The declining U.S. economy has led many to wake up to the fact that prisons are increasingly warehouses for “unwanted people” in the U.S. Whether they are people of color, immigrants (usually also people of color), poor women, trans, subsistence level or homeless youth, mentally ill, differently-abled, etc. the prison system is ready to take them on the most minor infraction. Once there, the system is designed to keep them through a combination of degradation and punishment that includes added time. The assumption that people in prison belong in prison has served to shield most N. Americans to the realities of mothers separated from nursing babies for nothing more than crossing a border or Latino youth clocking time because they were hanging out on the wrong street corner together or trans women praying they make it to prison instead of the infirmary because of “unexplained injuries” while in custody. While more information has come out about U.S. prisons becoming the largest state funded mental health facilities in some state’s, very few discussions outside of activist circles have centered on the interconnectedness of marginalization (“unwanted people”), incarceration, and income and job generation. Prisons are becoming one of the largest employers across the nation, providing jobs in food service, medicine, administration, sanitation, as well as guards and counselors. They also stimulate local economy because all of these new workers have money to spend at the local diner, coffee shop, clothing store, etc.Yet, as some small towns have argued, this stimulus restructures the entire economy toward the prison in ways that stunt alternative economic growth and econ sustaining diversification. Put another way, if the prison closes towns that were struggling before it opened would become ghost towns. So the prison must stay open. And to keep the prison open, there have to be criminals …
For those familiar with the prison-industrial-complex, or already working on the issue, this is not new information. Yet new ads inundate the local television with calls to join the ranks of border patrol (immigrant prison guards) and law enforcement careers (non-immigrant prisons) and my own uni has seen a massive increase in enrollment in the prison related degrees. It’s big business. Big business that is shielded by the national level discourses of citizenship and criminality.
Enter California.
While scandals about youth prisons are nothing new, the California prison system has one of the longest incarceration rates for youth offenders in the nation. Most of those offenders are originally arrested on misdemeanors, though there is a large percentage involved in hard core or gateway crimes. The issue is not whether or not incarcerated youth are “perfect victims”, ie completely innocent, but how they move from every day youth, to criminalized populations upon whom the prison-industrial-complex depends to generate money and jobs at the expense of lives.
Many youth in California prisons are people of color, second or third generation immigrant youth, and/or poor. 84% of youth in California prisons were people of color in 2007; while some will take this as proof people of color are more prone to criminality than white people, more than enough studies of race and racism in the legal system have proven that this overrepresenation has more to do with racism and classism than anything else. 1/3 of the youth serving time in CA prisons are there because of “time adds”. This means they have already served their original sentence and are serving time for behavioral issues ranging from talking back to guards to being involved in a fight (the application of the law has made little distinction between those who were targeted in those fights and/or defending themselves against bullying and harassment and those who intentionally caused a fight). The system is similar to that applied to people with mental health issues in prison who are often picked up on misdemeanors or petty crime and then warehoused for years based on behaviors related to their MH issues (talking back, ignoring lights out, fighting, etc.)
According to Books not Bars:
In the United States, 90,000 youth find themselves in juvenile detention centers on any given night and 2.2 million youth are arrested each year. In California, the state youth prison systems cost $216,000 per child per year while a mere $8,000 per child are allocated to Oakland public schools.
Once again, needed resources are funneled away from programs and services that help people succeed and deliberately moved into ones that require them to fail.
5 years of organizing in California against the inhumane treatment of incarcerated youth, including court cases finding the prison system or its employees guilty of beating, raping, or harassing youth prisoners, some times with the goal of goading them into time add violations, has had some positive effect on the system. According to Truthout, the number of youth arrested in 2009 was 1500 down from 5000, 5 years earlier. Ella Baker Center introduced a bill, AB 999, in CA that would eliminate time adds all together, replacing them with incentive programs that provide time reduction or other privileges to youth who take anger management, participate in counseling or work retraining programs, or otherwise show good behavior during their sentence. The bill has not yet passed but you can help by sending a letter to the California Legislature letting them know that intentionally incarcerating youth for years beyond their original sentence is not only inhumane it often causes irreparable damage to their education, self-esteem, and life choices.
The fight does not end with California’s youth however. As I’ve been trying to show, the problem is the system itself. The same tactics used to criminalize, round up, and retain youth in the prison system is similar to that of any other marginalized population. The correlations become all the more apparent when we map how policies about criminalizing normal behavior, like hanging out, and adding time to sentences is used on differently targeted populations, ie how these policies are used against Latin@s and immigrants in the Southwest, youth in California, black men in Chicago, and mental health patients in the U.S. Drawing connections between the groups least wanted, or in some cases least employed, in any given region and their treatment in prison to disparate least wanted populations in other regions shows a clear map of state sanctioned discrimination, violence, and economic gain on the backs of not only criminalized populations but the cities and towns that house the prisons. The problem is often worse for queer populations criminalized for their gender or sexual “transgressions” as well as the ways their identities often intersect other targeted populations. While Californians have been working to change this, Gov Schwarznegger has vetoed the the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Prisoner Safety Act and its predecessor, leaving queer people, particular trans women, extremely vulnerable to violence and murder in the prison system. According to the documentary Cruel and Unusual, trans people are incarcerated at 3 times the rate of cis people and many of them begin their time in prison as youth picked up for loitering, homelessness, or petty crime.
When we think intersectionally it is impossible to ignore how the prison system in the U.S. upholds the idea of who has a right to be considered N. American and who is part of Palin’s “other [N.] America”, the one we lock up and throw away.
Dan Savage and I are not often on the same page when it comes to issues of race and women (gay or straight), but where we agree is that the polarizing politics currently dominating the U.S. landscape is especially dangerous for the survival of queer youth. While adults fight over the meaning of marriage, diversity education programs, and even adoption, young people who are still figuring out life are subjected the backlash from these debates that vilify gender transgression, desire,love, and even people’s families. More than that, the national debate has led to a clear uptick in violence against both queer people and people “perceived to be gay or trans”. In this dangerous time, strides that we had made in helping youth feel comfortable about exploring their identities and their desires have fallen victim to policing, inaction, and despair. High profile child suicides are rocking the nation and many of them include stories of parents who tried to get the school to listen, children who tried to be stronger than the hate that surrounded them, and other kids whose lives are equally lost because they listened or were taught hate.
