Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (34 page)

Another issue targeted by One Billion Rising, as well as by WHO, Care International, the Carter Center, and other organizations, is female genital cutting (FGC). This name (unlike female genital mutilation) does not immediately alienate the people, mainly women, who perpetuate the practice but also does not minimize it as “female circumcision.” It is much more invasive than male circumcision, involving at least the cutting out of part or all of the clitoris, the center of most women’s sexual experience and the only human organ that has no purpose except pleasure. Often it also involves cutting away parts of the labia and even bringing the cut edges together to seal off most of the vaginal opening. As traditionally performed, it commonly leads to medical and surgical complications that can be life-threatening. It leads to a lifelong reduction in the quality of a woman’s sexual enjoyment, which is often part of the goal.

In Africa (including North Africa) an estimated 100 million girls and women over the age of ten have undergone some form of this, with another 40 million in Asia and immigrant groups in the West. According to a 2012 report by Orchid Project, a charity focused on FGC, it remains legal in the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, India, and Pakistan and common although illegal in Malaysia, Indonesia,
and Iraqi Kurdistan. A new American phenomenon, “vacation cutting,” involves girls in African immigrant families being sent to Africa for the summer and being operated on there, often without advance notice and against their will. (Federal law banned the practice in the United States in 1996, and in 2013 it became illegal to transport girls for this purpose.) Although it is common in Muslim countries, it has no basis in Islam; a meeting of Islamic scholars in Cairo in 2006 resulted in a fatwa issued against FGC by the grand mufti of Egypt. The Carter Center is working to build an international religious consensus against it, as described in the former president’s 2014 book.

Eliminating it is one goal of Molly Melching’s organization Tostan—“breakthrough” in the Wolof language of Senegal. Melching moved there in 1974 and began building trust and friendships. Tostan’s Community Empowerment Program, now deployed in eight countries and reaching 200,000 people, takes three years to implement in a village, with a trained facilitator fluent in the local language. In a June 2013 interview by Melinda Gates herself, Melching said it is “understandable that people are outraged when made aware of some harmful practices . . . but I learned in Senegal that aggressiveness does not lead to effectiveness . . . that combative, judgmental methods actually led to people shutting down and turning off.”

She also explained, “We never accuse or fight the men, particularly the traditional and religious leaders. Rather we see them as allies, as important leaders for change in the movement. . . . There are many male heroes in this movement in the eight African countries where we have been working.” The Tostan workers learned not to focus on one change and, especially, not to preach; Melching is justly proud of Tostan’s inroads against child marriage and in favor of educating girls. But she also says, “The courage of the rural women in this movement to end FGC has particularly amazed and deeply touched me.” In many cultures you are not considered a real woman unless you are cut, and if you are to avoid it as a girl, your mother, who was herself cut, must
defy
her
mother and other women in her family and the village—not to mention the families of men who may reject you as a future wife.

Change can occur only village by village, and it works best if people end up thinking it was their idea. When Melching heard rural Senegalese women and men say that child marriage and genital cutting did not fit
their
values, she knew she was getting somewhere, and the fact that it took decades was of the essence. Now, about 5,500 communities in Senegal and 1,000 more in eight other countries have declared publicly that they have abandoned FGC. We don’t have to imagine 100 percent follow-through to believe that Tostan made a difference. As a Wolof proverb says, “It is better to find a way out than to stand and scream at the forest.”

CARE (Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere) is a large, old charity—I remember CARE Packages, which began in the late 1940s as U.S. Army surplus meals ready to eat, sent to pockets of hunger in postwar Europe. CARE has long been focused on world poverty but has now made bettering women’s lives its strategic path to that goal. According to its statistics, 70 percent of the world’s 1.3 billion poorest people are women; within that 1.3 billion, women contribute two-thirds of the working hours but earn 10 percent of the income and hold 1 percent of the property. Two-thirds of illiterate adults are women, and 60 percent of children not in school are girls; in India, make that 80 percent.

