On being a Western harlot in other countries

There was worldwide shock and outrage earlier this month at the news that a Norwegian woman who was allegedly raped in Dubai had been sentenced to prison for extramarital sex, consuming alcohol without a licence and perjury. Marte Dalev was charged with extramarital sex because under UAE law, she was not raped. Rape is not easy to prove in any legal jurisdiction. Under Sharia law however, a rape only occurs if it is witnessed by four adult Muslim men or if the rapist confesses. This makes it almost impossible to prove a rape occurred.

Dalev's story is unfortunately not an isolated case. Australian Alicia Gali spent eight months in prison in 2008, after reporting being raped at the hotel where she worked. Her case was not widely publicised by her family, apparently due to advice from the Australian government. Dalev's case was barely reported in Gulf media outlets and when it was, it was mostly to express outrage at the evil Western media who were besmirching Dubai's good name. It was pointed out that Dalev was drinking and so was partly to blame if she was raped. The idea that a rape victim is to blame if she has been drinking is still prevalent here in Europe too, lest we forget.

Dubai, UAE

I'm moving to Oman next month, which has a similar, sharia-influence code of law to the UAE. I've seen calls to boycott Dubai as a holiday destination on Twitter and have been reading countless articles on this terrible case (Dalev's case was since suspended, thankfully). It's made me think a lot about travelling to countries which have laws I not only disagree with but actually abhor; laws which offer me little protection as a woman- especially a Western woman who likes a drink.

Some of my friends and family have questioned why I would want to live in a country such as Oman, especially as I am such a proponent of women's equality. I obviously don't see living there as condoning women's second class status but I am extremely interested in living in a completely different culture for a year and learning Arabic. In Uganda, I was lucky enough to meet some amazing Sudanese women. I hope to travel to Sudan sometime in the next two years. This is not because of their government's fantastic human rights policies or their heavily corrupted Public Order Laws but because I find Sudanese culture interesting and beautiful and Sudanese people friendly and warm. No one travels to a country because of governmental policy, you travel to see and experience new and different things. The things you see are not always good.

At the Gadaffi Mosque, Kampala in 2011. 

Dalev committed no crime. Her only mistake was to go to the Dubai police. As a resident of Abu Dhabi, it's surprising she was not aware of the UAE's draconian laws regarding rape. However, it is completely understandable that probably shocked and traumatised she automatically did what we European women are always taught to do if we are attacked; report it to the police.

Many young European women I've met who have travelled in Africa or the Middle East are unaware of the current political and legal situation of the countries they're visiting. In Uganda in late 2011, as Somali militants upped their terrorist activities in neighbouring Kenya, many people in Kampala became nervous they would soon strike Uganda. Discussing the situation in a typical expat bar,  I remember being shocked at a Dutch girl who scoffed at such an idea. She was completely unaware, having failed to adequately Google the country she was moving to, that just the previous summer, two suicide bombers had killed over 70 people in downtown Kampala.

Being aware of the laws in UAE would obviously not have protected Dalev against rape. However, knowing how rape is treated by the legal system there would have saved her some of the extra trauma she was forced to go through. As we all know, it doesn't matter where in the world you are as a woman or how careful you are- whether you're in jeans and a headscarf or a miniskirt, drunk or sober- rape happens. Stories like Dalev's does not stop me travelling to the countries I wish to visit but it certainly does remind me to know as much as possible about the country I am travelling to.

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Sexual Violence in Peacetime and War: It's not a Competition

In recent years, there has been an increased focus, from the media and international institutions, on the use of sexual violence in war. This is significant as it is important to recognise sexual violence in conflict not as something which just 'happens' but as a weapon of war and/or a tool of genocide. Recognising this includes taking into account the wider political situation and also considering gender inequalities in society. The use of sexual violence during war is a symptom of societal misogyny which also causes sexual violence during peacetime. Theses two 'types' of sexual violence are inextricably linked and cannot really be separated. We cannot speak of the reasons for one, without touching on the reasons behind the other. I always assume this fact to be self-evident.

But write an article about sexual violence in war and someone will inevitably comment 'what about rape or sexual violence that occurs in the home, during peacetime? That's under reported too.' This is of course a valid point. But what baffles me is the juxtaposition of the point, as if sexual violence in peacetime and war are somehow in competition with each other for attention. Similarly, writing about rape or sexual violence, whose victims are predominantly female, will almost always cause someone to say 'men are raped too, why are you ignoring that?'. No one is ignoring that men are also raped (in peacetime and war) but the simple fact is the vast majority of victims of sexual violence are female. As such, most of the discussion is framed around female victims.

Sexual violence occurs in war because it also occurs in peacetime. These two forms of sexual violence cannot be isolated from one another as they largely occur because of the same political, cultural and societal reasons. Speaking about one is not to belittle the other; highlighting one is not meant to detract from the other. In fact, speaking about one should draw attention to the fact that sexual violence is unfortunately a pervasive problem around the world, in peace time and war, in many different countries and societies.

Why I wrote an 'angry human rights' piece about rape and international law

Yesterday, A Safe World for Women published my piece on the International Criminal Court's acquittal of DRC warlord Mathieu Ngudjolo Chui.