Dan Savage and his partner have started a youtube channel of people telling their stories to encourage young people to hang in during the bad times and know that as Radcliff Hall says “somewhere there is a place for us”. As expected, the people participating so far have been largely male, white, cis, and middle class. However, everybody’s story matters in the fight to save struggle children. If you are from a traditionally marginalized background in the queer community (person of color, immigrant, lesbian, bi, trans, etc.) please consider making a video and helping young children see the diversity of the community reflected as well as the promise that no matter who you are you can survive and ultimately thrive.
As you can see from some of the videos I have chosen, the project is open to people from all over the world who would like to weigh in, so if you are part of the 58% of my blog readers who come from outside the U.S. you can still help with the project by making a video or spreading the word!
An interesting reaction to one of my posts about rape and police inaction solicited a comment on stumbleupon complaining “once again nowhere to donate.” The comment made me think of my students who often look extremely depressed midway through my social justice courses. When I ask them why they are pouting, they always say “well, this class is great but the world sucks and what are we supposed to do about it?!?” It’s about that time I give them my “soft drink” talk. I ask them to look at what they are drinking, knowing that most are drinking a particular product because it pays pov u a lot of money to feature its products on campus (shhhhh!!!!). Then I tell them about all of the violence against women, children, poor people, and people of color that the particular company is implicated in around the world (shhhhh!!!!). As they stare at their drinks horrified and dumbfounded as to how this information could possibly help their depression, I tell them where all the alternative drink machines are on campus and tell them just by buying a different product they make a statement to the company about their practices. I draw a connection between those choices and anti-apartheid movements on college campuses started by students that ultimately caused the universities with the most to lose to divest from Apartheid driven South Africa. Then I remind them that school is about learning to ask questions you might not otherwise ask or even know to ask. It is about learning to be critical thinkers and taking responsibility for what thinking critical reveals about our world. Everyone has choices and everyone can make a difference regardless of their politics. It is also at this point in the class, that I challenge them to do what other students have already been modeling, get involved in our communities and bring in opportunities to be involved locally and globally to class. In other words, I reframe that old comic book saying about great power and responsibility to remind them that they can and do have power to change the world. Think of it as the With Great Knowledge, Comes Great Responsibility, model.
Why am I telling you all of this?
It seems to me that the internet is both a reflection of the hopelessness under the weight of oppression that so many struggle with and an amplification of it. On the one hand, everyone has felt confused about where to start or how to start or even if doing anything would help when dealing with inequality. On the other hand, the internet spoon feeds information to users. You don’t have to look up material anymore because we link to everything. You don’t have to sit with any information you read because we have distilled everything into 144 words. And now you don’t even have to think about how to get involved because we link that too. And so people, in general, have become extremely lazy about owning the power they have to become informed, get involved, and work toward change.
Example One:
Remember when I put up a post on intersectional reading material with the full citations a year or more ago? I did not link the articles because most of them were not available online and I knew that linking to incomplete sources would have led people to read the few pages available and move on. People spent months demanding I link to the material, literally calling me lazy and stupid for not doing “basic things” like linking to articles; the irony of their own laziness in refusing to look up the material with a simple google search or trip to the library and their own ignorance in demanding links to full material that was not available on the internet was lost on them. Then someone actually wrote a post claiming I had intentionally withheld the links to force people to think resulting in a bunch of people coming to the blog to go off about how “condescending it was” for me to withhold information and how it “completely undermine[d] [my] efforts” because “no one was going to look up the information”, so I “might as well have not written [the] post”. Again, they did not bother to read my post or any of the comments reiterating it’s point about some sources not being digitized, they just demanded to be fed information as if was their right to sit back and depend on someone else.
Like the plant in Little Shop of Horrors, everyone commenting was capable of doing their own work or at the very least finding a way to get it. Unlike the plant in Little Shop, they were unwilling to work, to advocate for themselves, or even to consider how offensive it might be to demand that a woman of color provide every ounce of information on diversity readings to a mostly white, middle class, audience with more access to libraries, bookstores, good schools, and income needed to track down and/or buy the materials. In the midst of so many women of color and allies saying thank you for the resources, these readers collective opened their wide mouths and demanded “feed me” expecting blood if nothing else.
Example Two
While many of my posts do include links to organizations where you can volunteer, donate, or learn more information, my post on Antione Dodson did not. That post was about people’s reactions and inaction to issues of rape and sexual violence in poor communities, especially of color. It was not an activism post.
According to the 2007 National Crime Victim Survey, 500 people (.05% of them men or boys) were raped every day in the United States. That is roughly 20 people an hour. According to the US Department of Justice Bureau 2009 Justice Stats on Rape and Stalking, women between the ages of 19-24 make up the largest group of survivors. While my readers cross multiple identities, the largest group of people linking to my post based on an informal survey of links is female between 16 and 25; ie, they are roughly the same age group as the largest targeted population in the U.S. for rape. 1 in 3 women is a victim of domestic or sexual violence in their life time, since this post garnered 10,000s of hits per day for several weeks, that means that on average both the people linking or reading the post have some known relationship to rape survivors as friends, colleagues, or survivors themselves. Given this information, it seems to me that it isn’t too much to ask that people reading would be aware of rape, domestic and sexual violence, and either know the names of some of the organizations working on these issues in their area or how to look this information up with a simple google search. “Rape survivors + [city I live in]” yielded 5 helpful agencies, with addresses and phone numbers, and a law firm specializing in victim’s rights in the first 6 links on Google. “Women’s Crisis + [state I live in]” yielded a list of shelters, hospitals, and advocates in the top links. And so on. When you do the same thing using Dodson’s hometown, you find survivor support groups, AIDs hotlines, hospital advocates, and lawyers. It really is that simple.
