Ascent of Women (11 page)

When the reference case began, all sides lined up to have their day in court. The judge, Chief Justice Robert Bauman, listened to months of testimony, called on dozens of witnesses and ultimately made his lengthy and careful judgment. He ruled that though the ban on the practice of polygamy infringed on some sections of the Charter, polygamy remained illegal in Canada. He wrote that “the harms associated with the practice are endemic; they are inherent,” and that the harms found in polygamous societies “are not simply the product of individual misconduct; they arise inevitably out of the practice.” He further stated, “There is no such thing as so-called good polygamy.”

His judgment was in keeping with attitude changes the world over: the oppression of women not only hurts individuals but also hinders economies and holds back progress. A judgment
impossible to imagine even a decade earlier now seemed inevitable.

His comprehensive legal opinion is the first in the world to fully expose the effects of polygamy. In his conclusion he listed harms done, an itemization worth quoting at length.

(a) It creates a pool of unmarried men with the attendant increase in crime and anti-social behaviour;

(b) The increased competition for women creates pressure to recruit increasingly younger brides into the marriage market;

(c) This competition causes men (as fathers, husbands and brothers) to seek to exercise more control over the choices of women, increasing gender inequality and undermining female autonomy and rights. This is exacerbated by larger age disparities between husbands and wives in both polygynous and monogamous relationships;

(d) Men reduce investment in wives and offspring as they spread their resources more thinly across larger families and increasingly channel those resources into obtaining more wives.

(e) While polygyny increases the value of women in the marriage market, women do not realize the added value since men manipulate social institutions in ways that facilitate their control of women. These institutions include early and arranged marriages, the payment of bride-price, easy divorce and the devaluing of romantic love. Among the costs are depressed mental health for women and poorer outcomes for their children.

(f) Women in polygynous relationships are at an elevated risk of physical and psychological harm. They face higher rates of domestic violence and abuse, including sexual abuse. Competition for material and emotional access to a shared
husband can lead to fractious co-wife relationships. These factors contribute to the higher rates of depressive disorders and other mental health issues that women in polygynous relationships face. They have more children, are more likely to die in childbirth and live shorter lives than their monogamous counterparts. They lack reproductive autonomy, and report high rates of marital dissatisfaction and low levels of self-esteem. They also fare worse economically, as resources may be inequitably divided or simply insufficient.

(g) Children in polygynous families face higher infant mortality, even when accounting for economic status and other relevant variables. They tend to suffer more emotional, behavioural and physical problems, as well as lower educational achievement. These outcomes are likely the result of higher levels of conflict, emotional stress and tension in polygynous families. In particular, rivalry and jealousy among co-wives can cause significant emotional problems for their children. The inability of fathers to give sufficient affection and disciplinary attention to all of their children can further reduce children’s emotional security. Children are also at enhanced risk of psychological and physical abuse and neglect.

(h) Early marriage for girls is common, frequently to significantly older men. The resultant early sexual activity, pregnancies and childbirth have negative health implications for girls and also significantly limit their socio-economic development. Shortened inter-birth intervals pose a heightened risk of problems for both mother and child.

(i) The sex ratio imbalance inherent in polygyny means that young men are forced out of polygamous communities to sustain the ability of senior men to accumulate more wives.
These young men and boys often receive limited education as a result, and must navigate their way outside their communities with few life skills and little social support.

The judgment, handed down on November 23, 2011, was hailed by women’s groups across Canada and around the world. The archaic demands of fundamentalists had been challenged and stopped. It’s a sign of the times. As the woman in Bountiful said when I slipped past the gate so many years ago, “When the silence is broken, the secrets will lose their power.”

Still, as this book went to press, the provincial government of British Columbia had taken no action against the polygamists of Bountiful.

THREE

Cultural Contradictions

If your culture oppresses women, change it.

— F
ARIDA
S
HAHEED
,
United Nations
Independent Expert on Cultural Rights

J
ustifying violence in the name of culture is an old story. I’ve been its unhappy witness while reporting on the status of women in a dozen different places. I remember a UN official in Kandahar speaking to me with the patronizing air of a functionary in January 2001 about the Taliban rules that didn’t allow women to work outside their homes and forbade girls to go to school. He asked me, “When are you going to get it through your head that what’s happening to the women of Afghanistan is cultural.” I remember a diplomat in New York telling me, with exaggerated patience, “What you need to try to understand is that practices such as female genital mutilation and child marriage are cultural, and it’s not our business to interfere.”

In fact, in most of the countries where I work as a journalist, the thugs in power are quick to tell me, “You’re not from here. You’re not part of our culture, so you have no right to write about our women.” Speaking up about someone else’s culture is indeed a delicate task. Exposing the truth about cultural contradictions has been a hazardous voyage for the courageous women who dare
to risk the wrath of those who see themselves as the keepers of the cultural key in order to tell the truth about the price women pay for the so-called belonging that being part of a culture implies. Culture flies like a banner of pride. But it also covers a host of misogynist acts that have oppressed women for centuries.

Farida Shaheed was appointed as the United Nations Independent Expert on Cultural Rights in 2009. It was surely a sign of the times as the UN had assiduously avoided tangling with “cultural” issues such as child marriage in the past, lest they inflame one country or another with comments seen as interfering. Shaheed’s appointment was tantamount to an announcement that “culture” is no longer acceptable as an excuse for the ill treatment of women and girls. She has worked for women’s rights in Pakistan for three decades, first starting an NGO called Shirkat Gah in Lahore so that women could be educated about the laws that govern them and then as one of the founders of an organization called Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML).

