INTERNATIONAL: Look at Slutwalk in Global Context

Date: 
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Source: 
The Star Phoenix
PeaceWomen Consolidated Themes: 
Sexual and Gender-Based Violence

When Toronto police Const. Michael Sanguinetti told a safety forum at Osgoode Hall Law School that women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized, he could have had no idea how far those words would echo.

Thousands of activists in Toronto last month took part in a "SlutWalk." Dressed in fishnet stockings and stilettos, T-shirts and jeans, they marched from the legislature in Queen's Park to the police headquarters.
The march wasn't to demand disciplinary action - Const. Sanguinetti, who told the Osgoode audience that he'd been warned not to make his impolitic observation, already had faced public condemnation and internal department discipline.
"If that type of, frankly, archaic thinking still exists among any of my officers, it highlights for me the need to continue to train my officers and sensitize them to the reality of victimization," Police Chief Bill Blair told demonstrators.
Indeed, that was the message the marchers wanted to get out: It doesn't matter what a woman wears or if she has had a few drinks, there is no open season to perpetrate violence against her.
It is a message that has swept the developed world. SlutWalk marches are being organized from Boston early this month, to London in June, to Australia, Europe, and New Zealand, to state clearly that no matter how short a woman's skirt is or how much cleavage is on show, she never "asks" to be attacked.
It is a message worth repeating but, when it comes to the global plague of sexual violence, it doesn't even begin to address the daily struggle faced by a vast majority of women.
According to a study published last week in the American Journal of Public Health, at least 1,150 women are raped daily in the central African nation of Congo - a rate of 48 an hour.
And it isn't only women who are being victimized. A UN official called in February for international support to stop a rash of sexual assaults on women, children, men and boys who were attacked over a two-week period as they were heading to markets.
The use of sexual violence to disrupt the families and destroy the communities of Africa has been ongoing for years. Except for a peep here and a whimper there, the world mostly has remained silent.
Occasionally lip service is paid to the need to address the problem. After the United States, Canada and other allies went into Afghanistan to hunt down Osama bin Laden, a number of Western officials insisted the job wouldn't be complete until women in that backward part of the world had the right to life, liberty, education and personal security.
Within hours of the successful assassination mission against the al Qaida leader, those on both the ideological left and the right increased their calls for the West to quit Afghanistan - something that could return the country to the brutish Taliban.
And despite an American effort to cut off trading for so-called Central African "conflict" minerals such as tin, tantalum, tungsten and gold - similar to the global effort to curb trade in blood diamonds - the desire for the cellphones and other electronics that require these minerals has trumped the imperative to protect the women from violence.
To put the ugliness into some perspective, the Congo rape study notes that 29 Congolese women in every thousand is a victim, while in Canada, home of the SlutWalk, the rate is 0.5 rapes per 1,000 women.
No one marches for the enslaved Afghan women under the Taliban or for the African victims of rape, although the electronic devices being used to assemble the masses for the SlutWalks are helping to keep the African perpetrators in business.