The specific criticism of this post was that there was no “Donation” button or link to “do something about the issue.” Again, the ease with which we pass information on the internet seems to have stunted both people’s willingness to take charge of their own power to know and act, but also to engage in critical thinking about knowing and acting. Many people, especially in the radical woc, feminist, and dis/ability blogosphere have been deconstructing the idea of “donation culture” as social justice. In other words, we have been working within and expanding on existing critiques of who writes checks, who can write checks, whether check writing shifts thinking and commitment after the ink dries, and whether writing checks is a solution or a band aid. While I think most, if not all, of us understand that philanthropy is a critical part of keeping movements funded and operational, the idea is to do more than write a check through options ranging from educating yourself on the issues to organizing a group of people to get personally involved for the long term in the work of changing the system or aiding people. It is also about listening to communities and what they want, if they ask for money then money is the primary way to honor community need, if they ask for publicity and consciousness raising, then writing blog posts, writing editorials to your local paper, sending in emails to the national news about the issue, and talking about it with everyone you meet is the primary way to honor the community need, and so on. And no, honoring what the community says it needs does not preclude you from doing other things as well, it just makes their voices foremost and centered in your activism.
Getting back to the Dodson post, I specifically linked to a woc blogger who had listed all of the major players in the incident who had not acted on information about a serial rapist. She had phone numbers, websites, and action ideas in her post. Since my post was about perception, reception, and the failure of people who actually self-define as activist communities to act, linking to this information seemed more in keeping with the point of the post. So once again, no one bothered to follow through with the links I did provide because it wasn’t spelled out for them that they should click on the links. Have you noticed how we have gone from a digital culture that links to items to one that spells out explicitly why you should follow links with annotated bibliography type blurbs before or after the link? FEED ME SEYMORE.
(This is not a critique of the individual who said this but all of the people who thought it right a long with her and all of the ways that the internet encourages such thoughts.)
Conclusions
The way power works, is to convince you that power over people and things is normal and natural AND that you can do nothing about it. The people in power want you to believe that you are “just one person” and to constantly be asking “what could I possibly do to change things” so that you will give up. The practices of internet writing and activism are embedded in this system and potentially making it worse by making people passive consumers of information. According to recent research on brain development, the 144 word tweet culture is actually remapping pathways in the brain away from empathy and reflixivity. I want to encourage you to begin the decolonization of your mind by refusing to accept these easy constructions and expanding your information sources to a level that keeps your ability to connect and empathize with others intact. One person can and does change the world. One person can and has challenged the system:
Tiananmen Square/unattributed
You can start by being an active reader. When you see stats or other material cited or referred to, look it up. Ask who the source is, what is their theoretical and methodological training or usage, has the author of the post that linked to them accurately portrayed their content, etc. When you cannot find it online, go to the library or search around the topic, for instance in the Dodson case, look at information on the area, HUD and police stats vs. community reports, etc. Once you’ve done that, consider how you can become involved in changing social inequality in your own communities as well as support those in other communities referenced in the article that got you fired up in the first place. Again, in the Dodson case that means looking up rape survivor advocacy programs and getting involved or making a donation (clothes, money, gas vouchers for volunteers to get to the hospital, etc.) in your own area and/or giving money to rape and domestic and sexual violence agencies in Dodson’s area, sending a letter to the police or HUD about your concerns over their seeming inaction about a serial rapist, or starting an online petition that would flood them with faxes or signatures saying we are all watching. And if you really can’t think of anything else to do but be depressed and hit the resend button (which is a start in and of itself) then talk to your peers, families, and educators about what they think you could do. Worst case, come back to the blog owner and ask, but if you ask me, I am going to suggest you do your own research first.
To end on cliche that just happens to be soooo true: Knowledge is power. What you do with that power is up to you.
(By the way, I have chosen these related articles for the ways that the critique, expand, or agree with the opinions I have expressed in this post rather than their take on the same specific topic.)
I started a new Friday morning series on Twitter “ode to Pompous Professor XY”: today’s addition included, race, gender, language, and disparaging colleagues
Don’t ask don’t tell repeal was stopped by conservatives in congress at the expense of supporting both our queer troops and all our straight ones
The controversy surrounding the Islamic Center near the site of the 9/11 tragedy has not only exposed the increasing xenophobia and racism in the United States but also that certain groups believe this is the definitive expression of “americanness”. By their terms, failure to hate people who belong to the same faith as those who bombed the two towers, is akin to failing to be N. American. By extension, they assume that no other faith was represented amongst the victims beside Christianity and no people who died, read “good Americans”, were of different faiths, races, or even sexualities because to be different is to be “un-American” or “not American.”
I had meant to write a long piece about this discussing the image and meaning of N. America vs the history of oppression that sits underneath its surface. My goal was to appeal to people to choose the former, ie humanity, equality, freedom, including religious freedom, over hatred, xenophobia, and jingoism. But then I thought, perhaps the most powerful counter-argument to those who want us to permanently link Muslims to Terrorism and therefore deny the rights of Muslims to build a multi-faith center near the 9/11 site is to remind people of all the Muslim Americans who died in those attacks alongside everyone else. Muslims who were just doing their jobs as workers who helped keep the trade centers going or who had offices in the building. Muslims who helped dig through the rubble to find people, were first responder, and volunteers who helped save lives that day.
Today, when you remember the tragedy that took so many people’s lives but also during the two wars that continue to follow it, please remember these Muslims who died in 9/11 and the fact that their families have just as much right to worship and study near the site as anyone else:
Note: This list is as yet incomplete and unconfirmed. It has been compiled from the Islamic Circle of North America, the Newsday victims database, and reports from other major news organizations. The victims’ ages, employers, or other personal information is included when available, along with links to further information or photos.