“Violence against women is always justified in the name of culture,” she says. “Whether the culture is translated into laws [such as the personal status laws in Egypt] or is part of the system [the presumed and approved behaviour of a tribe], this is always the excuse. And it is not acceptable.” She’s taken a daring new stand that is bound to contribute to the revolution going on in the lives of women today. In her new position, she asks women to shift the paradigm from culture as an obstacle to rights, to demanding the cultural rights that are prescribed in the UN’s International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. She refers to the precise wording of the covenant that says, “All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue
their economic, social and cultural development.” Her goal is to flip the thinking from “I can’t (go to school, work, decide when to marry) because of my culture” to “I can decide for myself because of my cultural rights.”

Rather than backing down in the face of fundamentalists who claim that culture is no one else’s business, she asserts that one can freely determine cultural development. It’s a bold position. Cultural rights presume the right to freedom of association and conscience and action. Shaheed doesn’t mince words. “Too many states say this is our culture and we can’t change it, can’t make progress. The whole world backs down when someone says it’s our culture, not yours, so mind your own business. We need to say no matter where oppression exists or to whom it is happening, it’s not acceptable. These are minimum standards we have all agreed to as an international community and we’re not accepting deviations regardless of what the excuse is. I don’t care if it’s traditional or new, if [a practice is] discriminatory, it’s just not acceptable.”

Women in more than seventy countries who work with Shaheed’s international solidarity network, WLUML, have been laying the foundation for this kind of discussion of culture since they started in 1984. Their goal was to provide information, support and a collective space for women whose lives are shaped, conditioned or governed by laws and customs said to derive from Islam. Almost immediately they started asking the tough questions: How does your [religious leader’s] interpretation of my culture affect me? Who is deciding my fate? What right do you have to do that? How did the jurisprudence of this country arrive at the laws it uses? The answers to these questions, or more precisely the courage the women displayed in even asking them, has contributed to the tipping point that women are reaching today.

Their work has spread to more than seventy countries from South Africa to Uzbekistan, Senegal to Indonesia and Brazil to France. Since they are trying to reach women whose lives are controlled by Muslim law, they work in countries or states where Islam is the state religion, or in secular states that have Muslim majorities, and also in Muslim communities where political groups are demanding religious laws. In fact, wherever Muslim women live, this organization is available to strengthen their individual and collective struggles for equality and rights.

One of the first issues the organization tackled was the notion that the Muslim world was one big homogeneous family. It is not. Islam is complicated when it comes to interpretation: laws said to be Islamic vary from one context to the next and originate from diverse sources (religious, customary, colonial and secular). WLUML needed to immediately uncover the different layers of laws that affected women from one country to another and to determine how they differed within cultural, social and political contexts. For example, in one Muslim state women were required to cover their faces, and in another they didn’t even have to wear head scarves.

The network achieves its goals by moving Muslim women out of isolation, creating links between them and global equality-seeking women. By demystifying the diverse sources of control over women’s lives, the network shows women how to challenge the rules they live with.

Combatting violence against women is a theme that cuts across all of WLUML’s projects and activities. In 2010, the organization published a particularly astute book,
Control and Sexuality: The Revival of Zina Laws in Muslim Contexts
by Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Vanja Hamzic, a collection of essays that
explain how culture and/or religion are invoked to justify laws that criminalize women’s sexuality and subject them to cruel, inhuman and degrading forms of punishment.

Shaheed feels that the publication is very timely, coming out just as issues of culture and human rights are being debated, often for the first time, in Muslim states, and subjecting the hated Zina laws (relating to “unlawful sexual intercourse,” including extramarital and premarital sex) to a rare public examination. The authors explain that Zina laws were almost obsolete when the resurgence of Islam as a political and spiritual force late in the twentieth century saw them revived, codified and made part of the criminal justice system in several countries. In Pakistan, they were reactivated in 1979 by the military ruler Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq when he announced the Islamization of Pakistan with what was called the Hadood Ordinance. While many, including Farida Shaheed, saw the move as an attempt on Zia’s part to stay in power by appealing to extremists, the refreshed Zina laws were perilous to women. The legal punishment for adultery under the Zina code was death by stoning. The law required a raped woman to produce four male witnesses to prove she hadn’t caused the rape. Shaheed and her colleagues in Pakistan worked tirelessly to overturn these draconian laws, and finally they did it. “Rape and sexual assault in Pakistan have gone back to the penal code, the Hadood Ordinance has been reformed,” she says of their victory in the courts in 2007. “But it took twenty-seven years.”

Challenging the sacred texts that fundamentalists insist underpin such laws is a tricky business since criticism of Islam is considered to be blasphemous, and blasphemy is punishable by death. But women’s groups such as WLUML are using international human rights law to force a dialogue with political Islam.
They are well aware that improving women’s legal and social positions is a non-starter as long as patriarchal interpretations of the Quran remain unchallenged. The gender-based discussion that has started between traditionalism and modernism in the Muslim world is being hailed as progress for women. But it’s also a flashpoint for politically motivated fundamentalists, who heap scorn (and sometimes worse) on women who speak out for equality rights. A few years ago when I was in Kabul, Afghanistan, I got into a discussion about women’s rights with a mullah who was clearly appalled by the suggestion that women were equal to men. He said, “Get out of here with your Western human rights.”

As far as I know, human rights aren’t Western or Eastern, they’re human.

~

After 9/11, the world was drawn to the human rights catastrophe taking place in Afghanistan. U.S. president George W. Bush claimed that he was invading Afghanistan to rescue the women, but a more honest explanation was that the soldiers happened to stumble over burka-clad women on their way to avenge the attack on the World Trade towers. In fact, throughout history no military or government has ever gone anywhere to rescue women, particularly to a place where the unequal treatment of women is ordained as the holy word of God. Women have learned that if they want to make change they have to do it themselves.