V-Day Blog Archive

At Religious Universities, Disputes Over Faith and Academic Freedom

Neela Banerjee
A gay film festival opened at the University of Notre Dame last week with a sold-out showing of “Brokeback Mountain.” On Valentine’s Day, Notre Dame students staged a production of “The Vagina Monologues.”

Though the events have been held for the past few years, it may have been their last time on campus. In speeches and interviews recently, the Rev. John I. Jenkins, Notre Dame’s new president, has said that staging the events on campus implies an endorsement of values that conflict with Roman Catholicism.

The film festival had to change its name, and “The Vagina Monologues” was performed in a classroom, not a theater, by a group that was not allowed to sell tickets to raise money for women’s groups as it once had.

“Precisely because academic freedom is such a sacred value, we must be clear about its appropriate limits,” Father Jenkins said last month in a speech before faculty members and students. “I do not believe that freedom of expression has absolute priority in every circumstance.”

The controversies at Notre Dame are the latest and most high profile among disputes at many other religiously affiliated universities about how to promote open inquiry and critical thinking while adhering to the tenets of a given faith. Tensions seem most acute at some Catholic and Baptist universities, in large part because student bodies and faculties have grown more diverse and secular over the years, some theologians and historians said.

For instance, The Catholic University of America in Washington and Providence College in Rhode Island, among others, have sent productions of “The Vagina Monologues” off campus, and four other Catholic colleges have canceled the performances. The Georgia Baptist Convention voted late last year to break with Mercer University in Macon, Ga., in part because the school permitted a gay rights group to operate on campus.

For many, the disputes at Notre Dame arise from different ideas about what it means to be Catholic. Those who oppose the events say they contradict the church’s core teachings on human sexuality. Others contend that prohibiting events runs counter to a Catholic intellectual tradition of open-mindedness.

“The Catholic Church in many respects is a multicultural place,” said Ed Manier, a professor of philosophy, a graduate of Notre Dame and a Catholic. “Practicing Catholics do not hold exactly the same beliefs about how the faith needs to be translated into the public sector, matters of law or even into issues as serious as moral development of children.”

Founded largely by religious orders, Catholic universities were originally meant to educate Catholic immigrants and to train workers for Catholic institutions like hospitals and schools. The struggle to balance academic freedom and adherence to church teachings began in earnest after the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965, as many Catholic universities opened further to the secular world and sought to become top-tier schools by hiring more lay faculty members and broadening curriculums.

In 1967, a group of Catholic university presidents, led by the president of Notre Dame, the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, issued the Land-of-Lakes Statement, which said a university could not thrive without institutional autonomy and academic freedom, an idea still disputed by some Catholics.

“There was a real effort to beef up the academic respectability of universities,” said Patrick J. Reilly, president of the Cardinal Newman Society, a watchdog group. “Our view is that that went too far, and Catholic colleges strayed from Catholic teaching.”

Notre Dame, in South Bend, Ind., has 12,000 students, about 85 percent of them Catholic. Compared with other prestigious Catholic universities like Georgetown University and Boston College, Notre Dame has the reputation of being largely more conservative on thorny social issues, including sexuality, students and faculty members said.

In the last three to four years, the university has received “scores of complaints” about the play and the film festival, said Dennis K. Brown, a spokesman. This year, the Queer Film Festival changed its name to Gay and Lesbian Film: Filmmakers, Narratives, Spectatorships. Mr. Brown said Father Jenkins did not call for the change. Liam Dacey, a recent graduate who founded the festival three years ago, said the university insisted because the old title was deemed celebratory of homosexuality.

The university prohibited “The Vagina Monologues” from fund-raising after it collected $15,000 last year for groups that fight violence against women. The university said the play was an academic event and, as such, was not allowed to raise money. The play’s proponents said that the fund-raising was halted because anti-abortion activists complained that the groups involved had given money to support abortion.

Father Jenkins was traveling and answered questions by e-mail. Mr. Brown said the president hoped to articulate his plan for balancing the university’s religious and academic missions by the end of the spring semester and that it would include a decision about the sponsorship of the play and the festival.

Father Jenkins has heard from critics on both sides. This month, Bishop John M. D’Arcy of Fort Wayne-South Bend Diocese, called for the university to cancel the play. A new group, United for Free Speech, is asking faculty members and students to sign a petition requesting that the university maintain its openness in sponsoring academic endeavors. It has 3,000 signatures, said Kaitlyn Redfield, 21, an organizer.

The central question is whether the school’s sponsorship of the film festival and the play, and similar events, amounts to an endorsement of values at odds with Catholic teaching. Father Jenkins commended “The Vagina Monologues” for trying to reduce violence against women. But he objected to the work’s “graphic descriptions” of various sexual experiences.

In his speech last month he said. “These portrayals stand apart from, and indeed in opposition to, the view that human sexuality finds its proper expression in the committed relationship of marriage between a man and a woman that is open to the gift of procreation.”

Faculty members whose classes explore sexuality and gender worry that their work might be limited because of the subjects they broach, Professor Manier said. “Sponsorship isn’t the same as endorsement,” he added. “Sponsorship means an idea can be discussed and performance can be discussed.”

Some students said that the understanding of academic freedom at a Catholic university should be different from that at a secular university. “We have our own measures of what’s good and what’s right,” said Nicholas Matich, 22, the politics editor of The Irish Rover, a conservative student newspaper. ” ‘The Vagina Monologues’ is performed everywhere else in the academic world. It doesn’t mean Notre Dame should do it, too.”

