There doesn’t seem to be a consensus about whether the use of sexual tactics was instigated by interrogators from the CIA, private contractors, military intelligence officers, or all three. Nonetheless, all three entities appear to have been involved. From what I have been able to glean from official reports, witness and detainee testimony, and the stories of interrogators themselves, sexual tactics in interrogation involve sexual humiliation and homophobia, but less manhandling than what the Abu Ghraib photos depicted. This observation would conform to standard regulations restricting physical aggression in military interrogation, and also reflects the American predilection for psychological coercion versus physical force. Sexual tactics in interrogation are usually directed at one prisoner at a time, in isolation. Whereas the purpose of posing prisoners in explicitly sexual ways for photographs was to create embarrassing evidence that could be used to coerce prisoners into becoming informants, the use of sexual tactics in interrogation is aimed at “breaking” detainees by means of openly attacking their masculinity.
The use of American female sexuality as a weapon against Islamic enemies exploits a number of cultural biases and archetypes. The stereotype of Arab masculinity as fragile leads to soldiers’ treating it as a point of vulnerability, while the stereotype of women as less aggressive makes their sexual harassment of detainees seem to be milder and more acceptable than other forms of torture. We don’t really have a language for comprehending female sexual aggression as rape, and that lack diminishes our ability to perceive rape as such. Soldiers are trained to rationalize any form of violence against the enemy that is permitted within given rules of engagement, and measure all demands made of their bodies against the ultimate sacrifice of death. At the same time, the proliferation of erotic exhibitionism both as subcultural practice and as popular cultural entertainment in late-capitalist America generates a dominant interpretive framework for participating in and witnessing sexualized torture that favors a reading of it as something else: erotic play and illicit pleasure, for both the viewers and those viewed.
If you want to read more about FIGHT THE POWER, try:
• The Not-Rape Epidemic BY LATOYA PETERSON
• When Pregnancy Is Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Be Pregnant BY TILOMA JAYASINGHE
If you want to read more about MEDIA MATTERS, try:
• A Woman’s Worth BY JAVACIA N. HARRIS
• The Fantasy of Acceptable “Non-Consent”: Why the Female Sexual Submissive Scares Us (and Why She Shouldn’t) BY STACEY MAY FOWLES
If you want to read more about RACE RELATING, try:
• Queering Black Female Heterosexuality BY KIMBERLY SPRINGER
• Killing Misogyny: A Personal Story of Love, Violence, and Strategies for Survival BY CRISTINA MEZTLI TZINTZÚN
11
When Sexual Autonomy Isn’t Enough: Sexual Violence Against Immigrant Women in the United States
BY MIRIAM ZOILA PÉREZ
Women Crossing Borders
The most common way for immigrants coming from Latin America to enter the United States is by crossing at some point along the approximately two-thousand-mile U.S./Mexico border. Immigrants cross on foot, in vehicles, in trunks of cars, by wading through the Rio Grande. They have to avoid checkpoints, border patrols, fences, and barbed wire. Female immigrants taking on this increasingly dangerous journey face an added risk during the crossing: sexual assault and rape. In a 2006
Boston Globe
article, Julie Watson wrote, “Rape has become so prevalent that many women take birth control pills or shots before setting out to ensure they won’t get pregnant. Some consider rape ‘the price you pay for crossing the border,’ said Teresa Rodriguez, regional director of the UN Development Fund for Women.”
1
Many of us who work in reproductive health in cities with large Latina populations see the effects of these abuses firsthand. Women arrive here with untreated sexually transmitted infections that they were given while crossing, as well as with unintended pregnancies. Women are often abused by everyone from the
coyotes
they hire to take them across the border, to other men in their groups, to officials they encounter along the way.
A May 2008
Chicago Tribune
series on immigration addressed this violence: “Sometimes female migrants are sold by gangs along the border, used as lures to attract male migrants, or raped, say officials at Grupo Beta, the immigrant protection service in Nogales, Mexico, on the Arizona border. ‘Women are used like meat on a hook [by the smugglers] to attract more men to their groups,’ says Dr. Elizabeth Garcia Mejia, the head of Grupo Beta in Nogales.”
2
While there are invariably connections between the sexual abuses immigrant women face and the wider rape culture within the United States, there are also very different things at stake. What would a world free from sexual violence look like for immigrant women? Do the strategies employed by mainstream U.S. feminists to combat rape serve immigrant women?
Traditional attempts to combat rape in the United States have taken an individualized educational approach: Teach women to avoid “risky” behaviors (wearing skimpy clothing, drinking alcohol, walking alone), empower them to say no, and encourage men to respect boundaries. Newer, more feminist attempts have focused on reclaiming women’s sexual autonomy and pleasure as a way to combat rape. For immigrant women whose bodies are being turned into a commodity, both of these methods fall short. Their bodies are a commodity to be exchanged in return for passage across the border, primarily because of their socioeconomic vulnerability. This is true at the U.S./Mexico border, as well as the Mexico/Guatemala border. Women who are raped while crossing or sexually assaulted by immigration officials (or while in custody) are not protected by these preventative measures. On top of it all, immigrant women have a particularly hard time speaking out about the abuses. First of all, reporting abuses they suffered while crossing the border without documents carries with it the obvious and understandable fear of deportation or criminal penalty. Additionally, much of the time women who report are asked to cooperate in the prosecution of their abusers, both for their sexual assaults and for their smuggling activity. They fear retribution on the part of the
coyotes
and other individuals involved in border crossing—and for good reason. Immigrant women in these situations are in one of the most powerless of circumstances, and few, if any, people are advocating on their behalf. The traditional individualistic efforts to combat rape fall way short when the abuses against immigrant women occur in part because of their position in the larger structures of poverty and racism. Even the efforts to empower women and ensure their sexual autonomy, which are obviously important, won’t serve immigrant women until we work to correct the larger class imbalances that force them into these vulnerable positions.
