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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• adding one’s photo to a worldwide map showing people who oppose rape as a weapon of war
• raising the public profile of rape as a weapon of war through blogging, letters to the editors, media events, and the like
• writing a letter to local elected officials
• hosting a consciousness raising event

Videos, survivor stories, resource materials, sample letters, NGO activity updates and more are available on the Stop Rape Now! website.
Detailed information and support tools for all of these projects are available on the projects website’s Take Action page.

To raise awareness of the project, the United Nations’ special representative on sexual violence in conflict, Margaret Wallstrom was interviewed on NPR radio. They have also placed two PSA’s on YouTube. The first, displayed with this post is meant to both personalize the story and add celebrity appeal. The second features ordinary people around the globe expressing their opposition to rape as a weapon of war.

The political pressure is surely needed. Margaret Wallstrom still is working in temporary office space. A recent press conference several raised questions about whether or not the UN was dedicating sufficient resources to the problem. During the NPR interview, Wallstrom herself explained that the Congo has had good anti-rape laws on the books for a while. However, the laws remain unimplemented due to the lack of resources. Furthermore, the UN has ongoing problems moving its own anti-sexual abuse initiative from a global mandate to local implementation. At the beginning of May, the BBC reported that 10 Pakistani peace-keepers had raped a 13 year old girl. Her village’s elders lodged a formal complaint several months before the BBC investigation, but no action had been taken and the UN is only now saying it will look into the matter.

Often at the UN issues affecting women are treated as bargaining chips. Recently, Iran was accepted as a member of the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). Iran is one of only a handful of nations that has neither signed or ratified the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women. All other members of the CSW have ratified the treaty. Their uncontested nomination was the result of horse trading to keep them off of the UN Human Rights Commission.

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Sexual assault has been a hot topic in the last twelve months. Ben Roethlisberger twice made the headlines as an alleged assailant. Roman Polanski pitted Hollywood’s social awareness against its tendency to minimize the seriousness of a crime when a much liked and appreciated artist is the perpetrator.

The movie Precious, about a young woman and survivor of incest who wanted to make something of herself against all the odds was nominated for six academy awards and won two. Oprah did a two part series on sexual molesters. There were also several celebrity stories related to sexual assault: Tyler Perry, Mackensie Phillips publicly told their stories of childhood victimization. Katie Piper told the story of her recovery from a horrific rape and acid attack.

The triumph of the determined individual has been the theme of all of the recent survivor stories, both real and fictional. But survivors of sexual assault aren’t just wounded people in search of healing and personal transformation. Sexual assault and its aftermath also makes survivors aware of the many different ways our society can be improved. Here is just a sampling of the ways survivors of sexual assault have used their experiences to identify needs and improve lives of marginalized groups and even society as a whole.

• Natural childbirth. Ricki Lake became interested in natural childbirth after her own experience helped her gain a new appreciation for her body. Because her body issues were rooted in sexual molestation at 6 or 7, she pays special attention to birthing issues of survivors. However, her primary concerns are the interplay of medical politics, economics, and appreciation for this most essentially feminine of experiences – birthing. She has produced a movie, written a book, and set up a on-line community for those interested in natural childbirth.
• Burn victims. Katie Piper’s face and upper body were seriously damaged in an acid attack by a former boyfriend who had raped her only days before. She received ground breaking medical care and is now advocating to insure that burn victims have access to the latest innovations in burn care. For more information on her work, see The Katie Piper Foundation.
• Sex worker health. Former adult film actress Shelly Lubben has been actively lobbying for the California Occupation Health and Safety Administration (Cal/OSHA) to take a more active role in regulating health conditions in the adult film industry in California. Adult film making is legal in California since the California supreme court declared it a form of protected free speech, but health code requirements for adult film workers are regularly ignored by directors and management. Lubben was molested by older children ( a girl and her teen brother) at age 9. During her years working in the sex industry she was also raped several times.
• Throw-away children. Tracy Lords, another ex-adult film actress, made headlines in the 1980’s when the FBI discovered that she was under-aged when she was photographed for Penthouse magazine and at least 20 adult films. She was raped at age 10 by a 16 year old boy whom she considered a father figure and molested by her mother’s boyfriend from age 10-15.   At 15 she ran away. She began working in the porn industry because mainstream employers didn’t believe her fake id and producers and directors in the porn industry didn’t care. She now works as a mainstream actress and volunteers for Children of the Night – a program that takes in throw away children on the streets of Hollywood and gives them shelter until adult hood.
• Music therapy. Shiela E (raped at age 5) and Lynn Mawbry (molested at 12) developed a program using a combination of journaling, song writing, and music making to help children recover from CSA and other forms of abuse.
• Fund raising. The best ideas won’t go far without funding. Pamela Swider was raped in her early 20’s by a person she met briefly at a party. She has been active in feminist issues. She heads Michigan’s Take Back the Night and serves on the board of the national Take Back the Night Foundation. But organization is not enough. Her latest project is Women For Hope, an on-line shopping mall that donates 10% of gross proceeds to a variety of women’s charities.
• Social Critique. Andrea Dworkin leveraged her experiences of rape into a powerful and controversial critique of public and private expectations of sexuality and intercourse. She argued that the rape-like portrayal of sex in the media oppressed and limited the effectiveness of women in society. Her critique moved the debate about porn out of the sphere of religious morality and forever changed the way we talk and think about sex.