A wide-ranging report titled “Women’s Empowerment” says, “A key breakthrough in CARE’s evolving understanding of the underlying causes of poverty has been the explicit recognition of power as the currency of material and social well-being.” This realization—I, for one, was surprised by the use of the language of the counterculture to reorient a large, old, conventional charity—led to the I Am Powerful campaign, designed (under CEO Helene Gayle) to “reposition” the organization’s “brand.” In 2008 a case study at Harvard Business School and a special issue of
Advertising & Society
Review
were devoted to this rebranding, which worked like a charm. Once associated chiefly with emergency packages—and it does still respond to crises—CARE is now known as the largest organization using women’s empowerment as a lever to lift the poor, men and women alike, out of poverty.

CARE’s field research in India, Ecuador, Bangladesh, and Yemen shows that women feel empowered by self-worth and dignity, bodily integrity and freedom from coercion, control and influence over resources, and collective effort and solidarity. This may sound like a crisp summary of UN Women’s
Transformative Stand-Alone Goal,
except that CARE was years ahead of the UN in making women’s lives the top priority and no doubt served as a model. This starts with educating girls.

Again: girls who go to school postpone motherhood, have fewer, healthier, better-educated children, ensure better health for themselves
and
their husbands, are less likely to be abused by men, and earn more over their lifetimes. The impact is “dose”-related, improving with each added year of school, with a transgenerational multiplier, as educated girls have more educated daughters and yet more educated granddaughters.

In a project in northern Benin, girls’ school enrollment doubled in four years, an increase of eight thousand girls, with plummeting dropout rates and rising academic achievement. In southern Sudan, after years of genocidal war, CARE established the first real school system; where most people had never met an educated woman, they were introduced to their own educated fellow countrywomen, who were sent out to visit remote villages and enroll girls. CARE developed a series of schoolbooks, based on many interviews with southern Sudanese girls, in which characters “are smart, engaging and bold girls who challenge local notions of what a girl ‘should’ be.” CARE also funds centers to shield women from violence within refugee camps in Kenya and Chad, as well as on Sri Lanka’s east coast in the wake of decades of civil war.

In several places around the world, CARE has adopted versions of
microfinance, developed in the 1970s by Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank (among others) and laureled with a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Many banks and NGOs have applied it over the years; the consensus was that microloans work better if given to women rather than men. Grameen Bank clients have been more than 90 percent poor women, usually in groups (solidarity lending). This was based on the idea that women are more likely than men to repay, to put the loan to good use, and to respond to social pressures from other women in their groups.

These assumptions have been confirmed in some studies but not in others, and they remain controversial. That is why CARE has implemented its “Microfinance-Plus” program, which acknowledges that the loan may not be enough. In India, for example, the “plus” involves training in human rights, health, and governance. A controlled study showed that women who had social, political, and business-development training for three years developed greater independence and increased influence and equality in the home. They spent 125 percent more money on the education of their children and 43 percent more on health care than women in a control group.

The research also raised concerns about the much more widespread microfinance-only programs; these can cause reactive abuse of women by men, who may also use their wives to get money. But in Niger, 150,000 women have been recruited to Women on the Move, which emphasizes small savings-and-loan co-ops, with similar positive results—including a small but unprecedented number of women running for and winning local office.

Finally, as part of its fight against AIDS, CARE has for two decades helped sex workers in Bangladesh. Through a local organization, SHAKTI (Stopping HIV/AIDS Through Knowledge and Training Initiatives; the acronym is also the Bangla word for “strength”), CARE workers have trained women to negotiate safe sex and condom use and to form self-help groups. One named itself Durjoy Nari
Shanga—“Difficult-to-Conquer Women.” In the first phase, condom use went from 12 percent to 73 percent for brothel-based sex workers and 51 percent for those working the streets. Harassed by police, they learned to say, “Like you, we have an equal right to an income.” Looking back, they said, “We realized we are also human beings.” It’s not your grandmother’s CARE.

