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Religion and rape

ANNOUNCEMENT: Routledge Focus Book Series on ‘Rape Culture, Religion, and the Bible’

We are delighted to announce our new Routledge Focus book series ‘Rape Culture, Religion, and the Bible’, edited by The Shiloh Project co-directors Caroline Blyth, Katie Edwards and Johanna Stiebert.

Titles are peer-reviewed, short form publications between 20,000-50,000 words, published within 12 weeks of submission.

If you would like to discuss a potential proposal, contact the series editors at shiloh@sheffield.ac.uk

Look out for exciting titles coming later this year!

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CALL FOR PAPERS – Special Journal Issue: The Bible: Transgender and Genderqueer Perspectives

Call for papers: Special Edition of the Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies (JIBS)

The Bible: Transgender and Genderqueer Perspectives

Television shows, news articles, and social media sites are currently crammed with conflicting discourses about transgender (trans) and genderqueer identities. Some of these discourses affirm the authenticity of trans and genderqueer people, while many others attempt to undermine or deny this authenticity. Biblical scholars have begun to explore these conversations, asking how Bible traditions might be read and interpreted in light of trans and genderqueer lives. In this special issue of JIBS, we invite contributors to join this important conversation, focusing specifically on the Bible and biblical scholarship as potential sites of resistance against transphobia and genderqueer intolerance. Topics can include (but are not limited to):

Trans and/or genderqueer hermeneutics: interpreting the Bible through a transgender and/or genderqueer reading lens;

Transfeminism and biblical interpretation;

Biblical interpretation as a source of (or source of resistance against) transphobia and genderqueer intolerance;

Biblical interpretation at the intersection: how biblical traditions can speak to trans and genderqueer identities alongside class, race, ability, and sexuality.

Biblical engagements with indigenous trans and genderqueer identities, including takatāpui, fa’afafine, fakaleiti, fakafifine, akava’ine, vakasalewalewa, palopa, aikāne, faafatama, fakaleiti, māhū, palopa, tangata iratāne, whakawahine, hijra, and Two-Spirit.

Submissions should be between 4000 to 10,000 words.

All submissions will be subject to the usual blind peer review process.

Send proposals to Guest Editor Caroline Blyth (c.blyth@auckland.ac.nz) by 28 February 2019. Deadline for completed submissions 30 June 2019.

We will not accept submissions that are complicit in any form of transphobia or genderqueer intolerance. The senior editorial team of JIBS strongly affirm the full authenticity and humanity of all trans and genderqueer people.

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UN 16 Days of Activism – Day 12: Gerald West

Tell us about yourself. Who are you and what do you do? 

 I am Gerald West, from Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. Since 1989 I have worked within the Ujamaa Centre for Community Development and Research, a project which facilitates collaboration for systemic change between socially engaged and contextually ‘converted’biblical scholars and theologians, community-based organic intellectuals, and their local communities of the poor and marginalized. The Bible resides in the intersections of these sectors as a site of struggle (both death dealing and life facilitating). As a biblical scholar, ‘by day’ (as we say here), much of my contribution is in forging potentially liberative community-based participatory resources from biblical scholarship.

 Since 1996 we have worked explicitly in local African contexts on gender-based violence. Invited by a group of women to facilitate a series of ‘Contextual Bible Studies’ (CBS) on a range of gender-related contextual struggles, including gender-based violence, we began to develop a CBS on gender-based violence using the story of the rape of Tamar in 2 Samuel 13. We drew on the biblical studies work of Phyllis Trible, integrating it into the methodological processes of CBS. This ‘Tamar’ CBS has been used extensively ever since, within various South African contexts, across the African continent, and in many other contexts, wherever gender-based violence intersects with religious faith. This CBS also gave rise, again at the request of a local community, to the Tamar Campaign (in 2000), which in turn gave rise to a series of CBS on ‘Redemptive masculinities’. In 2007 the Ujamaa Centre began working with a version of the ‘Tamar’ CBS that focused on masculinity.