Catholic universities do not move in lockstep on controversial issues, and much depends on campus culture, said Michael J. James, executive vice president of the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities. Of the 612 American colleges that are staging the play from Feb. 1 to March 8, 35 are Catholic universities, one more than last year, according to V-Day, an anti-violence organization affiliated with the play.

“There are people who say that the play has no place on a Catholic campus,” the Rev. Kevin Wildes, president of Loyola University New Orleans, wrote last year in a statement sanctioning the play. “To exclude the play from a Catholic campus is to say either that these women are wrong or that their experience has nothing important to say to us. I would argue that these are voices that a Catholic university must listen to if we are to understand human experience and if we are to be faithful to the one who welcomed all men and women.”

Catholic teachings seem to allow divergence on complicated issues like human sexuality. In the last decade, the number of gay and lesbian groups at colleges, including religious ones, has risen steadily, according to gay rights and academic groups. Notre Dame does not have an officially sanctioned group for gay and lesbian students. Many other Catholic institutions do, including 24 of the 28 members of the Association of Jesuit Universities and Colleges, an increase from a decade ago, said the Rev. Charles L. Currie, the association president.

Watching the controversy unfold at Notre Dame is Father Hesburgh, who, though long retired, retains a campus office. He said Father Jenkins’s effort to define what Notre Dame stood for was important. But in an interview, Father Hesburgh also said a modern university had to face the crucial issues of the times.

“I think the real test of a great university,” he said, “is that you are fair to the opposition and that you get their point of view out there. You engage them. You want to get students’ minds working. You don’t want mindless Catholics. You want intelligent, successful Catholics.”

Gretchen Ruethling contributed reporting from South Bend, Ind., for this article.

Related Articles and Statements:

V-Day Update On Providence College Banning Of “The Vagina Monologues”
http://www.vday.org/contents/vday/press/release/0601211

USA Today
http://www.vday.org/contents/vday/press/media/0403011

Letter from the president of Loyola University, New Orleans- Kevin Wildes, S.J.
14 Feb 2005
http://www.vday.org/contents/vday/resistance/loyola

Resistance
http://www.vday.org/resistance

C’mon, guys, there’s nothing to be afraid of

Peter Walters
http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_3524167
Why are people afraid of “The Vagina Monologues”?

We were asked in class to attend Utah Valley State College’s third annual production of Eve Ensler’s theatrical production (which in my opinion is worthy of a Pulitzer or Nobel prize). I had heard of the show but had never attended.

We were warned that part of the production might be – no, would be – offensive. Ironically, one of the students asked, “Now, is this something we can bring the wife to?”

The answer to that question is yes. (In fact, after seeing the production, one might realize just how ironic the question is.) As a film, theater and literary critic for about five years now, I can safely say that those years of narrative awareness (and 27 years of narrative consumption in general), “The Vagina Monologues” is the most intense, stirring two hours I’ve ever sat through – yes, including yucky surgery.

Does that mean “The Vagina Monologues” is tantamount to torture? Nah. The show is actually funny at times. I am surprised at the wide range of emotion explored in this one show.

The monologues are based on interviews with women all over the world – some of whom have experienced the most intense of life’s situations: war, torture, child birth, ecstasy. I think I cried more than I laughed – real tears and gut laughter, with plenty of “ah hah!” moments.

Let me suggest to you that all cultures and societies are different. Let me suggest that just as so-called uncivilized or fundamentalist societies have for centuries held certain prejudices against women, Utah is not without its own cultural biases.

Without being sermonic, “The Vagina Monologues” is like a Zen master’s walking stick to the back of the head. It’s a wake-up call. It’s a promise and a commitment that you want to be aware of and dedicate your life to. Yes, “The Vagina Monologues” asserts its own normative view of universal truth: that women deserve respect, and that their bodies are their own property.

Just because the title of the show contains the word “vagina” does not make it a bad or dirty show. A friend of mine (who did not see the show) suggested that a name change might be in order if people were expected to actually go see it. I said, “See, that’s the whole point of the show. Why should women and their sexuality be something that has to be apologized for or quieted?”

Personally, the word “offensive” is the last word I would ever use to describe this show.

I told my friend to remember until the day he dies that we had once chatted about “The Vagina Monologues” and that I had called it one of the most influential narratives I had ever heard, and that he should reconsider his aversion to the title. I hope he’ll see the show one day, and I hope you will, too.

The end of the show found every member of the audience on their feet, promising to fight sexual violence and inequality wherever we saw it. I left with a much more profound respect for women, and I found myself wanting to do my damnedest to be the type of man that a woman deserves to have in her life.

You can see the Broadway version of “The Vagina Monologues” on DVD. But I’m glad that I saw the show presented by women from my local community.

I’m not going to tell you to run out and rent the DVD right now, or that the show is required viewing for all who want to call themselves enlightened. All I want to do is tell you how strongly the show affected me, and that I hope you’ll give it a try the next time it comes to your community.
—
Peter Walters studies media analysis at Utah Valley State College.

Crowd hails staging of play

Margaret Fosmoe
http://www.southbendtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060214/News…
SOUTH BEND — The ongoing discussion about sexually themed artistic events and free speech at the University of Notre Dame played out in a classroom Monday night, as an enthusiastic audience turned out for a student performance of “The Vagina Monologues.”

About 470 people attended the controversial show, which touches on topics that are rarely addressed publicly on the Catholic campus, including sexual experiences, menstruation, masturbation, lesbianism, rape and childbirth.

The crowd responded to the production with applause, frequent laughter and a standing ovation. Repeat performances are scheduled for tonight and Wednesday.

