A Step in the Right Direction for Niger’s Slavery Laws (or Lack Thereof)

The Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States has charged the state of Niger the equivalent of AU$30,600 for neglecting to protect a woman sold into slavery at 12 years old. Adidjatou Mani Koraou, now 24, was sold for 330 euros (AU$673) and forced into domestic, agricultural and sexual labour without pay for the following ten years. The Age reported:

Adidjatou “served her master and his family for 10 years. She was never paid for her work and lived in a state of complete submission to her master, being subjected to regular beatings and sexual violence.

Her circumstances fall squarely within the longstanding internationally accepted definition of slavery,” [NGO Anti-Slavery International] said in a statement released ahead of the hearing.

The hearing and the conviction that followed mark an important moment for slavery in West Africa, this being the first time that the ECOWAS regional court has been asked to rule on a case of slavery.The result carries weighty implications for other West African states, and will hopefully be regarded as a benchmark case to be mimicked and built on hereafter.

Ms. Koraou said of the ordeal in comments published by Anti-Slavery International:

It was very difficult to challenge my former master and to speak out when people see you as nothing more than a slave. But I knew that this was the only way to protect my child from suffering the same fate as myself. Nobody deserves to be enslaved. We are all equal and deserve to be treated the same… no woman should suffer the way I did.

What’s important to remember here is that slavery is not limited to those at the extreme end of the spectrum. Slavery today occurs in an alarming range of ways and affects an even more alarming amount of women (and men) all over the world. Anti-Slavery International defines a slave as anyone who is forced to work, owned or controlled by an employer and dehumanised or ‘bought’ in any way. Examples include (but of course are not limited to) bonded labour, early forced marriage, forced labour, slavery by descent, trafficking and child labour. See this section of Anti-Slavery International’s website for the full picture.

[And while you're there, send the automated e-mail - or adapt it into your own words - urging the President of the Phillippines to enact the Batas Kasambahay Domestic Workers Bill, which aims to pull Filipino domestic workers out of the private sphere and into the public legal system where their working conditions can be regulated and improved.]

Quentin Bryce Speaks Up On Indigenous Australians

From The Australian:

THE disparity between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians across every facet of life from health care through to opportunity remains unconscionably large, Australia’s Governor-General Quentin Bryce said today.

Giving the keynote address at the Global Foundation’s Australia Unlimited 2008 round table in Melbourne, Ms Bryce said the lives and spirits of many Aboriginal people “have been almost eviscerated by the workings of nature and human action over decades”.

She said she planned to use her term as Governor-General to provide an ear and a voice for indigenous people.

“People must know that they have been heard, and we must ensure that others have heard them too, so that we can go on to explore ground upon which we might be prepared to stand and work together,” Ms Bryce said.

Apart from the fact that it is Quentin Bryce speaking – first female Governor General of Australia and, technically, the most powerful female in Australia – you may ask what is so relevant about her comments. You may question what Aboriginal health and sovereignty has to do with feminism in Australia, even in general.

Indigenous people in Australia are treated as second class citizens. Governments make decisions about their land, their communities, their families, every aspect of their lives. Their voices and their desires and what they want is very rarely heard. Indigenous women in Australia are absolutely the least heard voice of all. It is the duty of the non-Indigenous people of Australia to stand up and help have those voices heard. It is the duty of non-Indigenous women in Australia to stand up, shoulder to shoulder with their ’sisters’ who are having their words and thoughts and ideas and lives ignored, and say LISTEN.

So good on Ms Bryce for doing just that.

Dr Sabi Lal – The Rapist Doctor is Back and Practicing

Sabi Lal

In 2002 “Doctor” Sabi Lal was found guilty of assaulting two pharmaceutical representatives (referred to as Ms DE and Ms PQ) who had visited his clinic. He was given a $1000 fine for each assault and convictions were recorded. He was also charged with digitally raping a patient six years earlier (referred to as Ms CD), indecently assaulting her and then attempting to pervert the course of justice. For these charges he was given a two and a half year suspended sentence. Several other assaults or problematic behaviours were reported to the police or the Medical Practitioners Board, including: inappropriate comments of a social, personal and sexual nature during consultations, inappropriate personal contact outside the consultations and misuse of information during the consultations, calling the mother of a child he was treating and asking her on a date and visiting a female patients house uninvited.

In his submissions to the Medical Practioners board a year later Lal claimed that the assaults were “at the very minor end of the spectrum of assault”. His counsel also claimed that there was “no infliction of physical harm by Dr Lal, that there was no evidence of force, that there was no aggression, no threat and no abuse and no physical pain.”

I tend to disagree. Strongly. In the case of the assaults he invited the pharmaceutical reps into his consulting room, interrogated them about their relationships, invited them on dates and then - when they refused – persisted with his questioning. In the case of Ms PQ he grabbed her by her upper arms and waist when she tried to leave the room and then followed her to the car park insisting they go for ‘a drive’. When Ms DE attempted to leave the room he grabbed her by the shoulders and attempted to kiss her. When she again tried to get away from him and leave the room he pulled her hand away from the door handle and leant against the door so she couldn’t leave. She finally managed to pull the door open and escape, where she ran to her car, locked it and sat there sobbing. What person could describe any of the above as lacking in aggression, threat, abuse or force? He restrained the women physically and engaged in sexual conduct of a kind that certainly wasn’t welcome or consented to.