Samad Afridi
Ashraf Ahmad
Shabbir Ahmad (45 years old; Windows on the World; leaves wife and 3 children)
Umar Ahmad
Azam Ahsan
Ahmed Ali
Tariq Amanullah (40 years old; Fiduciary Trust Co.; ICNA website team member; leaves wife and 2 children)
Touri Bolourchi (69 years old; United Airlines #175; a retired nurse from Tehran)
Salauddin Ahmad Chaudhury
Abdul K. Chowdhury (30 years old; Cantor Fitzgerald)
Mohammad S. Chowdhury (39 years old; Windows on the World; leaves wife and child born 2 days after the attack)
Jamal Legesse Desantis
Ramzi Attallah Douani (35 years old; Marsh & McLennan)
SaleemUllah Farooqi
Syed Fatha (54 years old; Pitney Bowes)
Osman Gani
Mohammad Hamdani (50 years old)
Salman Hamdani (NYPD Cadet)
Aisha Harris (21 years old; General Telecom)
Shakila Hoque (Marsh & McLennan)
Nabid Hossain
Shahzad Hussain
Talat Hussain
Mohammad Shah Jahan (Marsh & McLennan)
Yasmeen Jamal
Mohammed Jawarta (MAS security)
Arslan Khan Khakwani
Asim Khan
Ataullah Khan
Ayub Khan
Qasim Ali Khan
Sarah Khan (32 years old; Cantor Fitzgerald)
Taimour Khan (29 years old; Karr Futures)
Yasmeen Khan
Zahida Khan
Badruddin Lakhani
Omar Malick
Nurul Hoque Miah (36 years old)
Mubarak Mohammad (23 years old) Boyie Mohammed (Carr Futures)
Raza Mujtaba
Omar Namoos
Mujeb Qazi
Tarranum Rahim
Ehtesham U. Raja (28 years old)
Ameenia Rasool (33 years old)
Naveed Rehman
Yusuf Saad
Rahma Salie & unborn child (28 years old; American Airlines #11; wife of Michael Theodoridis; 7 months pregnant)
Shoman Samad
Asad Samir
Khalid Shahid (25 years old; Cantor Fitzgerald; engaged to be married in November)
Mohammed Shajahan (44 years old; Marsh & McLennan)
Naseema Simjee (Franklin Resources Inc.’s Fiduciary Trust)
Jamil Swaati
Sanober Syed
Robert Elias Talhami (40 years old; Cantor Fitzgerald)
Michael Theodoridis (32 years old; American Airlines #11; husband of Rahma Salie)
W. Wahid
- This list was compiled by About.com
We are all N. Americans and we all lost someone or some peace that day. When we hate each other we lose even more.
missing poster for Kampusch age 10/AP/unattributed
In 1998, 10 year old Natascha Kampusch was kidnapped by Wolfgang Priklopil on her way to school in Austria. She was kept locked in his home, often in a small cellar in the basement, and emotionally and sexually abused for the next eight years. During that time she was often frequently denied food and suffered from malnutrition resulting in her being almost the same weight when she was found as she was when she was taken at age 10. The malnutrition impacted her physical and brain development as much as the sexual and emotional abuse impacted her emotional one. According to Kampusch, Priklopil referred to her as his “sex slave” and himself as “the master”. He made her clean his house half-naked when he was not humiliating or violating her in other ways. In 2006, she finally escaped when Priklopil took a phone call while she was outside in the garden cleaning his car. Despite her repeated calls for help as she ran through the neighborhood where she had been held, no one actually called the police, until Kampusch stopped at a 71 year old woman’s house and asked her to use the phone to call the police. The case sent shockwaves of horror throughout the world and an SVU episode was loosely based on her story. Wolfgang Priklopil committed suicide shortly after her escape to avoid prosecution. When he died, so did the information about why he did what he did and how he had gotten away with it for so long.
Kampusch revisited her story recently when another girl, Elisabeth Fritzl, was discovered being held captive in a similar hidden cellar, by her own father for 24 years, also in Austria. Josef Fritzl did not commit suicide and continues to harass his daughter from behind bars. According to his friends and neighbors there had been some suspicions about his behavior and renters had also noticed things, but no one looked into it further. His wife, Elizabeth’s mother, continues to deny any knowledge of it though she helped raise several of Elizabeth’s children by Josef Fritzl.
Josef Fritzl, last known image of Elizabeth & the cellar apartment were he kept her for 24 years/unattributed
Kampusch shared her stories of rape, sexual humiliation, and captivity from childhood with Elizabeth in the hopes of showing her and the world that you can survive horrendous sexual abuse and enslavement. Telling her story, also prompted Kampusch to write a book about what happened to her to help other women and girls surviving childhood sexual abuse and rape. The book, 3,096 Days, chronicles Kampusch’s 8 years in captivity, focusing on her survival skills and her emotional process throughout the abuse. The book was published this month and is the first time Kampusch has told her story to the world.
When Kampusch first escaped, she did several interviews but was wary of news reporters digging into her abuse history. In an interview with the Sunday Times, she spoke about feeling violated by people looking at the small room where she had been kept and picking over the details of photos from Priklopl’s home and police reports in the national news:
“… above all, I’m annoyed about the pictures of my dungeon, because it is nobody’s business. I also would not look into the living rooms and bedrooms of other people. Why should people be able to open up a newspaper and look into my room?
…
The media interest is too much, but on the other hand through this fame I have some responsibility and I want to use to this advantage to help other people, to make a foundation and do charitable projects. For example to help lost people who were never found like me. And I want to work with the hungry [in Africa].” (Sunday Times 2006)
Like many survivors, Kampusch initially minimized her abuse and tried to keep details to herself. Her limited education, provided through newspapers and radio stations given to her by Priklopl also gave her a sense of worry for “the starving kids in Africa” despite having never seen any and actually having been motivated by her own starvation at the hands of her abuser. She later referred to them as primitives while again making a connection to her own thoughts as equally so because of hunger. The racism she expressed, especially in the context of being referred to as a slave by her abuser for 8 years makes one wonder about the racial overtones of her abuse and the connections between racism and sexism even in the life of an blonde blue-eyed Austrain girl who had likely never met any people of color or learned very little about the world before or during her capture and assault.