Notre Dame seniors John Chim and Andrew Gaudreau both attended the performance because a friend was in the cast. Neither had seen or read the play before.

“I really liked it,” Chim said afterward. “Notre Dame needs more events like this.” The play addresses issues that generally are avoided on campus, he said.

“It’s provocative. It discusses real issues that women have to deal with,” Gaudreau said. “It was enlightening.”

This is the fifth year the play has been performed at Notre Dame. In previous years, tickets were sold as a fundraiser for S-O-S of Madison Center and the YWCA of Michiana, agencies that serve victims of rape and domestic violence.

The Rev. John I. Jenkins, Notre Dame’s president, is considering limiting or banning “The Vagina Monologues” and a gay film festival on campus in the future. He said in January he is considering such a policy because sponsorship of such events may be at odds with Notre Dame’s Catholic character.

For this year, Jenkins allowed the student performance of the play to proceed. However, he required that it occur in a lecture hall instead of a theater, and student planners were not allowed to sell tickets and use the event as a fundraiser for the two community agencies.

Unlike in past years, no opponents appeared to protest the performance.

Ian Morgenheim, a South Bend resident, created a sign on poster board before the show. It read: “I support free speech. V-Day 2006.”

“If there are protesters, I want to have a response. I’ll be here every night,” Morgenheim said.

Graduate student Sandy Dedo thinks it’s absurd that a debate about the importance of academic freedom is needed on a university campus. “It’s shameful the stance they are taking toward women’s rights, and the gay and lesbian population,” she said.

Dedo is hopeful Jenkins will recognize the importance of free speech. She’s concerned about Notre Dame’s academic reputation if some events are banned. “We’re all concerned that the university we attend and love will be shamed in the national spotlight,” she said.

Members of United for Free Speech, a new student group on campus, collected signatures on a petition. The petition encourages Jenkins to respect freedom of speech by continuing to allow presentations such as “The Vagina Monologues” and the gay film series.

About 3,000 signatures have been collected so far, said Kaitlyn Redfield, one of the organizers. The group plans to present the petition to Jenkins next week.

More than 30 female students performed in the show, presenting the characters and thoughts of the women playwright Eve Ensler interviewed while writing the play.

Some cast members later donned black T-shirts that read: “Vaginas are part of the student body.”

“I’m Catholic, so I had some hesitancy about seeing it,” graduate student Joan Arbery said afterward. “Some things are controversial, but I felt it had a balanced tone.”

A panel discussion after the show featured women theology, sociology and law professors.

Bishop John M. D’Arcy, of the Catholic Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, publicly criticized Notre Dame last year for allowing “The Vagina Monologues” on campus.

In a recent opinion column in the diocese newspaper, D’Arcy reiterated his opposition, saying the play “distorts the beautiful gift of human sexuality, clouding its richness so it becomes merely the seeking of pleasure.”

“I regret the sponsorship of this play by Notre Dame again this year,” the bishop wrote, “and pray it will be the last time.”

Body by Eve

Brian Jarvis
“It’s what I call the heartbreaking campaign,” Ensler says, “because there is no end. We spend 40 billion a year on beauty products, and the only end is vanishing.”

There’s a saying that the odds of writing a poem that will stir the world to action are akin to dropping a flower petal down a well and waiting to hear the splash. The chances of writing a collection of monologues that will launch a global movement is hardly more auspicious. But that’s exactly what playwright Eve Ensler has done.

Anyone using the theater as a vehicle for political power walks a delicate tightrope between heavyhanded preaching and sentimental cliché, but when handled right, the effect can shift paradigms. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible attacked McCarthyism against the backdrop of the Salem witch hunt; Tony Kushner’s Angels in America tackled AIDS and homosexuality. Today, Eve Ensler’s The Good Body wages war against nearly every Western ideal of physical beauty. An ordinary play? No. But Eve Ensler is no ordinary woman.

In 1996, Ensler seemed to burst out of nowhere with her Obie-winning play, The Vagina Monologues. Recounting women’s intimate sexual experiences in their own words, the bluntly named production ran for seven years and was translated into more than 35 languages.

By Ensler’s own estimation, she has uttered the v-word close to a million times, enough for her seven-year-old granddaughter to tell friends that her “Bubbie” invented the word. “Vagina” always had an uncomfortable, scientific-sounding ring, evoking blushes in health classes and seeming to have little usage anywhere else. Indeed, when Ensler’s play premiered, radio stations refused to say vagina on the air. TV stations ran entire segments on the play without mention of the word, and newspapers danced around it with abbreviations. Part of Ensler’s aim in so naming the play was to bring the word into the mainstream.

The effort paid off. On the heels of her play’s success, Ensler was inspired to create V-Day, a worldwide effort to stop violence against women through a host of measures, ranging from registering single women to vote in the United States to establishing the first safehouse for women in Egypt. To date, V-Day has raised more than $30 million. In 2005 alone, there were more than 2,500 V-Day events.

The V stands for victory, valentine, and, of course, vagina. Few women can claim an international campaign that took root from an obsession with private parts. But again, there is nothing ordinary about Eve Ensler.

“In the midst of a war on Iraq, a time of torture camps and daily bombings, when civil liberties are disappearing faster than the ozone layer, when one out of three women will be beaten or raped in her lifetime, why write a book about my stomach?”