Even when survivors focus on personal transformation, survivors often use their own story as a way to better understand the barriers to empowerment and transformation that affect us all. Survivors have carved out a living as inspirational speakers, social workers, psychologists, coalition builders, and academics, each reflecting on a different aspect of what leaves people dis-empowered and under-performing.

Together with Disney, Terri Hatcher is launching a website devoted to female self-appreciation and empowerment. Joyce Meyer is a high profile evangelical preacher who often draws on her own story of childhood incest to encourage others to believe that they still are valuable in God’s eyes. Iyanla Vanzant, founder of the Inner Visions Institute for Spiritual Development has made a name for herself as a life coach and make-over guru, including a three year run as a life coach on the TV show Starting Over.

The most well known of of these empowerment activists is Oprah Winfrey. In O Magazine, People magazine and numerous comments on her shows, Oprah has discussed how rape at age 9 took her away Oprah’s sense of self worth and caused her to seek consolation and affirmation in food and tumultuous relationships.

As a small child she believed she was meant to help people (see McCall’s, Aug, 1987, p. 140). It was only by working through the childhood rape that she understood how important it was to affirm and love herself as well. As years have passed she has tried to share her sense of empowerment in any number of ways: through her talk show, through her O Magazine, through her choice of books in her book club, through Oprah’s Network of Angels, and through her For All Woman Registry. She has also turned to education both in the US and South Africa. In the US she has is an active supporter of A Better Chance, program that gives economically disadvantaged children in the USA a chance to attend top secondary schools. In South Africa she founded a well-appointed private school for bright economically disadvantaged girls.

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The exact date varies from city to city and school to school, but each year in the 3rd or 4th week of April, politicians, activists, students, celebrities, military personnel, survivors, and concerned citizens go to work or school wearing a pair of jeans to protest sexual violence and the social attitudes that support it.

Rape and sexual assault are not the only human ills remembered with denim. Each year Lee Jeans sponsors a breast cancer awareness day in May. In India, activists where jeans in December to raise awareness for HIV and AIDS. In September of each year, the Irish Youth Foundation promotes denim day to raise funds for underprivileged Irish youth.

The use of jeans to protest rape and sexual assault has its origins in a 1999 decision of the Italian supreme court.  In February, 1999,  the Italian supreme court overturned the rape conviction of a 45 year old driving instructor because his 17 year old student had been wearing tight jeans at the time of the rape.  The judges argued that the woman had consented because the jeans were tight and could not be removed without the victims cooperation. The effect of intimidation or psychological coercion was not considered.

Italian members of parliament protesting the 1999 court decision that let a rapist go free because his victim was wearing tight jeans.

The decision spawned an outcry in Italy and around the globe. In Italy, several women members of parliament wore jeans to parliamentary sessions. In April of that year, activists in Los Angelos, California (USA) organized the first ever Denim day in solidarity with the women of Italy.

The Italian supreme court eventually overturned its infamous “jeans” decision in 2008. This decision was the final step of a series of court decisions that have gradually undercut the 1999 decision. A summary of these decisions can be found on line in the Colombia Journal of European Law.

Rape never exists in a vacuum. It often forces us to think beyond the specific issue of rape to larger principles. This case was no exception. The deep discrepancy between the Italian court’s endorsement of the “jeans defense” and evolving social mores in Europe and around the globe forced some to re-evaluate the relationship between legal process and social norms. An example of this is Kitty C. Calvita’s 2001 article published in Law and Society review: Blue jeans, rape, and the ‘de-constitutive’ power of law.

