Gender and Combat

In its article about the contentious issue of civilians-to-combatants killed in Gaza, the New York Times lists the current death toll as 1,865—including 429 children and 243 women. Similar statistics have come from NPR, BBC, the Washington Post, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, ABC, and a particularly gender-focused post from NDTV, leading more than a few frustrated observers to ask: what about the men? Why does one pregnant woman get an article to herself, when over a thousand grown men are left anonymous? Do women's and children's lives matter more than men's? The obvious answer, as per Israel's justification for the attacks, is that any adult male Palestinian could be a member of Hamas, so his killing is more okay. The NYT article further clarifies: men between the ages of 20 and 29 are most likely to be militants, so gender is relevant. Any man could be a terrorist. He could also be an innocent civilian, but this is Gaza. Killing thousands of innocent people is a risk worth taking. If you kill enough people, they will stop attacking you (see also: Six-Day War, Yom Kippur War, First Intifada, Second Intifada, every conflict in human history. Love cannot drive out hate, only genocide can do that). We'll save "how to create world peace" for another post. Back to gender.

Gaza is a particularly polarizing example because Israel's claims of targeting militants have been met with so much doubt and anger, but reporting of deaths "including women and children" is not new to anyone, and it is a problem. Men are stronger, men are built for war, men are… more able to withstand drone attacks and car bombs? Or just more deserving? Men are overrepresented in armed forces around the world for various reasons: legislation mandating armed service for men or forbidding it for women, reports of sexual harassment, cultural stigmas against "tough" women, and beliefs that masculinity and violence are inherently connected, among others. This is a men's issue, but it's also a women's issue. It is unacceptable that men's deaths are understood to be more morally okay than those of women, and it is also unacceptable that women's role in war is often reduced to that of the innocent victim.

What role do women have in war and armed conflict, beyond adding sympathy to reporting? That varies by context. In conflicts such as those in Liberia, Lebanon, and northern Uganda, women have been kidnapped and forced to fight against their will. In conflicts around the world, women have been taken as prostitutes due to demand by male soldiers or lack of other options, from Japan's "comfort women" in World War II to the Civil War in Sierra Leone to a current increase in prostitution within Syrian refugee camps. Similarly, domestic violence increases in times of war. In some cases, war brings increased regulation of women's dress and lifestyles under the guise of religious devotion, such as in a recent commission by ISIS of women to regulate the lives of other women. The commission, of course, was appointed by men. Just over a week ago I went to a presentation by CARE Austria, who worked with CARE in Nepal, Burundi, and Uganda to study women in post-conflict areas. A Nepal-specific issue was that while many women did fight in Nepal's decade-long conflict, many other women stayed home while their husbands fought and died. In a region where the practice of sati, in which widows are burned at their husbands' funeral pyres, is still practiced often despite being illegal, the influx of Nepali widows meant that thousands more women dealt with this stigma (the full report can be found here). And, of course, women sometimes want to fight. This last point is worth noting: while men's deaths are underreported even when they have no interest in a conflict, women who choose to fight may be imagined as victims of forced combat because no woman would choose that. This denies agency from two genders: for women the agency to choose to fight, for men, the agency not to.

 I have just finished Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's fantastic novel Half of a Yellow Sun, set during the Nigerian Civil War of 1967-1970. While fictional, it does not shy away from (spoiler alert) topics such as gang rape, the impacts of war on families, and heightened gender roles as young men are kidnapped to be soldiers women are left at home to handle any and all domestic burdens. Isabelle Allende's incredible House of the Spirits deals with similar issues, and there may be something to it: while journalists can document the number and genders of people killed in an attack with relative ease, they are less likely to learn about increased domestic violence, gang rape, or gender-based violence within armed forces until later. Adichie and Allende have hindsight and historical research to their advantage, and they use it well.

So are both women and men underrepresented in headlines about armed conflict? Perhaps misrepresented is a better word. Both of their contributions--intentional or not--are ignored or misunderstood to an incredible scale. Pointing out mainly the women and children who are victims of campaigns that kill all genders and all ages both posits women as victims and posits men's lives as less valuable, their deaths less significant. On-the-ground war reporting cannot possibly give us all the information in real time: the domestic violence, forced prostitution, widows shunned by their communities, and other stigmatized issues that happen behind closed doors. It also cannot give us a profile of every man killed, though it would do well to stop placing women in a special category of inherent nonviolence. However, we as readers can look with a critical eye at what is going on and who it is affecting, knowing that the story may be told very differently in the future.

Anti-Trafficking Efforts in Nepal

This summer, I'm living in Nepal as an intern with Chhori, a really neat NGO in the capital city of Kathmandu. After almost ten weeks I'm still having trouble grasping the huge scope of programs Chhori implements, because it's incredible to me that such a small organization is able to do so much. Chhori's programs include:

• Running a shelter for women who have been trafficked into Kathmandu's entertainment sector, and providing them with counseling, job training, formal education, medical treatment, and reintegration into communities
• Publishing a magazine for men to focus on the role men play (or need to play) in preventing domestic violence
• Running short-term mobile counseling camps in Kathmandu's entertainment sector, providing dance bar and brothel workers with physical and psychological medical care and giving them the resources to get out of unsafe situations
• Prenatal counseling and other services to stop Nepal's huge pattern of son preference
• Building an educational program for schools to teach kids about the laws and social issues surrounding human rights abuses in Nepal
• Creating a network for girls who do not have brothers, as certain tasks are assumed to be for men in Nepal, so that these women and girls have other resources to talk to about discrimination and son preference
• Research and data collection on trafficking, entertainment work, domestic violence, and similar issues
• Advocating policy changes and implementation to the Nepali government
• Working with police near the shelter and in red light districts to keep women safe and prosecute traffickers in those areas