So begins Eve Ensler’s latest collection of monologues, The Good Body.
To describe it as mere monologue, however, or as a segue to the next bodily target of self-hatred does the playwright a disservice. The Good Body is the product of more than 200 interviews with women from 50 countries, from actress Isabella Rossellini to Cosmopolitan founder Helen Gurley Brown. Ensler takes us from the Rift Valley of Africa to a vaginal laser rejuvenation center in Beverly Hills. Along the way, we meet such varied characters as a teenage girl at a fat camp and a veiled Afghan woman willing to risk imprisonment for a taste of ice cream.

The question Ensler asked each woman: So, what do you think of your stomach?
“I have the most shame around my stomach,” she says. “It feels more dangerous talking about my stomach than my vagina.”

A self-described radical feminist, Ensler remembers feeling struck by the irony: How could the author of The Vagina Monologues spend so much time obsessing about her belly? Or in Ensler’s words, her “not so flat, post-40” belly.

“What is at the core of this desire to mutilate and starve myself?” she asks. “We spend our days shrinking, fixing, lipo-ing, tightening, dying… I’ve yet to meet a woman who doesn’t do that, even if she’s pretending she’s not.”

“There’s a way women have learned to not like their bodies in every single culture. We’re all contaminated at birth. In some places you have to be fat to be the chosen bride, so you eat, eat, eat. Here, you need to disappear to be the chosen bride, so you starve, starve, starve. Somebody’s making this all up.”

At the center of Ensler’s work is the misguided notion that we’re all one body part away from perfection. If only we could get rid of that one wrinkle, graying hair, or layer of flab, then our obsession would end.

“It’s what I call the heartbreaking campaign,” Ensler says, “because there is no end. We spend 40 billion a year on beauty products, and the only end is vanishing.”

Ensler acknowledges that fighting an internal enemy—in this case, convincing women to change the way they view themselves—is not an easy struggle. “Body image is so deep and complex that the uprooting is very delicate surgery,” she says. “Ninety percent of the world is round and colored, but we’re doing everything possible to be skinny and blonde. That’s insane.”

Physically, Ensler is the antithesis of the skinny blonde archetype she rails against. Looking much younger than her 52 years, with black-framed glasses matching her bobbed, raven hair, Ensler recalls a rebellious schoolgirl—which, in a sense, she is.

Over the phone on a Tuesday morning, Ensler is modest and subdued. She rarely speaks before two in the afternoon, given the vocal cord-wrenching demand of performing eight one-woman shows a week for 25 weeks. An interview before noon—as she granted for this piece—is not her choice time slot.

“The Good Body is the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” she says. “I go out there and someone else comes through me.”

When she’s not performing, Ensler’s V-Day activities take up at least 12 hours a day, though she occasionally manages to fit in a yoga class. Since The Vagina Monologues, Ensler has been consumed with her work. “In the end, I’m just struggling for pieces of truth,” she says.

When Ensler addresses a crowd, however, a lioness roars from within and leaps to embrace the current events of our times—things a typical celebrity would be advised by his or her lawyers to avoid.

“The Bush administration is geared toward making us feel more secure, but I’ve never felt more insecure,” Ensler declared before a packed house at a November book festival in Miami. “As we blindly pursue that so-called goal, we become people we don’t want to be. People who torture, people who illegally invade foreign countries, take away civil liberties in our own country, and do whatever we want to the environment. All things done in the name of security.”

Ensler is working on a book entitled Insecure at Last. Security, she argues, is impossible to achieve. Instead, she offers a list of what is possible: connection, care, peace, service, and making the world a better place.

Distorted body image has reached a critical mass in the last decade. It’s not uncommon to hear middle school girls talk about their future plastic surgeries or for fourth graders to be on a diet. Certainly no statistics need to be cited to prove that a majority of women think they need to lose weight. Reality shows like The Swan spew blatant messages of inadequacy that make psychologists cringe.

The issue is not solely the domain of women, however, as Ensler is quick to point out. “Men are more tyrannized and oppressed than women,” she says. “They’re not allowed to cry. If I couldn’t cry, I wouldn’t be on this planet anymore. Crying saves my life, it’s how I process suffering.” Ensler scarcely pauses for breath. “Where does all that hardened grief and sadness go? Of course it goes into violence; where else could it possibly go? Men need space to live in their bodies, too.”

To show her commitment to men, Ensler welcomes them to her cause. This spring, she will help sponsor a workshop in New York for teenage boys to confront what it means to be a man. Featured speakers will include former NFL quarterback Don McPherson and hip-hop musician Wyclef Jean.

As for The Good Body, its success is best measured not by ticket sales (it routinely sells out), but by the individuals who approach Ensler after the show. In Miami, three women told her they were taking the money they had saved for facelifts and donating it to charity. Helen Gurley Brown has been recommending the show to all her friends.

The audience, as described by Ensler, is “anyone wanting to fix their body that’s not broken to begin with.”

Her cure: Stop fixing your body, start fixing the world.
“When women do what we’re not supposed to do,” Ensler says, “the world changes.”

Warrior of another kind

Jayne Rose Gacheri

For more than a decade, Agnes Pareiyo has been traversing the expansive Maasai plains on foot with a dummy organ in her hand
The wooden organ, a replica of a vagina, has recently been upgraded to rubber and can be separated into several components.

This is what the soft-spoken, but tough-talking activist against Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and early marriage uses to educate the community about the dangers of the ritual.

“Discussing sex, and further more, with a replica of a vagina, was unheard of and it wasn’t easy breaking ground,” says Pareiyo, who started her campaign eight years ago.

Not surprisingly, the community met her mode of demonstration with hostility.

She was considered an enemy of their culture, and nearly became an outcast.

Despite massive resistance from a community known to guard its culture zealously, she drew encouragement from the fact that her message was getting across, especially to young girls. “The huge crowds that would turn up whenever I had a community demo assured me I was doing the right thing,” she says.