In the USA Denim Day continues to be honored with rape and sexual assault awareness activities. The specific legal decision that inspired it is thankfully part of history, but the need to raise awareness of rape and the role of psychological coercion continues.

Colleges, rape crisis centers, and even military bases in California, Guam, Idaho, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey, Nevada, and South Carolina all actively promote Denim Day both on and off line. Two organizations in particular, Support Denim Day and Peace Over Violence are working to make Denim day into a national event.

Although Denim Day began with the protest of Italian parliamentarians, it does not seem to have caught on outside the USA. Perhaps there are efforts on the ground and out of the sight of the web, but so far the only mention of Denim Day for the sake of sexual assault comes from a blogger in in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia who wrote a post promoting Denim Day in 2008.

If you or your organization would like to promote Denim day, please consider visiting either Support Denim Day or Peace Over Violence. Both sites are keeping a registry of Denim Day participants and have a number of programming and promotion ideas.

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It began with a guerrilla art campaign in New York in 1994. Today it is a three part fine art exhibit at the University of Pennsylvania running from February 17 through March 5.

Charles Hall, then a creative director at Chiat Day Advertising, threw himself a 30th birthday party. The next morning he found out that someone had tried to rape one of his guests. In response he designed a stickers with the slogan “This isn’t an invitation to rape me” and plastered them all over New York City.

But it didn’t stop there. He convinced a group of photographers to donate striking black and white photographs and arranged to have them published in mass media publications, among them Der Speigel, Elle, and Playboy. The stickers and ad campaign were eventually donated to Peace Over Violence (formerly the Los Angeles Commission on Assaults Against Women). It was used in anti-rape campaigns throughout the state of California. Posters and stickers based on the original ad campaign were also sold at minimal cost to anti-rape organizations across the USA.

Each picture illustrated a different circumstance where people tend to excuse a man’s behavior and see it as “bad sex” rather than rape: marriage, sexy clothes, drunkenness, homelessness, kissing, and so on. The phrase “This is not an invitation to rape me” was included in small red print on each image. A sampling of the images are shown below. The full collection of stickers and images can be seen here.

Ellen Von Unwerth

Mario de Lopez

Tony Ward

Moshe Brahka

Scottish campaign

The campaign went international in 2007 when the government of Scotland asked Charles Hall to adapt the campaign to the UK market. For the revision, Charles worked together with Clifford Graham and Julie Cerise. Full color photographs replaced the original black and white images. On the new color images, the difficult-to-see red slogan was replaced with the same words in yellow framed by a pink tear drop.

The Scottish campaign ran in two phases, in the fall of 2008 and 2009. A website with interactive posters was created. The images were plastered on billboards and bus stops.  The campaign was warmly received by the advertising industry, feminists, and anti-rape activists, and even the Scottish trade unions. However, many of the comments left on the website and non-feminist blogs do raise doubts about how effective the campaign is at changing attitudes. One of the participants in the campaign, a rape survivor who had done voice overs and interviews for a radio and television component to the campaign recently went public with her identity. She protested the offensive comments left on the campaign website and also highlighted the need for additional efforts to change public attitudes.

Fox Exhibit Hall (Daily Pennsylvanian)

The University of Pennsylvania exhibit represents the next stage in the development of this campaign, both in terms of message and art. It attempts to address some of the limitations of earlier versions of the campaign.

To expand the range of artistic voices, students and artists around the globe were invited to contribute. Up until this point the artistic content has been limited by governmental concerns and the limits of popular media. By formulating this as an art exhibit rather than a public service campaign, the relationship between consent and sensuality could be explored in further depth and with greater artistic freedom.  A full list of artists on exhibit can be found here.

The new exhibit has three components: the first part in Fox Hall focuses on the connection between sensuality, relationship, and consent. The second part displayed on campus sidewalks and titled “The Joy of Consent” focuses on the positive value of consent. The third part of the exhibit, titled “I am the Me”, focuses on the variety of victims and potential victims. It includes self-portraits of victims and people who see themselves as potential victims.

Both the UK and US public service campaigns have been criticized for using only professional model-quality white women as potential rape victims. Unless ordinary people are seen as victims, people may not make the connection between their day to day interactions and the campaign message. Thus the first part includes male and non-white artistic models. The third component insures that ordinary people, and not just professional models are included as potential victims.

