital to get stitches for a head wound, she made up a story to explain her injuries to emergency room personnel.

Once home, she refused to leave her apartment. He continued to contact her and eventually persuaded her to go out to a local internet cafe to check her email. On her way to the cafe she saw a beggar with a cup. As she reached in her purse to put money in the’s beggar cup, he threw the cup at her. It was full of acid.

In 2009 Channel 4 in the UK used her story as its “Alternative to the Queen’s Christmas Message”. The six part documentary can be seen here: 1 2 3 4 5 6. Titled “My Beautiful Face”, it chronicles both her medical and emotional journey towards healing. It closes with her reflections fourteen months after the attack: “I want to break free and be my own person. Obviously I have days, weeks, months where it is really hard and I don’t see a future. But then I have this inner thing, where I say, no, I’m going to do this, get back to normality. I did have these terrible attacks. I do look totally different physically, but I want to be the woman that got through that and is now living.” She is a woman on a journey, but clearly the journey has only begun.

Katie Piper, before and after (ABC News)

In the documentary, the beautiful face is backwards looking.   The documentary begins with slides and videos of her former career and face. Early on she looks through pictures and jokes about how she feels like a 60 year old woman reminiscing about her younger days when she was a sexy young thing. She laments midway through the documentary that the scars on her face make her feel “owned” by her attacker.

Two months after the close of “My Beautiful Face” she is interviewed by Sky TV and “My Beautiful Face” appears to have taken on new meaning.  She says:  “The title of the documentary is ‘My Beautiful Face’ and I think my face is beautiful and tells a story and I’m very happy with it.”

My face tells a story… there are few statements more compelling. Each of our faces tells a story. Our beauty comes not from the features of our face, but the way we wear them and the story they tell.

Katie Piper’s willingness to share her story is an important counterbalance to media’s incessant focus on perfect complexions, perfect curves, sexy poses, and near weightlessness. This is not joyous sexuality, but driven sexuality. Sexuality driven by money, fear, and a deep sense of unworth. In 2007, the APA put out a report examining how the media’s focus on sexual attractiveness affects the development of girls. It found that rather than generate joy and self-confidence, it was producing depression, low self-worth, and eating disorders.

Its primary recommendation to parents was to teach their daughters to value themselves for who they are and not how they look.   Parents can make a huge difference, but it isn’t enough.   To be whole we need to look beyond parents, out to society and backwards through the generations. We need stories both past and present to remind us that beauty can come from within as well as from without.   Looking out to society it is important to see women like Katie Piper who can find beauty in the story their faces tell. Looking back in history we need stories like the story of Purim, a Jewish holiday celebrated every spring.

Vashti sent away (Marc Chagall)

The Purim story tells of two women: Queen Vashti who based her life on beauty defined by men and Queen Esther who based her life on a beauty within her. Vashti bargained for love by agreement and sexual compliance with the men around her. One day she had enough. When her husband asked her to dance naked not only in front of him, but also the entire court, she balked. But since her relationship was based only on compliance and the king had all the power, she was banished for her refusal. Vashti’s story is the story of every woman who has believed she had no value of her own and can only win love by bending to the needs of others, including their sexual needs.

After her death, the king sought a new wife and sent out a call for virgins to be brought to his household. Among the virgins was a certain Esther. Esther wasn’t willing to be measured only by her external beauty. She worked on creating a relationship with the king. She consulted with the head of the concubines to understand what the king needed and was willing to give. She asked for no more than he was willing to give and payed attention to what he needed. The king fell in love, chose her first among the virgins, and made her his Queen. Even after this she continue to build the relationship based on her intelligence and sensitivity to others. When there were whispers of a coup, she told him the names of the instigators.

Queen Esther revealing her true identity (Lilian Broca)

What a difference building a relationship based on one’s personality rather than one’s looks makes! Eventually a political leader, Haman, arises that sees Esther’s uncle and Esther’s entire ethnic group, the Jews, as a political liability and he sets out to destroy them. He even convinces the king to pass a decree to kill all the Jews. Her uncle sends a message to Esther asking for her help.

Esther is in a predicament. The king has not asked for her presence in 30 days and approaching the king unbidden could mean death. Esther approaches him anyway. The king is so in love with Esther that he cares nothing for protocol and offers her anything up to half the kingdom. For three days running Esther invites the king and Haman to a banquet. On the third day she reveals that Haman’s death decree will include her.   The king nullifies the decree and kills Haman instead.

Esther was beautiful within and without. She could be bold and break the rules because she understood that her real power was not in her face or her naked body but in her soul: her sensitivity to the needs of others, her connections and intelligence, even her boldness.

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