Her commitment bore remarkable fruits.

Over 2,000 girls were saved from the cut within eight years under the umbrella of Tasaru Ntomonok Initiative (TNI), a community based organisation in the Southern Rift Valley, Narok District, where she is the elected Deputy Mayor.

To feather her cap, she was named the United Nations in Kenya Person of the Year, last October, a title she earned for her contribution towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals.

Tasaru Ntomonok, which means ‘rescue the woman’ in the local Maa language, continues to spread its tentacles far and wide.

At the time of this interview, Pareiyo was preparing for a one-week demonstration and training in Arusha.

Personal experience
Pareiyo’s passion stems from a personal experience; she was circumcised at the age of 14 and later on forced into marriage.

“The experience was so painful that it traumatised me for a long time… I never wanted it to happen to any other girl,” she says.

She walked out of her marriage after her husband took a second wife.

She however continued to look after their four children, who are now adults.

Two of her sons are working, while another is in university. Her last-born child, a girl, attends a technical college.

Her mission is to liberate girls from her community from “senseless genital mutilation” and “deprivation of education through early marriages”.

After many years of struggle, she set up TNI in 1999 after a survey she and her partner the late Leah Ole Muiya conducted showed that girls dropped out of school due to FGM.

“A girl who has undergone FGM means many things to many people.

To boys it means there is an available wife, to the poverty-driven parent she is a source of finances, and if the girl herself continues with education she becomes big-headed as she thinks of herself as an ‘adult’,” says Pareiyo, who partly blames poverty for FGM.

“Some 56 per cent of Kenyans live below the poverty line,” she says, quoting statistics from Ministry of National Planning.

And this is where the circumcisers come in.

“Most of the circumcisers want to cut as many girls a month as possible to earn a living.

In Narok and neighbouring areas, for example, cutters are paid Sh1,000 per girl, meaning if she does 20, that is Sh20,000 — very enticing. There aren’t many rural women who get that kind of money,” says the anti-FGM activist.

To combat the practice, TNI has embarked on a pilot project to provide capital to the cutters to start other businesses.

“It’s bearing fruit and since the beginning of the project, at least five circumcisers have laid down their tools,” she says.

A miracle
Through what the FGM activist terms “a miracle from God and one of the greatest things that happened to TNI”, she crossed paths with Eve Ensler, author of the controversial Vagina Monologues and founder of V-Day (Vagina, Valentine, Victory) in 2000.

The meeting changed TNI’s fortunes tremendously. For starters, she and her ‘apostles’ received a gift from Ensler in the form of a sport-utility jeep, allowing them to cover a distance that once took them a year, in three months.

“Ensler first saw me sitting in a field conducting a class and must have been amused at my mode of delivery…” Both women use the cut and uncut vagina for their demonstration.

Their shared interest brought them together instantly.

“Ensler made it possible for me to spread my campaign to areas I could never access. The message spread so fast that soon, girls were coming from all over seeking our advice and protection,” says Pareiyo.

Though the stage was set, there was something missing — Agnes and her group needed a place, a shelter to accommodate the runaway girls who needed to escape the wrath of a community that thought its culture was endangered by Pareyio’s work.

TNI could not cope with the number of runaway girls and the temporary solution of sending them to well-wishers was falling apart, “because families of runaway girls were turning their wrath on well wishers.”

Attempts to lobby local leaders, the government and even NGOs bore nothing.

But like the warrior she is, Pareiyo was determined to soldier on. She had by now earned the V-Day title, ‘Vagina Warrior’ (a name given to women and men who have experienced violence personally or witnessed it within their communities and dedicated themselves towards ending such violence through effective grassroot means), sought the help of Ensler, to establish a rescue center to which the girls could ‘escape’.

“This was after a series of cases in which girls were ‘cut’ and married off forcibly even after an agreement between their parents and TNI to allow the girls pursue education peacefully without having to undergo FGM or early marriage,” says Pareiyo.

Ensler was quick to respond.

Using V-Day, a global movement that helps anti-violence organisations expand their core work on the ground, while drawing public attention to the larger fight to stop worldwide violence (including rape, battery, incest, FGM and sexual slavery) against women and girls, a series of fundraising activities through V-Day benefit productions of the Vagina Monologues were conducted.

The result was the establishment of what the movement calls Safe Houses. The TNI Safe House was the first.

“Safe houses are shelters where girls and women faced with violence can seek refuge.

The importance of a safe house lies in the fact that once educated about the cut, girls require a place to seek refuge. Without it, many of the girls will be forced to undergo FGM,” Pareiyo says as she takes us on a tour of the 40-bedroomed house.

It is also here that girls undergo an alternative ritual, which involves a five-day seclusion during which the girls are empowered to make informed decisions about their own lives.

“This education intentionally reflects the Maasai culture where women teach their girls about life as a Maasai woman after their rites of passage (FGM).

This is done when they are in seclusion and we at TNI believe that the teachings are important and should continue, but without the pain of the cut.” Over 50 girls went through the ceremony last week.

This new addition to her campaign is winning tremendous results from the community, which is now looking at Pareiyo and her group, not as an enemy of their culture, but as a supporter.

Not so lucky
Only a week ago, says Pareiyo, six girls ran away from their Trans Mara homes on the eve of a group circumcision comprising 26 girls.

Twenty of them may not have been so lucky, says Pareiyo.

The six girls will stay at the Safe House until they are reconciled with their families (in the presence of the local administration).

Their families have to commit to educating them. TNI arranges for the schools and fees.

