Authors: Mickey Huff
The fact that homosexual men are raped and assaulted in prison more often than heterosexual men is no great surprise. Given the history of pathologization and violence directed at homosexuals in the
United States and the continuing stigmatization and legal discrimination against them, acts that negatively effect male or female homosexuals are perceived as less damaging and more justified by American culture. In February 2011, a West Virginia coal miner claimed that he was threatened, verbally mistreated, and his property vandalized because of his sexual orientation. He was unable to bring a formal legal complaint against his employer because West Virginia’s antidiscrimination laws do not apply to anyone on the basis of sexual orientation.
18
Although a number of states and municipalities have included sexual orientation and gender presentation in their antidiscrimination policies regarding employment, education, and housing, West Virginia failed this year to pass two bills that would have included sexual orientation in their antidiscrimination laws.
Of course, one of the major organizations opposing these bills was the West Virginia Family Foundation, which said its opposition was based on its endorsement of “deviant behavior.”
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Although the Kinsey reports of the 1950s dispelled the myth that homosexual acts were deviant or abnormal, multiple “family” foundations and organizations continue to use the rhetoric of mental illness, deviance, and criminality to convince legislators that certain persons should continue to be treated as second-class citizens based on their sexuality. This is an issue that will not be solved without a formal amendment to the Civil Rights Act that includes sexual orientation. Although numerous executive orders and interpretations of the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 by the Office of Personnel Management supposedly bar discrimination in federal employment based on sexual orientation, they have never been expanded to include private sector workplaces and are rarely enforced within federal workplaces.
20
Until homosexual persons or persons who engage in same-sex acts are afforded the same rights and protections as all other citizens of the United States, we will continue to see violence perpetrated against them en masse, as well as their exclusion from global and domestic policy decisions and their continued denigration as deviants or criminals.
While the United States’ formal eugenic program of sterilization, castration, and detention of the poor, “feebleminded,” and “criminally inclined” citizens ran between the mid-nineteenth century and the mid-twentieth century, right up until we entered World War II and backed
away from any scientific discourse that resembled that of the Nazi regime, we continue to subtly endorse population control initiatives in the third world and Global South, where we believe human lives are less valuable than our own. Our endorsement of the Peruvian sterilization program was indirect, but part of a larger global push to stem the growth of the population in other parts of the world in order to allow the US to have continued access to dwindling global resources.
The United States must take responsibility for fostering eugenic policies across the globe through our endorsement of population control campaigns in the Global South and through our key role in United Nations policymaking.
21
One of the most recent of these instances occurred between 1995 and 2000 when the Peruvian government, in compliance with the UN Population Fund directives, embarked on a campaign of mass, forced sterilization of mostly poor and indigenous women and men in the province of Anta.
22
The Peruvian government’s National Programme for Reproductive Health and Family Planning issued quotas and payment-per-operation guidelines for doctors who were required to locate and sterilize as many Peruvians as possible, using deceit and coercion when necessary.
In 2009, the Women’s Association of Forced Sterilisation Victims of Anta brought a lawsuit against four government officials for what was done to them, but the statute of limitations on crimes of bodily harm had passed, so the case was shelved. Now the Association is bringing new complaints of crimes against humanity and torture against government officials. The Peruvian government has admitted the eugenic nature of its family planning program and has conceded that over three hundred thousand forced sterilizations took place under the program’s directives.
23
Still, there is little chance that the complaints filed by these victims of medical torture and government sterilization will be accepted—and even if they were, a conviction would not serve justice for those who will never again be capable of choosing their own reproductive status.
Often, corporate media coverage of women’s issues becomes distorted by an inability to talk about economic inequity because of an uncritical stance on capitalism. Corporate media coverage of female genital mutilation (FGM) generally focuses on the cultural demand for the act and fails to examine how women in the countries that practice
FGM have very little economic freedom, making them dependant upon men and the culturally-held norms of beauty and marriage. By ignoring the economic role in gender/power dynamics, corporate media analysis fails to examine how increased educational and economic opportunities could give women more freedom to choose their own engagement with genital mutilation practices. In the
New York Times
piece “A Rite of Torture for Girls,” the focus is on the “what and how” of genital mutilation, with a possible solution being to encourage milder forms of mutilation, or to get religious leaders to speak out against it. “People usually torture those whom they fear or despise. But one of the most common forms of torture in the modern world, incomparably more widespread than water-boarding or electric shock, is inflicted by mothers on daughters they love.”
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What the piece fails to address is why women are being forced into this brutal custom in the first place.
This cultural practice fits within a concept of femininity that is rigidly pure and untouched, making them acceptable for marriage. In contrast, the
Daily Nation
story, “Family Pressure on Young Girls for Genitalia Mutilation Continue in Kenya,” addresses the lack of education for young girls, and the threat of being completely ostracized from the community if they do not undergo genital mutilation:
Many girls have been forced to cut short their studies and are married off at a young age while some of them are still in hiding because their parents would disown them after running away to avoid circumcision.… Parents and grandparents in this area tell the young girls they will never get married, and no man would want them if they do not fulfill the rite. Not many women in this region are left to pursue education beyond the age of eight. Young women are told that education was not meant for them because they are supposed to get married and take care of their husbands. Uncircumcised women are generally looked down upon as failed women and discriminated against for not mutilating their genitalia. Because of this, young girls agree to go through with the surgery so that they can be included in the rites of passage so that their community will accept them.
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Corporate media do indeed cover the issue of FGM. However, the
coverage is scant and framed to avoid any conversation about empowering women through educational and economic opportunities that are denied them. Further, there are no discussions in corporate media about the cultural contexts in which these acts take place, which would broaden the scope of our knowledge on the issue and allow a deeper analysis of the reasons why this tradition has been kept alive, as well as why many oppose it.