We say that abuse of women leads to a kind of slavery, but of course there is also plenty of outright slavery, no metaphors needed. While for obvious reasons it is difficult to get accurate numbers, good sources say that there are between 21 and 30 million slaves in the world today,
more than at any time in history
. According to the UN’s Global Report on Trafficking in Persons for 2012, about half the trafficked people detected in one year were bought and sold for sexual exploitation. According to the U.S. State Department, some 800,000 people are trafficked across international borders each year, around 80 percent of these are women, and around 70 percent of those are sexual slaves. This means that more than half (nearly 450,000) of the people bought and sold each year are girls and women bound in sexual slavery.

Nonsexual slave labor includes forced begging (for the slave owner’s benefit), carpet weaving, brick making, wood burning for industrial charcoal, mining and quarrying, commercial fishing, and coffee and chocolate growing, among many other harsh jobs. Almost everyone reading (or writing) this book buys products every day that are partly produced by slaves.

Women and girls make up an estimated 55 percent of such labor slaves. However, the most profitable way by far to make use of someone you have bought and paid for is to prostitute her (or, in much smaller numbers, him). It is the third most profitable illegal business in the world, after drugs and weapons trafficking, totaling over $30 billion a year internationally, almost half in
industrial and postindustrial
countries. Sexual slaves are overwhelmingly female. Most of them are under age eighteen when sold, and resistance is beaten out of
them early on. Severe beatings result from escape attempts or disloyalty to your owners, such as talking to people trying to help you. You service large numbers of customers, who also beat and otherwise abuse you; welts, bruises, and cigarette burns are common. Sexually transmitted infections are rampant. Many sex slaves are abused until they die—often in just a few years.

Opposition to girls’ education converged on the risk of slavery in Nigeria in April 2014, when the violent Islamist group Boko Haram—the name means “Western education is a sin”—kidnapped more than two hundred girls from their school in a northern village. A few weeks later, the organization’s leader threatened to sell the girls, saying he would “give their hands in marriage because they are our slaves. We would marry them out at the age of 9. We would marry them out at the age of 12.” Forced child marriage is probably the best fate they would face if they were actually sold by their captors. A wave of anti-government protest, rare in Nigeria, demanded action. By June the girls’ location was approximately known, but rescue was considered impossible; the group could be expected to murder the girls during any attempt, since these extremists have slaughtered hundreds of people in the past, children included. They have attacked the girls’ village and killed some of their parents. In September, the girls were still captives, some dispersed to unknown places, but the Nigerian government was negotiating for their possible release.

Given the power of girls’ education, not surprisingly some men oppose it with all the violence of a male supremacist past. The Pakistani Taliban burned down schools and tried to murder a 15-year-old who had raised her voice in favor of education, shooting her in the head; she barely survived, but two years later, she is loved by the world as “Malala,” and her voice is stronger than ever. Ten men who conspired to murder her were arrested in September 2014, and in October she won the Nobel Prize.

And in other echoes of the darkest days of the human past, the Islamist terror army known as ISIS (or ISIL, or the Islamic State) has
mounted genocidal campaigns that include the mass murder of men of other religious groups and the wholesale rape and enslavement of those victims’ wives and daughters. For example, between 1,500 and 4,000 women and girls from the Yazidi minority group in Iraq have been abducted, raped, and tortured, some sold to terrorist fighters as brides, others killing themselves to avoid sexual slavery.

But others have been and are being saved, throughout the world. The CNN Freedom Project collaborates with Free the Slaves, which exposes all forms of slavery, mounts raids to free child slaves, pays for their schooling and books afterward, helps families start businesses so that they won’t sell their children, and urges national governments as well as the UN to take more concerted action to root out and prosecute slave owners and traffickers. Boycotts of companies identified as using slave labor, long prison terms for violators, rescue operations, campaigns directed at customers, and other strategies are growing in size and effectiveness, but much more action is needed. Free2Work, a program of the organization Not for Sale, grades companies in slave-using industries. For example, 40 percent of all commercial chocolate is produced with slaves playing a key role. All the most recognizable names on the wrappers of the chocolate we buy earn grades of C- or worse, mostly D-.