However, those girls whose parents persist in carrying out FGM as a rite of passage remain at the centre and pursue their education.

“Sometimes sad things do happen,” Pareiyo says, citing a recent case, where 16-year-old Judy Santeyan and her 14-year-old sister, Dorcas Keiwua, went through a harrowing and traumatising experience last September.

Four years ago, their brother threatened them with circumcision and they fled to the rescue centre. After staying there for two years, they reconciled and the girls returned home.

“But the brother never kept his side of the bargain and in August this year he, along with a group of eight — five elderly women and three boys, all neighbours — forcibly circumcised the sisters, leaving them bleeding almost to death, were it not for the arrival of their mother who took them to hospital.”

Such incidents don’t deter her, but it saddens her that the community is deeply rooted in a traditional culture that believes that girls cannot be women without the cut.

Pareiyo’s close association with Ensler has made her a globetrotter.

She has met and exchanged notes with many women of substance such as Maya Angelou, Jane Fonda and a myriad activists.

Currently, Pareiyo, who is passionate about rural women issues, is lobbying for support to form an NGO that will financially empower rural women as another tool towards eradicating FGM and stopping early marriages.

V-Day Letter To The Editor Of The Michigan Daily

Dear Editor,

As the director of V-Day’s College Campaign, I am writing to clarify some key points raised in your article “Monologues Looks For All-Minority Cast” (Michigan Daily, November 14, 2005).

V-Day is a global movement to end violence against women and girls that grew out of women’s responses to “The Vagina Monologues.” Each year February through March, college students and women in over 80 countries and all fifty states stage benefit productions of the play to raise funds for anti-violence programs and shelters in their community. In the past eight years, over 5,000 V-Day benefits have raised over $30 million for 5,000 programs.

V-Day events have taken place at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor for the past 4 years and the organizers have reported raising over $30,000 for SAFE House, a local shelter for battered women and children, as well as funding for the Michigan Battered Women’s Clemency Project. This year’s organizers plan to raise funds for SAFE House and also to include a week of events raising awareness about the violence that affects one in three women in this country and throughout the world.

The event takes place alongside thousands of V-Day events that will bring the issue center-stage in communities from Dar es Salaam to Charlotte, from Tokyo to Los Angeles. V-Day staff have advised thousands of V-Day organizers over the years, and attended hundreds of community productions in person. The breadth of these events is remarkable, and yet they are united in their mission.

With respect to this year’s campus production and your article, we applaud the efforts of the organizers to proactively engage a diverse group of students who may not have been deeply involved in previous V-Day benefit productions of “The Vagina Monologues” on campus. However, we feel obligated to clarify that it is not in the spirit of V-Day to engage some women to the exclusion of others, and that V-Day will not endorse a production of “The Vagina Monologues” that does. The materials that V-Day provides to its approved organizers specifically directs organizers to incorporate as diverse a cast as possible with consideration to race, age, disability and size. Everyone that expresses interest is to be included, whether on stage or off.

We also reject the notion put forth in your article that the script is inherently racist. “The Vagina Monologues” is a play based on Eve Ensler’s interviews with over 200 real women. The vast majority of the monologues are composites of the interviews with women of various ages, races and creeds, and the script intentionally refuses to instruct directors to cast any particular role as a particular race. In fact, the only specific reference to race in the script is a monologue based on a particular interview with “A Southern Woman of color,” in which the director’s notes go on to state that “women of all races have performed this role around the world.”

Since the play was first performed, women of all races, religions, and sizes have performed the monologues – all of the monologues. In the last eight years, tens of thousands of women, from Tulsa, OK to Islamabad, Pakistan to Nairobi, Kenya have embraced the play, performing and casting women – both actors and non-actors – in all of the roles without racial typecasting.

We have shared a healthy dialogue with organizer Jillian Steinhauer and director Lauren Whitehead. We have heard their concerns and thoughts and they have graciously taken the time to listen to ours.

As we move forward, we hope that their efforts have brought women of color into the V-Day movement on campus as never before. We also hope that the dynamic debate and dialogue that has ensued has rallied women and men of all races and ethnicities to work together to bring about awareness of violence against all women and girls, as well as to help end violence against women and girls on campus and in the community.

Sincerely,
Shael Norris
College Campaign Director, V-Day

Eve Ensler on BBC-TV’s “Talking Point” program

On Sunday, November 27, Eve Ensler appeared on BBC-TV’s “Talking Point” to talk about the recent World Health Organization (WHO) Multi-Country Study On Women’s Health and Domestic Violence against Women.

To watch the program, visit http://www.bbcnews.com/talkingpoint To read Eve’s commentary to the report, visit http://www.vday.org/vmoment

The Dignity Works

Fatemah Farag
How to assert a woman’s right to a violence-free existence? Women activists from across the ideological spectrum met in Cairo to discuss this.

“As I traveled with the piece to city after city, country after country, hundreds of women waited after the show to talk to me about their lives. The play had somehow freed up their memories, pain and desire. Night after night I heard the same stories — women being raped as teenagers, in college, as little girls, as elderly women; women who had finally escaped being beaten to death by their husbands; women who were terrified to leave; women who were taken sexually, before they were even conscious of sex by their stepfathers, brothers, cousins, uncles, mothers and fathers. I began to feel insane, as if a door had opened to some underworld and I was being told things I was not supposed to know; knowing these things was dangerous.”