When she talked about gender, she also seemed to have internalized messages that women were weaker and/or powerless:
And this female lack of power that I couldn’t do anything against him.
These thoughts too, likely came from Priklopl to both subdue her and groom her for ongoing abuse. These gender disparities also made her identify with Priklopl’s mother and worry about how she would get on in the world if her son was prosecuted. At the same time, Kampusch talks about promising herself that when she got older and stronger, she would escape.
Much of her story about how he convinced her that he was harmless and that her parents did not love her, in those initial interviews, follow a similar pattern to the stories other kidnapped children and trafficked child sex workers tell. In these stories, kidnappers tell children their parents gave them permission and/or are coming to pick them up as soon as they pay a ransom or get a check they need or new job, etc. and then after time goes by kidnappers switch the story to say parents are still unavailable, finally following up with stories of how parents no longer want them, abandoned them, or even are dead all the while slowly grooming the children to trust or become dependent on them so that they will resign themselves to the abuse. In Kampusch’s case, Priklopl not only did all of this, but also forced her to take a new name to divorce her from her past and possibly hide her better.
Kampusch/The Star/unattributed
Now Kampusch speaks about her abuse with the insight of someone who has had time to talk and heal. She no longer looks at people’s interests in her case as invasive but rather an opportunity to help others avoid or survive abuse in their own lives. In place of her the survival skill of minimizing abuse, is a forthright tone that waivers at certain memories but is committed to telling her story and moving forward. While she still shows signs of what I would consider unhealthy attachment to her abuser, she bought his car and his house, she is trying her best to tell a story she spent 8 years being trained never to tell and she is doing, not for fame or fortune, but to help other women and girls.
Two other books about the incident were published prior. In 2006, an English-language book Girl in the Cellar was published by two journalists who had worked part of the case. Kampusch’s mother also published a book about her own story looking for her daughter two years later. Both books were controversial because Kampusch disputed the material in the former and even threatened suit. While her mother’s book capitalized on the media attention Natascha’s escape was receiving but did only tell her own story. Though both mother and daughter had a strained relationship at the time, Natascha did attend her mother’s release party and has never disputed information in her mother’s book.
So far, the 3,096 Days is not available in English and though there is a planned movie based on the book to be released in 2012, it is unclear if there will be an English language version of the film either. While there are things that are specific to Austria, like the basement cellars that so many predators seem to be using to hide their assaults on women and girls, the story of surviving child sexual abuse and rebuilding one’s life is unfortunately universal. While I have always worried about the way these two girls-now-women’s stories have been turned into spectacle by the media, I do think that hearing their stories in their own words is critical for rape survivors and people invested in ending child sexual abuse, rape, and torture of women and girls. There are lessons to be learned in how and why these men were allowed to continue abusing women and girls, despite some public unease, signs of potential involvement, and in Fritzl’s case previous conviction or suspicion of sexual assault. If we stopped talking about these cases as exceptions dominated by monsters and started asking how these men succeeded and how our investment in women and children’s inequality helps pave the way for heinous acts of violence we might make huge leaps forward in moving beyond the non-profit industrial complex, which, mind you, helps save women’s lives, to a world safe for young girls to walk to school or live in homes without every needing to fear their own fathers or male relatives. And while many of us are lucky to have lived in such homes and maybe even walked to school without knowing about predators, the fact is many of us were not and are not.
If an English-language version of the book comes out, I will update this post and/or announce it. (If you want to know more about Kampusch, there is an extensive link list at the bottom of the wikipedia page on her, though of course I would tell you to read those links and their sources directly, not just rely on the wikipedia page itself.)
In June, I wrote a post about violence erupting in Kyrgyztan and its impact on women. For those who do not know, an unidentified number of Kyrgyz systematically targeted Uzbek neighbors for several days, including nearly burning down one of largest cities in the state and moving slowly out to the rural areas. Homes and shops were burned and women and children fled through the streets, being trampled, caught in the crossfire, and potentially targeted for sexual and emotional abuse. They were herded toward the border even though the Kyrgyz had intentionally blocked the ditch they would have to cross to flee to safety; in other words, the women and children were intentionally forced together in a holding area while Kyrgyz killed off the men. The first female acting-President, Roza Otunbayeva, begged for direct military action from international governments that came too late. Her ascendancy to power and proposed reforms, including the use of Kyrgyzstan by U.S. troops stationed there, is said to have sparked the ethnic cleansing attempt targeting her fellow Uzbekis and potentially fueling the inaction of the U.S. Base. Like the current scapegoating of Latin@ and Muslim immigrants in the U.S., the Uzbekis were targeted because of Political turmoil, unemployment, growing migration, criminal activity, and growing religious intolerance and at the center was the belief that an ethnic minority female president was not only unqualified to lead but also playing favorites by nature of shared identity.
A month later, women were at the center of rebuilding both the burned out communities and the sense of trust across ethno-religious lines. The city itself maintained a curfew and tensions continued in general, flaring up in small acts of violence on both sides. Like so many communities who experienced unchecked ethnic cleansing then end of major violence has left the population weary, scarred, and angry. Women in particular are surviving the scars of being raped, beaten, disappeared, taken hostage, forced to flee their homes, wounded, and killed. Many are trying to rebuild families that were separated only to find that most of their missing relatives are dead. And yet, according to Dr. Nurgul Djanaeva, the founder and president of the Forum of Women’s NGOs of Kyrgyzstan, no one had created bureaus specifically for dealing with women’s trauma, the potential for ongoing targeting of women in the aftermath, or the documenting of gender based violence against women during the conflict. One other major hindrance has been the stigma of rape and sexual assault that is making women wary of being counted or exposed while seeking treatment.
uzbek women voting amidst the ruble of their burned out home/unattributed
Women’s NGOs are at the forefront of bringing women together to heal. They are taking a lesson from other ethnic cleansing incidents in Europe, Africa, and Latin America to address specific gender based violence and support the centrality of women’s voices and experiences in rebuilding the nation. The hope is that rather than sparking ethno-religious misogyny in the future, women’s leadership will become a regularized part of Kyrgyzstan life.