When we take a step back from the experiences of individual immigrants crossing into the United States, we can see a complex institutional structure that aids and abets these forms of sexual violence. First, there is the racist and classist U.S. immigration policy. Based on a quota system, the number of visas available to immigrants from Latin America is severely limited, making it difficult to gain access legally. U.S. foreign economic policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have worsened the economic situation in Latin America, creating that much more demand to enter the United States.
3
In response, a large black market has developed for helping immigrants cross without documents.
Things have only worsened in recent years as the Bush administration has led an immigration crackdown. Primarily, this has involved militarizing certain sections of the border, planning for a U.S./Mexico border fence, and increasing border patrol along highly trafficked areas. It has been documented that rather than stemming the flow of people across the border, these actions serve only to increase the likelihood of deaths from border crossings, by pushing the immigrants to less trafficked and more dangerous parts of the border.
4
This militarization also increases immigrants’ reliance on
coyotes
and other smugglers, who charge huge fees and often sexually abuse the women in their charge.
Human Trafficking and Sexual Abuse
These abuses are not limited to women crossing the U.S./Mexico border. Female immigrants from all over the world face different forms of exploitation in the United States The Human Trafficking and Asian Pacific Islander Women fact sheet published by the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF) reveals that human trafficking has become a large black-market industry in the United States—46 percent of human-trafficking victims are forced into different forms of sex work, and Asian Pacific Islander (API) women represent the largest group of women trafficked into the United States.
5
This trafficking can take on many forms, including women’s being brought into this country without documentation and held captive by their traffickers, forced to work for little or no money and in substandard conditions; international marriages (also known as bride trafficking), where women are paired up via international marriage broker agencies and then abused by their American partners; and women’s being brought from their country of origin as domestic workers, and then mistreated by their employers.
The common link between of all these trafficking cases is that the women are dependent on their abusers for their immigration status. It is the ultimate form of control, as their ability to be in the United States is connected to their relationship (personal, romantic, or business) with their sponsor. This creates the power imbalance that facilitates these abuses and makes it extremely difficult for women (and all people) to escape these situations without facing the threat of deportation. If a woman marries a U.S. citizen, her immigration status is dependent on their relationship. If a woman comes to the United States to serve as a domestic worker or child-care provider with an American family, her visa is contingent on her employment with them. All of these circumstances leave women extremely vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. U.S. immigration policies are partially to blame, as well as the foreign countries that do not do a sufficient job of protecting women in these situations and educating them about their rights. Once again, we see how immigrant women are particularly vulnerable to rape and sexual abuse because of their socioeconomic position, an issue that current strategies for combating rape do not address directly.
Controlling Reproduction: Another Form of Sexual Violence Against Immigrant Women
A 2006
Ms.
magazine exposé on sweatshop labor in garment factories in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) found that some women employed there were coerced into having abortions for fear of losing their jobs: “According to a 1998 investigation by the Department of Interior Office of Insular Affairs, a number of Chinese garment workers reported that if they became pregnant, they were ‘forced to return to China to have an abortion or forced to have an illegal abortion’ in the Marianas.”
6
This is not the only attempt at institutional control over immigrant women’s reproduction. In the early 1970s, medical students and community activists at the USC-Los Angeles County hospital uncovered that hundreds of Mexican-origin women in the U.S. had been sterilized without their consent. Most of the women were sterilized shortly after delivering by cesarean section. This coercion took various forms, from the women’s being asked to sign consent forms in English (when most spoke only Spanish), women’s being told that the procedure was reversible, or women who were offered the operation while in labor.
7
Because of the way they impact and manipulate women’s sexual and reproductive lives, coercively sterilizing women, forcing them through economic incentives (like the threat of being fired) to terminate pregnancies, and offering them long-term birth control at no or low cost are all forms of sexual violence against immigrant women. Racist population-control philosophies are behind these policies and practices, from the myth about immigrant women using “anchor babies” to stay in the United States to misconceptions and fears about overpopulation among certain racial and ethnic groups.
Moving Forward: Fighting Back Against the Abuse of Immigrant Women
When the International Marriage Broker Restriction Act (IMBRA) was first introduced in the United States, its sponsors wanted to name it the Anastasia King Bill, after an Eastern European immigrant woman who was murdered in 2000 by her American husband. For years, Asian Pacific Islander women had been abused and exploited in these international marriages—there were even two very high-profile murders of Filipina women in Washington state in the 1990s.
8
It is no coincidence that in spite of this history, the sponsors wanted to name it after a white immigrant—or that the bill was introduced after Eastern European women were brought into the international marriage market. In the end, the API community mobilized against the naming of the bill, and it was changed to IMBRA. These acts of sexual violence against immigrant women, while invariably very much connected to issues of gender and inequality, are also inseparable from issues of class and race.