Thus wrote Eve Ensler in her introduction to the 2002 edition of The Vagina Monologues, the experience that led her to develop V-Day. “In 1997 I met with a group of activist women… On February 14, 1998, Valentine’s Day, our first V-Day was born.” And the movement has since defined itself as supporting networks and promoting creative events “to increase awareness, raise money and revitalize the spirit of existing anti-violence organizations. V-Day generates attention for the fight to stop violence against women and girls worldwide, including rape, domestic abuse, incest, female genital mutilation (FGM), honor killings, and sexual slavery.”

And V-day launched the Karama programme in Egypt on 17 July 2005; in Cairo last week, activists from across the political spectrum met to take part in formulating priorities and approaches that can be adopted by the programme — to be extended to Palestine, Jordan, Syria, Morocco and Tunisia. According to Rola Jamal of Karama, “The choice of the word ‘pride’ in Arabic is very significant because the core of the problem is that women are not the honour of societies but their dignity.”

Many of those attending had never heard of Ensler or the Monologues ; but the message — “stop violence against women” — struck a chord with everyone. According to background documentation provided by Karama, “Similar to their counterparts in the world, women’s voices in the Middle East and North Africa have been drowned out by rhetoric and violence. Throughout the region, women are victims of many different kinds of violence and subjugation. Estimates in Egypt, for example, indicate that one in three women suffers from domestic abuse and nearly 97 per cent of women ever married have undergone female genital mutation (see related article). Throughout most of the Arab world, women’s lives are worth less than a man’s honor. Men who believe they are within their rights to kill a woman who is perceived to have disgraced the family’s reputation practice the ancient tribal custom of honor killing with impunity.”

This is in spite of the fact that the region has been targetted for years: “Many women do not or cannot speak of the violence they have experienced in their lives. They are victims of violence, and victims of silence.” Azza Shalaby from ACT, a local NGO, recounted her organisation’s experience documenting rape. “We set up a hotline but when the technology that enables a call receiver to identify the number of the caller became widespread, women stopped calling for fear of identification,” recounted Kamel. Ashgan Abdel-Hamid of Al-Nadim Centre added, “Even when women suffer from violence they can’t take action because of economic constraints.” While Shahira Fawzi, a woman activist who works at the Netherlands Embassy, spoke of “negative adaptation” where women deny they are the victims of violence in an attempt to accommodate themselves to harsh realities. Seham Nigm of the Women and Society Organisation painted a bleak picture of the education system, too, whose curricula do not stress positive inter-gender interaction, while Hala Saqr from the World Health Organisation (WHO) recounted that in cases in which women suffering abuse are allowed to seek medical treatment, they are usually accompanied by the partner who has subjected them to it: “Even when a doctor believes the reasons for her injuries is violence, she will not admit this, adding to the reasons why the documentation of violence against women is lacking.”

All such factors are exacerbated by the local media, which does not take on the cause of women’s dignity. In the words of Afaf Sayed of Heya, “Our media is controlled by a patriarchal discourse and capital, both of which work against women’s rights. Follow news broadcasts and you will note that the images of women suffering from violence in areas of conflict are never shown.” Everyone in attendance agreed that, on the ground, research indicates that the incidence of violence against women is much higher than statistics would indicate. The aim of Karama is to promote “a broad- based and inclusive approach to addressing violence. A major goal is to reach out to communities and to women isolated from such discussions and to engage with them in dialogue and action within their everyday realities. In Egypt, for example, the views of women farmers must be heard. In Jordan, the inclusion of Bedouin women is a priority. In the Sudan, Nuba mountain women and others from the south must be a key part. These are essential constituents who have been historically marginalised and deprived access to the women’s movement”. Over the two-day workshop, activists voiced disagreement over the role played — and should be played — by religion, priorities and where to start. While NGOs repeatedly pointed out that a main restriction in combating violence against women is the limited influence they have on policy- making.

This remains, however, an immense task — considering that the focus is not simply women; there is no ending violence towards women without reforming men and society as a whole.

Malalai Joya elected to Afghan Parliament

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/4420832.stm
BBC Profile: Malalai Joya
Malalai Joya, one of the prominent winners in Afghanistan’s landmark parliamentary elections, is an outspoken critic of the country’s warlords.

“I hope by being a member of parliament I will be able to serve my people, especially the women,” Ms Joya told reporters.

“I will do my best to stop the warlords and criminals from building any laws that will jeopardise the rights of Afghan people, especially the women.”

The 27-year-old women’s literacy and health worker will take her seat in the 249-seat National Assembly, or Wolesi Jirga, representing the remote province of Farah.

The warlords are like snakes in the sleeves of the government

Ms Joya, daughter of a former medical student who was wounded fighting the Soviets, rose to prominence for denouncing warlords at a constitutional forum two years ago.

She received a number of death threats after interrupting the loya jirga (grand council) with her criticism of the mujahideen, fighters who fought against the Soviet Union and then among themselves.

Ms Joya told the constitutional convention the mujahideen were responsible for Afghanistan’s civil war which only ended when the Taleban seized power in 1996.

‘Annihilated’
Ms Joya continued to press her case against the former rulers of Afghanistan – last year she, together with a delegation of 50 tribal elders, persuaded President Hamid Karzai to dismiss a provincial governor who was a former Taleban commander.

She has survived at least four assassination attempts since her speech at the constitutional convention. According to reports, Ms Joya employs armed guards and travels incognito.

“I know that if not today, then probably tomorrow, I will be physically annihilated,” Ms Joya told the BBC World Service’s Outlook programme.

“But the voice of protest will continue, because it is the voice of the people of my country.”

