Violence Against Migrant Women Won’t End After DSK Case

The media circus surrounding the Dominique Strauss-Kahn rape case dishes out more drama each day, with a side of lurid fascination. But we basically know how the story ends. The narrative of the immigrant housekeeper assaulted by a European official perfectly illustrates an axiom of violence and power: the wider the gap between genders and races, the greater the latitude of injustice.

Yet the same story plays out every day on an endless loop around the globe: a retaliatory rape against a young girl sends a warning to the enemy militia; a wife is pummeled into bloody silence, her bedroom beyond the purview of traditional local courts; a daughter is married off to pay down a farm debt. The stories weave into a pattern that a media-fatigued public has come to normalize.

To resensitize us to those numbing tragedies, an annual report of Migrant Rights International documents the cruel synergy between being a woman and being the other on every continent. Young girls from the rural hill tribes of Thailand, who lack full citizenship rights, are “easy prey” for forced sex trafficking. Canadian First Nations women, long alienated from mainstream society, suffer epidemic rates of sexual assault as well as HIV/AIDS infection. Sexual and gender minority status often compound each other, as with the rash of “corrective rapes” targeting lesbians in South Africa.

Women of marginalized ethnicities suffer violence at the hands of their own, as well. Domestic violence is rampant in some indigenous communities, according to MRI, in large part because mainstream legal structures provide no protection or access to justice. The resulting erosion of the social fabric feeds into racialized stereotypes of moral deviance.

Tactical Rape

Rape has always been a potent tool for demarcating difference. During the war on indigenous Mayans that exploded across Guatemala a generation ago, MRI notes, mass rape was part of a military strategy to destroy communities from within:

According to the Truth Commission, the most under-reported human rights violation was the rape of indigenous women. No overall estimates as to the number of women affected exist. Of the 1,465 cases of rape that were documented by the Commission, 88.7 percent were of Mayan women and girls of all ages. As one survivor states: ‘it’s the campesinos, the Indians, who get raped because they used to say we were animals, that’s why they did it to us, because they thought we were worthless’.

The pattern plays out today in conflict zones like the Democratic Republic of Congo. Mark Lattimer, executive director of MRI, told Colorlines:

We’re only now beginning to understand just how profound the effect can be when rape is used as a weapon of war. And from our point of view, looking specifically at the rights of minorities, we can see that in about three-quarters of the world’s conflicts today, most of the violence is targeted either by ethnicity or by religion. So overwhelmingly, women who are being subjected to systematic sexual violence are from a particular ethnic or religious group that’s being targeted.

Yakın Erturkm, former United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women, describes violence against women as a threat coming from both inside and outside their communities:

As members of a minority group, they may be assaulted by members of the majority population and/or by agents of the state. … Such assaults, in turn, leave women in danger of further abuse and ostracism from within their own communities, where—due to a rigid, patriarchal morality code—they are accused of having “dishonored” themselves and their families.