While the conflict has led to opportunities for women, the trajectory of that conflict and its specific use of gender based violence largely unchecked by international peace keeping forces is becoming all too familiar. The strategic location of the U.S. military base in Kyrgyzstan and the ties to Russia were leveraged against the proposed autonomy of the people and the safety and security of women, children, and ethnic minorities. The rhetoric turning neighbor against neighbor is no longer the stuff of “never again” (WWII) but instead the common day occurrences that allow “good Americans” to burn other people’s holy books regardless of its impact on them or the U.S. troops they claim to support and have radio broadcasts using racial “puns” about rape and sexual assault of Latinas while others form vigilante groups and beat immigrants, often to death. What is the dividing line between those whose fears and misplaced envy is harnessed by radio stations and politicians into a lethal genocidal force and those who claim their references to “re-loading” are metaphorical? And why is it that despite what we know about how women are targeted both during these conflicts and in the makeshift camps built to keep them safe in the aftermath, why do we still fail to take this knowledge into account to ensure women’s bodily integrity? And why, after all the genocide we have seen in this world, are the military and economic interests of major Super Powers more important than safety and security of women’s lives? Haven’t we learned that societies where women have access to education, family planning, and representation and poor people have access to jobs, food, and shelter free of discrimination, are more stable than places where both populations, and their intersections, are exploitable? But then asking these questions might make us have to look at foreign policy through the lens of humanity rather than profit and ask when and where we are culpable and how these “exceptions” are in fact just more extreme versions of behaviors that permeate our own society.
I know music posts on this blog don’t generate a lot of traffic, but you know I am less interested in how many people stop by then the quality of what people take away when they do. So I put this beautiful love song on when I got home from a mini-conference on race, gender, and the law at the uni today (don’t ask) and felt celebratory joy about being alive, a woman, and a person of color seeping back into my bones. It’s isn’t a political song, it is is a love song (though of course, love is often political in this world).
Telmary Diaz is a Cubana Canadian based hip hop poet who comments on politics, social justice, women, and life in her music. One of my favorite lines from her songs is “everywhere the capitalists destroy, disguised as socialists” if that isn’t the legacy of Reagan and the war on socialism in Latin America, I don’t what is. (And yes, it is so much deeper than that but again I’m tired of a million qualifiers just to say something these days. Literalism will be death of intelligent, thoughtful discourse and that is the legacy of No Child Left a Mind)
So what amazing female artist are you listening to today?
PS. Telmary Diaz will be playing at the Tornto Women’s bookstore for FREE tonight. If you are there, you should check her out and buy a book, as well as her CD, while you are there.
In honor of working class women who are often missing from our history books, I thought I would give you a photo essay today. (please note the title for this post comes from Paul Willis’ still amazing book about the connections between education, social status, habitus and the creation of the working class.)
This is a post in progress. Trigger warning for rape survivors, some descriptions are graphic.
unattributed
I’ve spent most of the morning trying to write a post about the contrast in attention in Hollywood to stories about murdered male soldiers and raped and/or murdered female ones. My main argument is that white male soldiers exemplify a narrative about the nation and citizenship that makes their stories reaffirm “americanness” even as many of their stories also critique war in general and especially the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and I will continue to include Iraq until every soldier and government paid mercenary has left). Stories about female soldiers however challenge notions about gender and the nation by subverting the strong white male in uniform with a normative gender crossing female face (since the definition of masculinity being sold here is one that depends on pretty girlfriends and wives who stay at home to care for the kids and cook dinner). More than that, the number of female soldiers and “consultants” who have been raped or otherwise sexually harassed in the military refuses an easy reading of military culture and subsequently “americanness” as exclusively heroic and just. The female soldiers whose deaths and abuses have been covered up further illustrate the links between sexism, violence against women, the war machine, and the state.
Gone is the tragic narrative of the “good soldier” who after doing all for “love of country” is murdered, like rising football star Tillman who gave up his career “stop terrorism”. In its wake is the story of women hazed along sexist and/or racialized sexist lines, abused and harassed for daring to do what their male counterparts are praised for doing, and some even murdered for daring to speak out or seek help. You cannot valorize a female soldier without confronting gender stereotypes that are embedded in the meaning of the nation. Nor can you talk about cover ups surrounding the abuse and/or murder of female soldiers without exposing the ways that violence against women is mapped onto military culture and war. This is not to say that all men or male soldiers are rapists, but rather that rape is a tool of war and that women’s bodies are the terrain by which men in war claim conquest and re-establish manhood. In the face of this truth, the narrative of the nation that depends on valorizing soldiers and seeing them as definitive images of the nation crumbles under the weight of oppression.
The farther away from the white male all-American soldier we get, the less likely the story will be told. In 2007, In the Valley of Elah was released to a moderate-sized audience. The movie told the story of Richard Davis, a third generation soldier who had fought in both Bosnia and Iraq who was murdered by fellow soldiers a few days after returning from war. Davis’ story garnered attention in the media because he was a legacy and covering up his death was much harder to do with so many other high ranking soldiers in his family. Yet, in order to tell his story, Hollywood execs decided he had to be white. They cast Susan Sarandon as his mother, a woman of color, and Jonathan Tucker to play Davis himself. No similar white washing of his assailants, which included men of color, was done. In order for the narrative of “good soldier” to hold, he needed to fit the myth of “americanness” that increasingly ignores the presence of Latinos as legitimate citizens.
Pat Tillman/wikipedia
Yet Davis’ story still got told, partially because of power within the military held by his family and partially the fact of his maleness. Re-written as white, he could still embody the hyper-masculine pseudo-sanctity of the State. Pat Tillman offers the same opportunity to Hollywood, all the more so because he was a football star turned patriot gunned down by friendly fire. The subsequent government cover up went all the way to the Bush White House. Hollywood is positively giddy at the thought of: a rising football star with a square jaw and a John Wayne sense of justice going off to inexplicable war only to be killed in a massive government conspiracy. It’s the kind of movie that helps win hearts and minds in the peace effort all the while nodding appreciatively at the hawks. In other words, both of these stories allow us to keep the image of N. America and heroism intact while underscoring the adage that “war is hell”.