From "Joy of Consent" (Tony Ward)

A second criticism of the original campaign is its focus on the negative: it teaches what isn’t a yes to sex, but neglects to teach what is a yes to sex. Increasingly anti-rape advocates are feeling that “no means no” needs to be replaced with “only yes means yes”. Hence, the exhibit titled “The Joy of Consent”.

Photos of all three parts of the exhibit can be found on Facebook.

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This year the United Nations has chosen the theme “Equal rights, equal opportunities: Progress for all” for International Women’s Day.

First observed in 1911, International Women’s Day events typically focus on women’s stories and women’s empowerment. In the UK alone more than 160 events have been registered with the International Women’s Day website. They include story-telling, comedy routines, free beauty therapies, lectures, art exhibits, food bazaars, special television programming, charity fund-raisers, film-screenings, poetry readings, conferences, marches, and a discussion in the House of Lords.

Equally diverse activities can be found around the globe. In India, there is a run in Bangalore sponsored by Adidas and free tailoring classes in Lucknow. In Guatemala and Bolivia, two women artists blogging and cycling from Quetzaltenango, Guatemala to Bogota, Columbia to learn more about the lives of women in those countries. The ride will end with an art exhibit in Bogota, Columbia. In Nigeria, a day of advocacy is planned with TV and radio broadcasts, meetings with political and religious leaders, a solidarity march, lectures and an award ceremony.

In the blogosphere, International Women’s Day (IWD) is being observed with blogathons and story collection drives. To participate, visit any one of these sites:

• Gender Across Borders IWD Blogathon is running a blogathon based on the 2010 UN theme of “Equal rights, equal opportunities: Progress for all”
• Bloggers Unite: International Women’s Day
• Reuter’s News Service will be sponsoring a live blogging event
• Indusladies.com is requesting blogs on 10 different development issues, including doweries, sex trafficking, woman’s health, and equity in the workplace.
• The Ubuntu Women’s website is promoting women in technology by collecting stories from women about when they first started using Ubuntu.

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No recent song has captured both the hopes and sorrows of peace of Israel like the song Shir L’shalom (Song for Peace).

This was the song that Yitzak Rabin, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, was singing moments before he was shot to death. The blood stained song sheet is in the Israeli national archives.

Ironically, the song was composed and first performed in 1969 by an Israeli military band. Israel is probably the only country in the world that considers the longing for peace proper material to motivate soldiers but this oddity has a long history in Jewish tradition where war is viewed as grim necessity rather than a sign of power or triumph. According to Jewish tradition, King David was a powerful leader but he had too much blood on his hands to build the temple in Jerusalem. That task was left to a later more peaceful ruler, the wise Solomon.

It may seem strange to talk about a song like Shir L’Shalom in connection with rape. After all rape is a crime involving two individuals. War is a crime between two peoples. And yet…

The relationship between war and peace is not simple. In rape, as in war, we are made to make tough choices: to fight for our lives or freeze and retreat. Individuals and peoples under threat both make hard choices.   For some odd reason we seem to have a double standard: we judge countries for fighting, and people who are raped for not fighting. Why? Why do we judge individuals for freezing, or even for giving the rapist what he wants?

We say that war is collective aggression and rape is private aggression, but how clear are the lines really? An individual soldier, not society, pulls each and every gun trigger in a war. The rapist does the raping, but in many cases, he has a belief that he is entitled to ignore another person’s wishes and even use force. Society tells him that sex is OK unless the woman aggressively stops him. His peers and even the legal system allow him to believe that alcohol or a woman’s dress or a no that isn’t loud enough is somehow carte blanche to do whatever he wants.

Let the sun rise and light up the morning
Prayerful pleading will not restore us
She whose candle was snuffed out and buried in dust
cannot be brought back with a bitter cry.
None can answer us from the well of deepest dark
Neither joy in victory nor songs of praise will be effective.

So let us only sing songs of peace
Don’t whisper a prayer, better to sing a song for peace with a great shout.

Let the sun penetrate through the flowers
Don’t look back, let them go
Look up in hope, and not out through rifle sights,
Sing songs of love, and not of war.
Don’t say “it will come one day, bring us that day”
Because this is not a dream.
Raise a loud cry for peace in all the city squares.

So let us only sing songs of peace
Don’t whisper a prayer, better to sing a song for peace with a great shout.

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