It's impressive work and I am so lucky to spend 3 months here learning the ins and outs of the organization. It's one thing to study trafficking and gender discrimination from thousands of miles away (and I did, presenting a paper at a conference in April, and you can find it here), but things are not as cut and dry on the ground. Some police are corrupt and work with brothel owners, some are great and work with NGOs, some just don't have the resources or knowledge to know how to fight trafficking. Some Nepali NGOs refuse to work with anyone else, some are happy to collaborate and share data and methods, some are in between. Vague overarching solutions, including those in the paper I wrote in April, cannot possibly explain or alleviate the huge issue that is human trafficking in South Asia. Some organizations are working together, some police officers do care, some international donors are willing to fund the cause, some programs are effective. Of course some are not and do not, but the resources are there.

Today two of my coworkers and I went to a meeting with representatives from a few other anti-trafficking organizations in Nepal, talking about specific work that is being done and what needs to change and it was so interesting! Here are some points of note:

• Current data is critical. The trafficking scene here changes so quickly—women in Kathmandu are often rotated from brothel to brothel (or dance bar to cabin restaurant) every 2 weeks so that it's hard to find the same woman twice. As tourism patterns change and law enforcement improves in some areas and worsens in others, five-year-old data becomes incredibly inaccurate.
• Accurate data, of course, is also critical. One way to do this is for NGOs to cross-check their estimates (Which border checkpoints are the most common stops for traffickers? Are more women working in dance bars in Bhaktapur or Lalitpur? What is the most common age range of trafficked women?) with each other, and some are pretty reluctant to hand over hard-acquired data. If valuable information is caught up in the selfish goals of NGOs and in bureaucratic disagreements, though, that doesn't help anyone. On the other hand, cross-checking data not only helps NGOs to focus their efforts but also helps prove information to skeptical law enforcement officials.
• No one organization can do everything. Of course any NGO should be thorough with the work it's doing, but it's tempting to see the scope of the problem and criticize groups for not doing enough. My meeting notes from today include many repetitions of the phrase "Who's working on labor trafficking?" or "Why is this organization only focused on women? What about the men who are lied to? This is valid, but at a certain point that has to be left to someone else. Better to be effective in combating one small issue than ineffective in combating ten.
• Sources of valuable information on trafficking patterns include not only current and former victims but also independent journalists, missing persons reports, and even imprisoned traffickers. That last one was pretty surprising to me.
• The need for culturally-specific solutions extends not only to regions (what works in Thailand mights not be effective in Nepal) but also to each subset of one issue. Tiny Hands Nepal, which works to fight trafficking into India, handed everyone a copy of the interview questions they use when talking to women who are at risk of being trafficked to Calcutta or Mumbai, and it was of no use to Chhori, dealing specifically with internal trafficking to the entertainment sector in Kathmandu. That's pretty specific.
• There is a tendency by NGOs to believe they know what's best for a victim better than the victim herself. Just about everyone in the room had seen situations where NGOs forced women out of entertainment work and into shelters, and these women almost always relapsed. Sometimes people really do want to be entertainment workers, and sometimes it is the best option for the time being for any number of reasons: a child at home, a need to live in a certain location, connections to other people (shelters are often intentionally hard to find for security reasons), a desire to be financially independent even if that means sexual harassment on a regular basis. Forcing people into shelters for their own good denies them the agency that is already such a big issue for women who have been trafficked. I now appreciate the significance of Chhori's mobile counseling camps much more than I did at the beginning of arrival: for the hundreds of women who cannot or will not leave their entertainment sector jobs, providing consistent counseling, medical care, and job training is a way to help women transition into safer, better jobs without forcing them into the victimizing world of living in a shelter.
• Taking traffickers to court is often a huge hassle because of the difficulty of providing valid accounts from witnesses and victims while still maintaining privacy and safety for those people. In some countries video testimonies are ok, in some places the technology even for something that simple is lacking, in some areas the courts won't accept that. I had never even considered that issue.

So those are my thoughts and insights for the day. Many more to come I'm sure, and hopefully on similar issues in other parts of the world so that I can see what is different.

Red Bean Ice Cream

Is is acceptable to start your human rights/ migration issues/ global affairs blog with a post on red bean ice cream? Worse, a repost of someone else's red bean ice cream recipe? What if you just need one post to practice formatting? What if you decided at 10pm that you suddenly, desperately needed a blog to work on your writing/html/social commentary and this was the best post you could come up with after dealing with different frustrating platforms from your iffy-internet bedroom in Kathmandu? Then is it ok? What if you lose all of your future readers when they discover that your first blog post was a red bean ice cream recipe link preceded by six rhetorical questions? Well, here it is:

http://food52.com/blog/10637-how-to-make-red-bean-ice-cream-from-scratch

In the future, I will set out to prove that my html abilities to not require me to include the website name in the text of my posts. Sometime I will also own a freezer (and live near a store selling red bean) so I will be able to make my own red bean ice cream. That time is not now.