No similar films have been made about Shoshana Johnson, Jamie Leigh Jones, or Lavena Johnson and there probably never will be. You may recall that Shoshana Johnson, a Panamanian immigrant to the U.S. and food service specialist in the military, was the first black female prisoner of war. She was caught and held for 22 days in Iraq along with 5 other soldiers from her unit. When they returned to the U.S., the media focused on Jessica Lynch, a young blonde, blue-eyed soldier who became emblematic of the war effort. In this role, Lynch re-affirmed gender norms by becoming the face of why we are fighting rather than the fighting itself. In the discourse of war, small boned, blue-eyed Lynch desperately tried to hold off the enemy only to be captured and held prisoner for days, possibly even raped during her ordeal, reinforcing the idea of the region as barbaric and a threat to valiant women and children everywhere. Lynch never fired her weapon. Some reports even claim her lack of action during the conflict may have gotten another soldier killed. She also denies being raped, all though her biographer says her medical records are consistent with sexual assault. The media frenzy surrounding her, quickly died when the military cover up of what actually happened stripped her of her “innocence”. Shoshana Johnson was permanently disabled in the incident and had to fight the U.S. Army for benefits. She received no media attention and her fight to have her injuries recognized and paid for by the military, to receive her pay for her service, and to leave the army with an honorable discharge were all unreported. While the experience of both of these women is part of a larger racial discourse in the nation where big boned black immigrant Johnson could never stand in for the nation nor garner national sympathy in the quest for definitive americanness in war time, both women also had their stories manipulated or neglected because of their gender.
Shoshana Johnson & Jessica Lynch/unattributed
Think about the story as told by Hollywood, devoid of gender reference. Young, innocent soldiers, take a wrong turn into a fire fight and are then terrorized by the enemy as prisoners of war; when they return home, the military quickly concocts a story of heroism elevating one of the soldiers who may have been implicated in the death or capture of a fellow soldier while forcing the others to keep silent. Sounds fascinating doesn’t it? Now add in gender and race: a multi-racial unit of soldiers is captured during a firefight, including two women; they are held captive, and upon return to the U.S. the stories of the soldiers of color quickly fade into the background to highlight the plight of a single white female soldier until the truth surfaces and it turns out she was just an exploitable “pretty face” for the war machine. While I find that story interesting, does that sound like a Hollywood blockbuster to you or a Lifetime Movie? And what are some of the defining differences in those two genres?
Like Pat Tillman, Jamie Leigh Jones story went all the way to Congress. Jones was a KBR/Halliburton employee, a consulting firm in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan who has filed suit against 7 KBR mercenaries and employees who drugged and raped her while in country. Her gang rape was so brutal that at least one or more of her assailants ruptured her breast implants and tore the muscles underneath. The rape kit that confirmed 7 men had raped her both anally and vaginally throughout the night was stolen from the military infirmary. When it was later recovered, all pictures of Jones’ injuries had been destroyed. Jones herself was kept in locked up by KBR/Halliburton employees as punishment for seeking medical attention until one soldier snuck her a cellphone she used to call her dad in the States.
The investigation into Jones’ rape claims briefly exposed the legal issues surrounding the use of contracted “consultants”, mercenaries, in the U.S. war effort. They operate outside of military law and in international territory making the application of U.S. laws questionable. At the same time, rules limiting the governing power of Iraq over soldiers and contracted mercenaries makes it almost impossible for Jones’ to hold them accountable in Iraqi courts either. In December of 2007, the DOJ decided they had were not going to press charges. From 2007 to 2009, KBR/Halliburton did everything in their considerable power to prevent Jones from filing suit or having an open court case if she was able to do so. In the meantime, Jones’ testimony before Congress forced them to change their rules about contracting with companies that require mandatory arbitration but as of January 2010 Halliburton/KBR was still fighting Jones’ right to have an open court trial against them.
Again, imagine this story devoid of gender in the hands of Hollywood. A young idealist consultant arrives in a war zone and discovers violence and corruption for which they are held prisoner and then spend the next 4 years fighting to expose in court that takes them all the way to The Hill. Again, this is the kind of story you could see at your local movie theater if starred someone like Jake Gyllenhaal or Matt Damon. (Matt Damon, by the way, appeared in one of the few made for Hollywood films about a female soldier’s mysterious death and the cover up surrounding it. Unlike the stories outlined here however, the soldiers were trying to cover up for her because she was incompetent and they “had to frag her” to save everyone else.) But when you add gender back in, centering the brutal rape of Jones, it once again makes move to Lifetime.
If we compare Lynch’s story to Jones’ the gendered aspects of “americanness” and war become all the more evident. Lynch was seen as a national hero because she supposedly bravely fought of the enemy who punished with rape and torture. Her victimization at the hands of the enemy was all the more valorized because she was song, small, blonde and blue-eyed. She exemplified the Birth of a Nation narrative that casts men of color as barbarians and rapists unable to govern and helped elevate it to international discourse justifying war. Jones’ was also blonde and blue-eyed and also fairly young. But these attributes were consistently used in a victim-blaming narrative that argued “she should have known better than to show up in a war zone pretty” and that her implants meant she wanted it … Why the difference? Because Lynch’s assault fit the war narrative of us=good vs they=bad. Jones’ story blurred those lines and implicated not only “us” but also the Bush administration who was intimately tied to Halliburton. Further, her story would have once again centered violence against women as a fact of war on all sides, undermining the image of America the Savior, and potentially privileged the Iraqi government over the U.S. one since the Iraqis made some indication that they were willing to prosecute the mercenaries for violence against women. This would hardly fit with the image of sexism that has underlined both pro-war and even some mainstream feminist interpretations of the Middle East and women.
