New Mexico Mercury

Almost lost amidst the terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon was the news a few days later of a five-year-old girl raped and left for dead in New Delhi, India. Only four months earlier, a young Indian woman was gang raped on a bus; she died of her injuries. Much of the world’s attention focused on that faraway country, on its startling number of sexualized power crimes against women and girls, and the failure of its authorities to take such crimes seriously. Mass protests demanded Indian police and courts do better. In our own press a common question became “Is travel to India safe?”

But this is not an Indian problem. There is really nothing unusual about men raping or otherwise sexually abusing women and young girls. It happens everywhere, is reported a fraction of the time, and is even considered “natural” in some cultures. The rapid spread of HIV/AIDS in a number of African nations could be traced, among other sources, to a horrendous popular belief that having sex with a virgin inoculated men against the new pandemic. Neither are we in the United States immune to sex crimes against children, in their vast majority girls. The revelation that large numbers of Catholic priests have engaged in this abuse, and that their powerful transnational institution, the Catholic Church, has protected them for generations, is only one of many such situations, here and elsewhere. The public expresses shock, and the stories keep surfacing.

I am not startled. Not even surprised. And I don’t believe this is an Indian problem or an African problem or a problem peculiar to any single society. Systematic abuse of women and girls crosses national, class, racial, and cultural lines. Tragically, it is endemic in most countries. What differs most significantly is the country’s approach to justification, cover-up, punishment and—very occasionally—retribution.

Rape rears its ugly head within the supposed sanctity of the home where fathers and other male relatives routinely abuse daughters and granddaughters; at college fraternity parties where vulnerable young women are urged to drink until they are simply a passed-out body; when professors coerce students who fear not going along will mean a bad grade; in every branch of the armed forces where officers often take advantage of female enlisted soldiers; and in workplaces where the act has acquired the less dramatic label of sexual harassment.

China and several other societies continue to favor male children over females. Christian fundamentalism continues to see women and girls as servants whose role is to service men. Women in many Muslim societies continue to be treated as second-class citizens, subservient to the rules set down by male imams. Large-scale rape is perpetrated in many wars; indeed in recent years rape has gained international recognition as a crime of war.

In recent decades and in the more enlightened societies, women have fought persuasive battles and come a long way in achieving a degree of progress. In the United States it’s no longer as common as it once was for a woman or girl reporting a rape to be asked what she did to provoke it, “was your skirt too short?” In a number of countries special police units, staffed exclusively by women, make it easier for victims of sexual assault to come forward and get help.

Feminism has been a powerful tool against misogyny. In the United States and Europe, Women’s Studies courses at most major universities help educate new generations. Despite the fact that our country has not been able to pass an Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, and our corporate media periodically proclaims that “feminism is dead” or that we are living in a “post-feminist era,” the struggle for women’s rights is alive. Occasionally sexist comments may cost a male politician his job, or help defeat him at the polls. 

But, as with so many other problems endemic to our lives, we are slow to connect the dots. We seem unable to make the necessary connections, to link the complex ways in which our institutionalized hatred of women permeates all our lives. Until female human beings everywhere are considered fully human, until our agency over our lives is complete, until we earn the same pay for the same work, hold the same public offices and enjoy the same legal privileges, a five-year-old girl in India will be raped, her community will not look beyond protecting or punishing the criminal, and we will ask “Can we travel safely?”