Lal’s counsel also stated that both instances were “one-off” occurences. That doesn’t even make sense. How can a one-off occurence happen multiple times? Do they really expect anyone to believe that because this guy ‘impulsively’ grabs and intimidates women repeatedly we should exercise lenience in morally condemning him?

Well, at least he admitted that in the case of the rape: “it was wrong to perform the Pap smear if the patient were led to believe a female doctor would be doing it and he should not have gone ahead and done the smear.” I’d prefer to have heard that he recognised his actions constituted rape. That he was aware this woman would be traumatised for the rest of her life. That he probably endangered her long term physical health by causing her to not only be terrified of having pap smears in the future but also potentially avoiding them as a result. However, if he took the rap for his charges, engaged with mental health professionals to understand the errors of his ways, undertook volunteer work at an organisation aimed at providing support services for victims of sexual assault and agreed to never, ever practice medicine again I would maybe have some respect for his efforts to rehabilitate himself.

But wait… What is that I hear? Continued injustice lurking in the wings?

Yes! This week the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) ruled that Sabi Lal be reinstated to the medical register and be allowed to resume seeing and treating patients. Despite the fact that even the Medical Practitioners Board still considers him unfit to practice VCAT claims that they have implemented strict conditions on him and that these should, apparently, limit his capacity to reoffend. He is not allowed to treat females or anyone under the age of 16. He will be strictly supervised and monitored. The fact that he has previously been subject to similar conditions and then offended again within a year of them being lifted seems to be of little concern. To quote the VCAT panel:

“We are not persuaded that Mr Lal’s suitability to practise is likely to be affected because of the offences of which he has been found guilty”

Raping and assaulting women who visit his practice doesn’t persuade them they he shouldn’t be allowed to hold a position of power or influence?

Nor are they concerned by the fact that Lal has apparently shown a deep lack of empathy or remorse for his previous actions; nor by the fact that he has regular relapses of obsessive compulsive disorder (the disorder he blamed all the assaults he perpetrated on). They referred to his disorder and the previous assaults as “character flaws”.

This man raped a woman and assaulted two others. Numerous other women have come forward and complained of assault and harassment. How do we react? We charge him $2000. We give him a suspended sentence. We let him continue practicing medicine.

The gross injustice of the legal system in cases of rape and sexual assault will never cease to disgust and astonish me.

Reclaim the Night!

The first Reclaim the Night rally took place in Rome in 1976 in response to skyrocketing numbers of reported rapes. Women in England marched in 1977, when a series of murders in Leeds led to women being advised to stay indoors. Australia’s first rally was in 1978, and similar events take place across the world wherever women want to protest violence against women, or rail against the ‘curfew’ mentality that leads to ‘commonsensical’ beliefs like the ones my mother is constantly spouting at me:

• Women shouldn’t walk alone at night
• Women should avoid dressing and behaving ‘provocatively’ at night
• Women should avoid parks, dark streets and deserted places at night
• Women shouldn’t get drunk at night because they’ll be more vulnerable to attack
• Women shouldn’t speak to strangers at night

While I was definitely spooked last year after getting mugged around the corner from my house, generally it really pisses me off that women are expected to be personally responsible for potential violence against them, to modify their night-time habits and to feel worried and afraid whenever they venture out at night, whereas men can just do anything and go anywhere, unobserved, unharmed and uncriticised.

Of course, women don’t want to think of themselves as powerless or vulnerable, but at the same time there are also blasé attitudes about the things that happen to us in public. Sometimes we don’t interpret them as harassment or assaults, or we’re worried about looking silly, prudish or hysterical if we do. It’s easy to look at statistics (according to CASA, one in three women will be sexually assaulted in her lifetime) and think, “That’s not me, I haven’t been raped”, but almost everyone has a story about being followed along the street, flashed at, groped at gigs, in bars or on public transport, or generally feeling creeped out by someone else’s treatment of you.

That shit is not normal. We don’t have to stand for it, and when I say that I’m not advocating taking arse-kicking classes to learn how to fight off attackers. These just feed into the attitude that violence against women is inevitable and it’s women’s job to anticipate it. We need to highlight the fact that everyone has a right to feel safe at night and that public safety is a consensual social contract, not the sole responsibility of one gender.

I say this because sexual violence isn’t only a concern for women, and it isn’t the only reason the night doesn’t feel safe. A (female) former workmate of mine got decked by some guy earlier this year in a fight over a cab, and on Caulfield Cup Day, my brother saw two men harassing a woman and when he told them to cut it out, he got bashed and ended up in hospital. A male friend of mine also has an eye-opening story of being stalked down the street late at night by a man in a car who was jerking off the whole time, and when he reported the licence plate number to the local police, this stalker was already known to them from several previous incidents.

Reclaim the Night takes place at the end of October every year. See if there’s an event happening near you: some are happening on Thursday, some on Friday. The Melbourne event kicks off at 7pm this Thursday at the State Library; the march itself ends up at Trades Hall, where there’ll be an after party from 8pm with free food, live performance from local musos, stalls and a zine fair. The march itself is for women and children only, whereas everyone is welcome at Trades Hall.

I must admit to being kind of ambivalent about these events, because they tend to take place in an ‘activist’ context that can seem daggy and offputting for people who don’t identify as activists, whereas this is an issue for everyone. At the same time though, I’m pleased to see the Bella Union bar used as a space of solidarity. I have been extremely unimpressed to see this historic site degenerate into just another indie and comedy club, with its labour movement heritage aestheticised for the appreciation of apolitical (yet left-leaning) local hipsters.