Rape – a crime of power

Rodel Rodis
On the front page of the November 5 issue of Manila dailies was the photo of Brad Tiffany, an American tourist from New York, screaming to placard-waving demonstrators who had marched to the U.S. Embassy in Manila to protest the rape of a Filipina by five American servicemen in Subic.

“She’s a prostitute asking U.S. servicemen for money!” Tiffany yelled, taunting the protestors.

But the incredibly arrogant Tiffany was wrong. An investigation by the Subic Bay Metropolitan Authority (SBMA) revealed that the rape victim is a vacationing college graduate from a wealthy family from Zamboanga City who had just arrived in Subic with her stepsister a few days before the rape.

According to the SBMA, the 23-year old Filipina went with her stepsister and her stepsister’s boyfriend, a U.S. Marine who was on shore leave after participating in joint U.S.-Philippine anti-terrorism military exercises, to a karaoke bar on November 1. She was introduced to the five Marines who talked her into going with them in their rented van. It is unclear what they told her and why she agreed.

What is known is that a few hours later, witnesses saw the woman from Zamboanga being dumped unconscious from the van onto a road.

After she was brought to the nearest Subic hospital, a medico-legal examination confirmed that she had been brutally raped.

SBMA police authorities then interviewed Timoteo Soriano, the driver of the rented blue van used by the soldiers, and he signed a sworn statement attesting that “those U.S. Marines mercilessly raped the girl inside the van. It was really horrible.”

Rape charges were filed before the Olongapo City prosecutor’s office against U.S. Marines Keith Silkwood, Albert Lara, Corey Barris, Chad Carpenter and Daniel Smith. The name of a sixth Marine, Dominic Duplantis, was later dropped after he claimed he was not with the soldiers in the van.

As a result of the filing of the criminal complaint against them, the Marines were not allowed to leave the Philippines on board their ship, the USS Essex, which left on November 3. But rather than being arrested and incarcerated by Philippine authorities, the Marines were placed in the physical custody of the U.S. Embassy.

The U.S. Embassy then released a statement stating that it was taking the matter “very seriously” considering that U.S. troops headed for foreign lands were, as standard procedure, advised to observe “cultural sensitivity, proper behavior and respect for the law of the communities” they were visiting, especially when off-duty.

But this was not an offense against a “quaint local taboo,” as one pundit put it, but a viciously brutal crime, whether it occurred in New York or in Subic, and regardless of whether the victim was a “prostitute” as Brad Tiffany believed.

Perhaps that is the impression Tiffany has of Filipino women, an image that will be more widespread when the new Adam Sandler produced movie, Grandma’s Boy, appears in movie theatres this Christmas. In one scene, shown in the trailer to current movies, the title character says he spent the night with “three Filipino whores.”

Manila newspapers do not use the word “prostitute” or “whore,” preferring “sex worker” instead, a sign of political maturity and respect for the women who rely on the money from their sex labor to put food on the table for themselves and their families.

The Philippine Daily Inquirer November 6 editorial observed that “a rape is not only a crime against a person; it is also a crime of power, of unequal relations between victim and victimizer. The fact that the alleged rapists are American soldiers, running wild inside a former American naval base, makes their American-ness, in the context of our country’s own history, an inescapable reality.”

One “inescapable reality” is that before the Philippines closed down the U.S. bases in Subic and Clark in 1990, there were 52 documented cases of rape committed against Filipino women by U.S. soldiers stationed at those bases. But not a single American soldier was ever arrested or convicted of any of the offenses.

As columnist Rina Jimenez-David explained, “the central question in the present controversy is not whether the servicemen are guilty of the crime they’re accused of, but whether they will ever be made to face the music. Will the accused in the Subic rape case be haled before the local police and be made to face a Philippine judge? Or will they be able to escape Philippine justice just like those before them?”

Involved in the controversy is the Visiting Forces Agreement (VFA) between the Philippines and the U.S., signed in 1999, which covers this incident.
According to Article 5, Section 1 of the VFA, “Philippine authorities shall have jurisdiction over United States personnel with respect to offenses committed within the Philippines and punishable under the law of the Philippines.”

The rape case is supposed to be treated like any criminal case that will undergo preliminary investigation, filing of charges, arrest and trial. However, unlike ordinary criminal cases, Section 6 of the VFA states that “The custody of any United States personnel whom the Philippines is to exercise jurisdiction shall immediately reside with United States military authorities, if they so request, from the commission of the offense until completion of all judicial proceedings.”

According to this provision, the Marines will remain under the custody of American authorities for the duration of the investigation until the end of trial. Another provision of the VFA states that “in the event Philippine judicial proceedings are not completed within one year, the United States shall be relieved of any obligations under this paragraph.”

There is no such thing as a “speedy trial” in the Philippines. Criminal cases can be delayed for years and the U.S. will not need to do much to cause a delay in the proceedings that will deprive the Philippine courts of jurisdiction over the case.

It should be noted that President George W. Bush’s refusal to sign the United Nations agreement creating an international criminal court system is because he does not want U.S. soldiers to be subject to the jurisdiction of non-American courts as occurred in 1996 when three U.S. servicemen were convicted in the abduction and rape of a 12-year old Okinawa girl and sentenced by a panel of three Japanese judges to seven years in a Japanese prison.

A drive-by incidental victim of the Subic rapists may be Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. As president of a sovereign nation, she has to assure her people, as she did through her spokesperson, that the “Philippines stands for justice, the dignity of women and the rule of law and these shall be pursued and fulfilled by the government. Let every one be assured that we will pursue full justice for the victim and dignity for our country.”

The “inescapable reality” is that she may not be able to assure anyone that this will happen.

Send comments to Rodel50@aol.com.