Tag: rape

The Lethal Consequences for Women of Trump’s Suspending Foreign Aid

Waist up portrait of young African American doctor consulting female patient using digital tablet in clinic setting

Yesterday, in a 6-3 vote, liberal members of the court dissenting, the US Supreme Court granted an emergency stay of a lower court decision mandating that the Trump administration disburse the $4 billion dollars in foreign aid approved by Congress.

While the Court’s decision isn’t a final one, the funds must be spent before the end of the fiscal year, endangering their being ever dispensed.

The Court’s decision violates the right of Congress to legislate the nation’s purse, as granted by the Constitution.

The consequences from the holdup are lethal, especially for women in developing nations.

In Uganda, 88 teachers have been dismissed and thousands of students have dropped out, the majority of them girls. In Uganda, only a quarter of remaining students are females.

Early sell off of daughters as young as thirteen is increasingly common, as families seek to buttress income through dowries, consequent with the government’s reduction in food subsidies.

As is, numerous African women have been raped by warring militants, especially in South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Rape victims face social stigma and diminished prospects of marriage. The
administration’s policies only add to their plight.

Let me tell you what’s happened in Lesotho, whose primary industry is textiles, its workforce 80% female. Due to Trump’s tariffs and a decrease in aid, orders have dried-up, resulting in mass layoffs.

Across Africa, reduced employment impacts health, imperiling the progress made against AIDS/STD. Most health care workers are women. It used to be that women could access an HIV test, averaging 12 cents a test. With suspension of aid, that option has virtually disappeared.

Pap smears are now largely unavailable; the fallout, cervical cancer rivals maternal mortality.

African children, many of them already undernourished, stunted in growth and suffering mental retardation, face the bleakest of futures.

Some women may resort to transactional sex as means to economic survival, increasing health risk.

With the pervasive suspension of birth control assistance, women lose the ability to limit family size. The average family size in Africa is 4.5. Still more in the Sahel. By the century’s turn, Nigeria alone will have a projected 750 million population.

Poverty is an enemy of the social fabric, contributing to domestic violence.

Poverty contributes to crime, much of it food theft.

Poverty increases migration pressures and with dislocation, still more violence, as is occurring in South Africa, migrants resented as competitors.

Menaced by climate warming, which Trump calls a hoax, Africans are confronted with daily survival made worse by prolonged droughts and tropical diseases.

Trump, however, dismisses developing nations as “shithole countries,” his racism creating a vast milieu of unprecedented suffering.

I’ve largely centered on Africa, but its experience is reenacted in other developing countries as well.

Women, tragically, are Trump’s primary victims.

rj

Maleficent: a must see movie!

“No society treats its women as well as its men.”
UN Development Programme, 1997)

Jolie

There’s a new movie I’m wanting to see. It’s called Maleficent and stars Angelina Jolie.

It’s timely because it’s really about rape, which has now entered into virtually every fabric of American life, including our schools. On our higher college campuses, one out of five coeds will be raped.

Time Magazine in its recent cover issue on the subject, mentions that the University of Montana (Missoula) has averaged 80 rapes annually over the last two years. It isn’t unique: even the Ivy League schools have a high incident rate–that is, of reported rapes, twenty percent of them related to alcohol. Some experts speculate that most campus rape goes unreported.

Across the nation, the same 20% figure prevails, with 80% of rape victims below age 25, according to The National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey, done in 2010, and made public last year. Stalking, now abetted by smart technology, is even more widespread, or five times the number of rapes.

But let’s get down to bedrock: The survey estimated that 1.27 million American women were raped–or one woman every 29 seconds–and 5.1 million stalked–a fall out rate of one woman every 7 seconds.

Rape is so much a part of our national fabric that it’s found its way into a Walt Disney film in a grim version of Sleeping Beauty. In the eponymous film, Maleficent is a fairy initially enjoying unlimited aerial freedom in a forest setting (i.e, archetypal rendering of situational danger), who falls in love with Stefan, a human being, who betrays her.

Rape, in the film’s metaphorical version, is transposed into Stefan’s drugging Maleficent so that he can take her wings back to the king of humans. In this age of ambien, pervasive alcohol, and PT141 on the horizon, sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

In a cogent review, http://huff.to/1lbymvh, Hayley Krischer writes that “Maleficent is a commentary on current male and female relationships. It’s a commentary on rape culture. And much more, it’s a story that allows a woman to recover. It gives her agency. It gives her power. It allows her to reclaim the story. And this is something that can’t be ignored.”

Sadly, clipping a woman’s wings is what many men do, with rape its ultimate manifestation, taking away their ability to be fully themselves, free to pursue their dreams, able to soar above the nets of male malice, discrimination, exploitation and often betrayal. (Krischer reminds us that 70% percent of rapes are committed by someone the woman knows.)

While many gains have been made with the rise of feminism in the 1960s, the rape culture is still with us, and even more, of men who still try to clip a women’s wings through unequal pay, feminization of poverty, career barriers, sexual harassment, verbal abuse, and physical violence.

In a culture still dominated by testosterone driven men I doubt this sad scenario will ever fully vanish, but at least a film like Maleficent can give women awareness and its articulation, empowering them to keep their wings intact.

–rj