Finally, Lavena Johnson’s death has garnered the least amount of attention in mainstream media of all of these women and yet hers is also a story of brave soldier and cover up.
As the news report shows, Johnson’s parents were told that she committed suicide in Iraq to cover up what medical reports indicate was a rape and murder. Not only did the military once again try to hide the fact that female soldiers are being raped at the hands of their own fellow soldiers, but their tale of suicide demeaned Johnson’s memory and denied the family benefits she had earned as a soldier.
Lavena Johnson was a high school honor’s student with a bright future ahead of her. She enlisted in order to pay for college. She was killed by fellow soldiers at 19 years old. Like Lynch, she was small (5 foot, 100 lbs) and pretty but as a black woman her rape and murder did not fit the national narrative of americanness and “family values” that the war was supposedly meant to uphold. Like Jones’ her rape may have been the result of hired mercenaries working for Halliburton/KBR as her body was found in one of their tents. And her death sheds new light on what may have happened to Jones had a soldier not gotten her a cellphone. According to the autopsy, Jones was beaten, shot at an angle that would be impossible for her to do on her own, and then, unsuccessfully, set on fire. While her breasts were not as severely damaged as Jones’, they showed signs of scratches and bite marks meant to abuse and torture. Someone had also poured lye into her vagina, something I can only interpret as an act of racialized violence since Johnson had pressed hair.
Sadly, Jones and Johnson have one other thing in common, the DOJ is refusing to investigate. Johnson is dead and her parents are working class African Americans with no ties to the military or to Halliburton/KBR. Unlike Jones, they do not have the kind of clout or momentum behind their cause in mainstream media to force the issue. Once again the disparities between how the nation views white women and women of color has left Johnson with only a handful of mainstream activists and mostly black activists on her side. And both women, by nature of being women have had to fight, Johnson through relatives, to even have their stories of rape validated precisely because their stories undermine the nation’s image of itself and its mission in Iraq and Afghanistan.
1 in 3 women who join the military will be raped or sexually assaulted by fellow soldiers or U.S. hired mercenaries. According to Time Magazine, The Pentagon estimates nearly 3,000 women were sexually assaulted in 2008, up 9% from the year before. Among women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, the number rose 25%. Women’s advocates in the military estimate the rate of rape and sexual assault in the military is nearly twice that of civilians living in the U.S. The same Pentagon report determined that 80-90% of sexual based crimes in the military go unreported and only 8% of those that are actually end in prosecution of rapists. Of the 94 N. American military women who died in Iraq, 36 died from injuries unrelated to combat. Many of these were ruled as suicides by the State Department, while 15 deaths remain shrouded in suspicion. Given that Lavena Johnson’s death was ruled a suicide it is hard to say how many of the other deaths attributed to suicide were in fact examples of violence against women or military sexism. At least 8 women died due to “non-combatant injuries” in the same base in Iraq and all 8 had shipped out from the same base in Texas. Moreover, these numbers do not include women who died for other reasons that may have actually been related to violence against women, like the 3 women who died of dehydration in Iraq in 2003 because they were afraid to drink liquids provided to them on the base after a certain hour. Given the incidents involving date rape drugs, their fears may not be as paranoid or as limited in scale as their case implies. Interview data by Salon author Benedict shows that female soldiers are consistently warned not to go the bathrooms or showers by themselves and on some bases, not to go out at all at night. At least two women have come forward with claims of brutal rape at the hands of KBR/Halliburton. The contracts forcing them to remain silent and seek arbitration rather than legal options may be hiding any number of additional abuse cases. No data is available on Blackwater, though Iraqi citizens have claimed that some of their employees have raped Iraqi women and girls unchecked.
These stories are not headed to Hollywood. In some ways, this is a good thing because like the story of murdered soldier Davis, there is no way to know if Hollywood would do their stories justice or simply reinforce the same old narratives in a kinder, gentler, package. Nor do I think equal attention from Hollywood would make the fact that both women and men are dying under suspicious circumstances in Iraq all better. Instead, I am trying to argue that the war effort is based on an increasingly insular definition of N. America and americanness which reflects marginalizing traditions in our nation while deepening them. This in turn makes women’s lives less safe by allowing them to be targeted and even killed by fellow soldiers and mercenaries. The sexualized violence they experience, which often gets carried on racial lines that erases the plight of black and brown women as well as Iraqi women, is part of war culture that has historically come to visit on the mainland with returning soldiers. The failure to tell these women’s stories, particularly those of women of color, at a national level has helped allow this process to continue. Moreover, the desire to on the one hand, not vilify soldiers who are trying to do their best in an inexcusable war and on the other, to not validate the war effort by either focusing exclusively on the plight of N. American women (as I have done in this post) nor elevating the lives of soldiers above those of the 100,000s of civilians killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, has left us worrying about moral dilemmas and ideologies while women suffer unchecked.
Ultimately, this what motivated me to write this convoluted piece today from the perspective of Hollywood where for art thou. I am concerned about the lack of attention to women’s stories and experiences in war in general. And the constant refrain of how amazing Pat Tillman was and how great the movie about him was going to be finally pushed those concerns to the surface in a new way than the posts I have done about sexism, sexual assault, and sexualized racism against both N. American women and women and girls living in Iraq and Afghanistan. While Tillman’s story is important, I think he embodies everything we tell ourselves is the definition of American, everything makes this country great, and yet it is the narrow space he occupies as a “family values”, nationalistic, white heterosexual male football star that allows us to vilify women and people of color in this country and outside of it. It is the focus on that face as definitional space of the nation that makes it possible to laugh at the rape of poor black women in this country and to excuse away the rape and murder of them in another one as “suicide”. Until we better confront the meanings of nation, heroism, and war in this nation we cannot tell the stories of female soldiers because their stories undermine those images. And if we do not tell their stories, than violence against women as a weapon of war will continue precisely because we don’t talk about it and when we do, it is only to prove the barbarism of others.