It's not a balanced piece. Ngudjolo is guilty. His acquittal is not the fault of the ICC judges but of the prosecution team who presented an extremely weak case.

There was no excuse for such a weak case. There is an abundance of evidence in the DRC, where hundreds of thousands of women and children have been raped and millions killed in the last ten years or so.

It's not a PC thing to admit, especially for a human rights folk, that the ICC is essentially 'a court for the guilty' and that an acquittal is unacceptable. But this is the harsh truth. I talk about this further in the piece; thousands and thousands of women have been raped by thousands of militias and soldiers. The DRC does not have the will or capacity to hold them all to account. So the International Community, working through the ICC, attempts to provide some form of justice or recourse for victims. They cannot try the thousands of guilty. So they choose a handful, to make an 'example' of.


And they fail in even that.

It's not enough to have rape listed as a war crime. Last year, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) produced a documentary about the prosecution of sexual violence in international law entitled 'The Triumph of Justice'. It's worth a watch as it is interesting. Although the ICTY has done much for the advancement of the prosecution of sexual violence, the title is disingenuous in the extreme. About 30 individuals have been convicted on charges related to sexual violence by the ICTY. Around 50,000 women were raped during the conflict in Bosnia alone.

Let's not speak about the triumph of anything here except impunity.

Stopping sexual violence in Syria

Last week, UK Foreign Secretary William Hague announced the UK was sending a team of experts to gather evidence on the use of rape and other forms of sexualised violence in the conflict. As media reports of the announcement tended to focus more on Angelina Jolie’s support for the move, the true monumental importance of this has been lost somewhat. 

In international law, rape is well established as a weapon of war and genocide. Sexualised violence is used in conflict to humiliate, punish and subjugate, to destroy the social cohesion of communities and even as a form of ethnic cleansing, through forced pregnancy. When the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was established in 1993, the inclusion of rape as a crime against humanity was considered revolutionary. Although important precedents have been set by the ICTY and also the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in defining rape as an act of torture, a war crime, a crime against humanity and a tool of genocide, progress in terms of prosecution has been slow and disappointing. The number of prosecutions for such crimes do not come close to matching the thousands of women, men and children raped in both conflicts. 

Why is this?  

Similar to the prosecution of rape in domestic courts, the issue usually lies with evidence or lack thereof. While the world is well aware of Bosnia's notorious 'rape camps', media reports do not stand up in international law. Cold hard facts and evidence are essential. Without these there can be no meaningful, appropriate prosecution of such hideous crimes. 

Which is why the deployment of UK backed team of 70 people, including doctors, lawyers and forensic experts, is so important. If the horrifying reports of brutal and widespread instances of sexualised violence can be verified, hopefully they can be stopped to some extent and later prosecuted.

Prevention and Deterrence

Obviously, the main goal of this initiative, and others, is prevention and deterrence. At a brainstorming conference on what can be done on sexualised violence in Syria last month, sponsored by the UK FCO's Initiative to prevent sexual violence, participants came up with some concrete actions which can be taken now- including using the resources of the UK and other G8 countries to provide mechanisms for reporting sexualised violence, pressuring Russia to make interventions on this issue and leveraging NATO and the OSCE.

Lauren Wolfe, Director of the Women Under Siege Project and one of the meetings participants who pushed for concrete recommendations has a great piece with more details on this.  

It's a start

It may not seem like much and the notion that we are not stopping such instances, merely documenting them is hard to bear. And there is so much more to be done in places like DRC.

However, it is infinitely better than doing nothing. And hopefully this is just the beginning of more concrete international efforts to halt the use of sexualised violence in conflict. 

Women Under Siege: Rape as a weapon of war

The Women Under Siege Project, an independent initiative of the Women's Media Centre, documents how rape and other forms of sexualised violence are used as tools of genocide and conflict in the 20th century and into the 21st. Less than a year old, Women Under Siege is a really original research site. It has original content, interesting blog posts and uses technology to document offences in real time- such as creating a live, crowd sourced map of rape in Syria (Disclaimer: I am a sometime contributor to their blog).

Rape is often considered to be something which 'happens' during conflict as if it is somehow insignificant or less serious than other crimes. Rape is much more than that however- it is a weapon which can be deployed to devastating effect. The International Criminal Court has recognised in numerous indictments that rape can be used as a tool of genocide. Rape can be used to destroy the social fabric of communities and forced pregnancies are also a way of 'cleansing or diluting' a particular ethnic group.

There is growing awareness of the reality of the use of rape as tool of conflict. Although it is hardly a new phenomenon, the use of sexualised violence in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and Darfur in the early 2000s really brought the issue to attention.

There are a number of high level international initiatives aimed at combating the use of sexualised violence in conflict such as the UN's Stop Rape Now campaign. In May this year, the UK's Foreign Secretary William Hague launched the Preventing Sexual Violence Initiative.

These initiatives may not seem like much - too theoretical perhaps- but they are highly significant. They signify a massive change in how sexual violence is viewed and are a massive step forward for the prevention of such crimes.  Hopefully concrete action will follow.