Women's Rights in the Middle East and North Africa

I attended a terrific program yesterday: a presentation of the findings of Freedom House’s survey “Women’s Rights in the Middle East and North Africa: Citizenship and Justice” at the Sewall-Belmont House. Freedom House (http://www.freedomhouse.org/) was founded in 1941 by Eleanor Roosevelt and others and is "dedicated to establishing freedom and democracy throughout the world." The Sewall-Belmont House (www.sewallbelmont.org) was the home of Alice Paul, the suffragette, remains home to the National Woman’s Party, and is a museum of the history of the women's suffrage movement in the United States. The comprehensive study, which covers 17 selected countries and territories, is the first comparative assessment of women’s rights in those areas of the world and contains recommendations for improvement. The survey, including individual country reports, ratings, and methodology, is available online at: www.freedomhouse.org/research/menasurvey

I was happy that this study had finally been done, as the status of women in the Middle East and Africa has been something I've been keenly interested in and concerned about for a long time. Democracy can't be a reality in any of those countries, imho, as long as women are treated as (less than) second class citizens. I just finished another book, "The Swallows of Kabul," which points up that problem again. Although it is a novel, I'm sure it's the truth about how life was under the Taliban. The Freedom House survey talks about several areas of women's status, including health, and it discusses the extent to which FGM (female genital mutilation) is a factor in the surveyed countries. That topic was one we discussed in the sexuality classes I taught at Mount Vernon and one which I wrote a poem about a few years ago.

I'm Thinking

Of the girls of Africa,
Of the Middle East
The ones whose bodies
Are being mutilated,
Whose spirits
Are being crushed.

I'm thinking

Of their mothers
The ones with the butchered genitals,
The shattered souls,
The ones who went before
And are helpless to protect.

I'm thinking

Of the thousands and thousands of girls
Every day,
Of the millions and millions of women
Altogether,
Of the multitudes of girls and women
Over the millennia.

I'm thinking of their pain,
The denial of their humanity,
The violation of their sacredness.

And I'm wondering

Would the world rise up in anger,
Would we demand an immediate halt
If 6,000 boy penises were chopped off
6,000 boy babies, on a daily basis?*

Would we much concern ourselves
With the delicate question of culture,
And tiptoe around tradition,
Or would we consider the rights of the person
Sacrosanct in this matter,
As they should be, girl or boy?

Would we consider the difficulties of "manhood,"
Without a penis, and demand immediate action?
How long would we let it go on
If boys’ lives were at stake?

I'm just wondering

And, like their mourning, broken mothers,
Feeling painfully helpless
And unbearably sad

While another little girl's
Vagina
Is being sliced apart.**

Let us pray.

P.E. Ortman


*This is a generally agreed estimate of how many girls are “circumsized” daily.

**Sometimes these procedures are done with shards of broken glass or rusty knives and often, maybe generally, without sterile instruments of any kind.