Since the United States’ invasion of the sovereign state of Iraq in 2003, countless civilians have been murdered by our forces and those fighting against our military. One of the invisible (perceived as incidental) effects of this war has been that many Iraqi women and female children have been left without the male protection that their culture demands. Though Iraqi women hold some legal human rights, they are immeasurably more vulnerable to violence, sexual violence, and abduction without a male head-of-household to stake claim to the safety of their person.
A Women’s Commission report from 2008 stated that over 4.5 million Iraqis have been displaced by the war and are living as informal refugees either in Iraq or in neighboring countries, though most have not been granted any formal refugee status or protections. According to the report, over fifty thousand women and children who fled to Syria and Jordan as refugees have found themselves victims of sex traffickers and sexual predators.
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With no legal refugee status, work visas, or necessary male protectors in these countries, Iraqi women and children are forced into underground economies of sex—often occasional sexual servitude at best and permanent slavery at worst. With no way to report these crimes, women and children can disappear without a trace into these sexual underworlds at any time.
While the United States has taken some responsibility for the situation these women face, it has mostly taken the form of lip service. While our Secretary of State Clinton, an outspoken human rights advocate for women, has been clear that she believes the abuse of Iraqi women and children must end, we have not yet granted them priority refugee status, which would aid in their resettlement and give them protections under UN law.
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As it stands now, women and children must live and work illegally in Iraq’s neighboring countries. If arrested for legal trespass, they may face deportation back to Iraq
where they will be criminally prosecuted for their own displacement and negotiated strategies for survival. If an arrest is made for prostitution or other crimes of sexuality, the woman can be legally executed if convicted in Iraq in order to avoid further disgrace to her family and to reinforce the importance of conservative sexual morals to the rest of the populace.
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There can be no easy solution to the global problem of human sex trafficking, and the United States certainly does not have a positive record on the prevention of female sexual slavery and trafficking. The US’ first antisex trafficking act was the White-Slave Traffic Act of 1910, commonly known as the Mann Act, which was aimed more at restricting the interstate travel of African American men than protecting female sex slaves. While the American culture of sexual voyeurism has brought to life a massive number of television exposés on the subject and realities of women trafficked throughout our own country, our solution has been to enact harsher and evermore intrusive laws, which add to the prison-industrial complex’s solvency, and gloss over the multiple causes of female sexual slavery which include gender power inequality, limited economic choices for the poorest of women, and the eroticization of sexual violence through media.
To be clear, the US invasion of Iraq contributed definitively to the displacement, vulnerability, and subsequent sexual enslavement of thousands of Iraqi women and children. Yet, to scapegoat Arab cultures as patriarchal, sexually oppressive, and violent to women without examining the pervasiveness of these characteristics in American culture only furthers the rhetoric of American exceptionalism and the excuse for more extensive military imperialism.
One of the major reasons that corporate media do not cover the news stories reported above is because they are characterized as “women’s issues.” Though the term may be useful in some cases to acknowledge a common theme that runs through a series of stories, “women’s issues” is often a recognition of social injustice within the structures of power. We have reported stories that showcase the global UN initiatives, US military policies, state laws, transnational gender ideologies, and domestic gendered power dynamics that have been denigrated as “women’s issues.” The subsumption or mischaracterization of these stories by the corporate media structure is purposeful and aimed at
silencing the majority of the population that would otherwise be outraged at the global and domestic treatment of others at our hands.
1
.
Global Report on the Status of Women in the News Media
, International Women’s Media Foundation, March 24, 2011,
http://www.iwmf.org/pdfs/IWMF-Global-Report.pdf
.
2
. Ibid.
3
. Michael Martinez and Moni Basu, “Abortion Battle Rages in State Legislatures,” CNN, April 14, 2011,
http://articles.cnn.com/2011-04-14/us/abortion.state.laws_1_abortion-providers-abortion-battle-law-that-bans-abortions
.
4
. Monica Davey, “Nebraska Law Sets Limits on Abortion,”
New York Times
, April 13, 2011,
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/14/us/14abortion.html
.
5
. Susan Lee, Henry Ralston, Eleanor Drey, John Partridge, and Mark Rosen, “Fetal Pain: A Systematic Multidisciplinary Review of the Evidence,”
Journal of the American Medical Association
294 (2005): 947–54, doi:10.1001/jama.294.8.947.
6
. Chet Brokaw, “South Dakota Abortion Bill Signed Into Law by Governor Dennis Daugaard,”
Huffington Post
, March 22, 2011,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/03/22/south-dakota-abortion-bil_n_839063.html
.
7
. Lynda Waddington, “Iowa Bills Open Door for Use of Deadly Force to Protect the Unborn,”
Iowa Independent
, February 24, 2011,
http://iowaindependent.com/52869/iowa-bills-open-door-for-use-of-deadly-force-to-protect-the-unborn
.
8
. John Hanna, “Kansas Backs Bill Restricting Abortion Coverage,” Associated Press,
Joplin Globe
, May 13, 2011,
http://www.joplinglobe.com/local/x1227546545/Kansas-backs-bill-restricting-abortion-coverage
.
9
. Mary Plummer, “Pregnant Woman Kicked Out of Bar,” ABC News, January 12, 2011,
http://abcnews.go.com/US/pregnant-lady-turned-illinois-bar/story?id=12600511
.
10
. Megan O’Rourke, “Breastfeeding Mom Mad at Mall,” WDTN, February 14, 2011,
http://www.wdtn.com/dpp/news/local/greene_county/wdtn-Breastfeeding-mom-mad-at-mall-mo
.