equality of suffering

Last week in TomDispatch, Ruth Rosen discussed “The Hidden War on Iraqi Women” To the roster of American shame that includes Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and Guantanamo, Rosen notes, we can now add “Mahmudiya, a town 20 miles south of Baghdad. There, this March, a group of five American soldiers allegedly were involved in the rape and murder of Abeer Qassim Hamza, a [fourteen year old] Iraqi girl. Her body was then set on fire to cover up [the] crimes, [and] her father, mother, and sister [were] murdered.”

Rosen discusses in detail the ways that “the invasion and occupation of Iraq has had the effect of humiliating, endangering, and repressing Iraqi women in ways that have not been widely publicized in the mainstream media: As detainees in prisons run by Americans, they have been sexually abused and raped; as civilians, they have been kidnapped, raped, and then sometimes sold for prostitution; and as women -- and, in particular, as among the more liberated women in the Arab world -- they have increasingly disappeared from public life, many becoming shut-ins in their own homes.”

Tom Engelhardt, in his preface to Rosen’s essay, quotes Riverbend, who writes the “girlblog” Baghdad Burning from Iraq:
"Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it's not really the latest -- it's just the one that's being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last. The only reason this rape was brought to light and publicized is that her whole immediate family were killed along with her. Rape is a taboo subject in Iraq. Families don't report rapes here, they avenge them. We've been hearing whisperings about rapes in American-controlled prisons and during sieges of towns like Haditha and Samarra for the last three years. The naiveté of Americans who can't believe their 'heroes' are committing such atrocities is ridiculous. Who ever heard of an occupying army committing rape??? You raped the country, why not the people?"

Engelhardt suggests that the secrecy around rape as a taboo subject marks an area where the US is more enlightened than Iraq.
“In the United States,” he says, “rape is now a public crime. Cases are regularly discussed and followed in the media; victims are far less often blamed; if you turn on a TV program like Law & Order: SVU, rape cases are national drama and even entertainment.”

The idea of rape cases as entertainment seems not to strike Engelhardt as troubling.

Lucinda Marshall in Counterpunch sees coverage of the Mahmudiya story some what differently:
“despite the enormous press coverage and airplay that this story is getting, the context in which the atrocity took place will only nominally be examined, if at all. That aspect of the story is not what is newsworthy. Or to be a tad more crass and honest, it is not what sells. And the dissemination of news is most definitely a business, one that is now owned and controlled primarily by large corporations who are far more concerned with the bottom line than with truth and integrity.

“. . . . it should not be at all surprising that when a news story that contains the same elements as a . . . porn plot occurs, the media doesn't hesitate to frame the story from that angle. Sex sells. . . .

“Like Abu Ghraib, the brutal rape and murder of . . . Abeer Qasim Hamza was just such a story. Young soldiers, the supposed . . . defenders of our rights and values, in a premeditated act of sex and violence against a . . . girl who had earlier refused their taunts and advances at a checkpoint. . . . In [a] sense, this story bears a resemblance to the coverage of cases such as the . . . the Duke University rape allegations. Virile young men [behaving] . . . in sufficiently obscene ways to be titillating and very marketable stories.

“None of this is lost on news producers. . . . [and it] impacts how the media frames the story, even to the extent of editing the facts to fit the story. In an Op Ed piece about the Duke rape allegations, David Brooks waxed poetic about the reputation of the Duke Lacrosse team--their good grades and community service; That the alleged victim was an honor student and a military veteran was conveniently omitted from his piece. To have included that information would have damaged the media portrayal of the alleged victim as being deserving of whatever may have happened that night by virtue of her 'behavior'.”

The hidden war on women, or its repackaging as entertainment, brings to mind the question that forms the title of Catherine MacKinnon’s latest book, Are Women Human? According to reviewer Martha Nussbaum, writing in the latest issue of The Nation magazine, the book argues that “women suffer aggression and exploitation, "because we are women, systemically and systematically,"” and considers the “hypocrisy of the international system when it faces up to some crimes against humanity but fails to confront similar harms when they happen to women, often on a daily basis.”

“Similarity of treatment, [MacKinnon] has argued throughout her work, is not sufficient for the true "equal protection" of the laws. Mere formal equality often masks, or even reinforces, underlying inequalities. We need to think, instead, of the idea of freedom from hierarchy, from domination and subordination. . . . To deny women benefits that they need in order to function as equals (medical pregnancy benefits, for example) is to violate equal protection, even when the treatment of men and women is similar (no men get pregnancy benefits, and no women get them either).”

Another example would be abortion rights. In an essay on Alternet.org, Carmen Valenzuela argues that a woman's right to end her pregnancy must be considered an international human right. As 70,000 women die each year around the world as a direct result of unsafe abortion, and 600,000 more are seriously injured, Amnesty International is currently considering adding a woman’s right to safely terminate a pregnancy to the rights that they support. Denying men the right to abortion would not make its denial to women equal.

Conversely, that suffering is shared by men does not make it of less concern to women. Judy Martin, writing for Women’s eNews, reports on a conference of Iraqi women sponsored by the NY-based group Global Peace Initiative of Women, at which women from Iraq cited as their chief problems violence against civilians, widespread infrastructure damage, and the consequent instability of daily life. They noted the need for potable water and for health care, the shortages of electricity, and the lack of social services.

Reporter Nir Rosen on Truthdig suggests that "Focusing on Abu Ghraib and Haditha distracts us from the daily, little Abu Ghraibs and small-scale Hadithas that have made up the [US] occupation [of Iraq]. The occupation has been one vast extended crime against the Iraqi people, and most of it has occurred unnoticed by the American people and the media."