 Allied to and generated by this gender-based violence CBS work have been an array of CBS on HIV and most recently sexuality. Just as the formative work of the Ujamaa Centre on race and class (in the context of the struggle against apartheid) generated systemic analysis and action in the context of gender-based violence, so our gender work in turn generated systemic analysis and action in the context of the intersections between economic and hetero-patriarchal systems that perpetrate HIV infection and discrimination against LGBTIQ sexualities. An analysis of systemic injustices shapes CBS work. We work within the intersectional entanglements of systemic injustice.

 In was from within this trajectory of the Ujamaa Centre’s work that I became familiar with the Shiloh Project.

 How do you think the Shiloh Project’s work on religion and rape culture can add to and enrich discussion and action on the topic of gender activism today? Is there more we can do? What else should we post?

 An important contribution of the Shiloh project has been the notion of ‘rape culture’. Rape has always been systemic, but the prevailing individualized and moralized understandings of religious faith have tended to represent rape in these terms. Most legal systems tend to adopt the same orientation. The notion of ‘rape culture’ makes it clear that rape is a system. The rape of Tamar is a good example of this, with each of the male characters in the narrative constituting a ‘rape culture’. In our work on this narrative we offer resources that facilitate reflection on rape as systemic, so the Shiloh Project’s notion of ‘rape culture’ is a useful conceptual tool.

 Significantly, the Ujamaa Centre has used the notion of ‘rape culture’ (though not this particular phrase) for our work on Genesis 19. This text is the primary biblical proof-text for condemning ‘homosexuality’ in many African contexts, and so we have done a series of CBS work on Genesis 18-19. An aspect of our CBS work recognizes the ‘rape culture’ of Sodom, in which strangers were subjected to violent assault by other men. By recognizing and naming the ‘rape culture’ of Sodom our CBS has enabled participants to construct a counter discourse in which ‘the story of Sodom’ is not about ‘homosexuality’ but about Sodom’s inhospitable attitude to strangers, violently expressed through the (heterosexual) rape culture of the men of Sodom.

 In the year ahead, how will you contribute to advancing the aims and goals of The Shiloh Project?

 The work of the Ujamaa Centre is forged from within our day-to-day work with particular organized formations of the poor and marginalized. We work ‘from below’, and so will come to the Shiloh Project from this perspective, collaborating with the Shiloh Project from the emerging contours of African local contexts in the year ahead.

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UN 16 Days of Activism – Day 11: Tat-siong Benny Liew

Tell us about yourself. Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Tat-siong Benny Liew, and I am currently Class of 1956 Professor in New Testament Studies at the College of Holy Cross.  Holy Cross is a Jesuit liberal arts college located in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA; however, I am not a Catholic.  

Although I have been living in North America for over 30 years, I was born in Hong Kong.  Since my father passed away when I was relatively young, my mother, who was strong and wise despite of having only an elementary education, basically raised me and my five siblings all by herself.  For both of my primary and secondary education in Hong Kong, I attended an Anglican school that is only for boys.  During most of those years and in that particular environment, I am sad to say that I had bought into many of the dominant and pervasive gender ideologies. When my eldest sister became a pastor of a local church, she experienced many discriminatory treatments that were based on gender; for instance, her district superintendent tried to tell her that the denomination would not provide housing for her because she could live with her family as a single and unmarried woman.  While homophobia was and is by no means absent in Hong Kong, I only witnessed it first hand after I moved to the USA to continue my studies.  

Besides learning from my own mother and my eldest sister, I am fortunate to have many wise and powerful female or queer teachers and colleagues who helped me gain a better sense and sensibility about various matters pertaining to gender.  My teaching and scholarship about religion in general and the Bible in particular have, as a result, always attended to gender-based dynamics and violence, as well as how they intersect with other identity factors and power differentials.  Both of the Bible courses I am teaching this semester, for instance, are cross-listed for the College’s Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies program.  Without implying that my academic work is separable from activism, I have found it more and more important to become personally involved in public movements and protestsagainst discrimination and violence on the basis of gender.

How do you think the Shiloh Project’s work on religion and rape culture can add to and enrich discussion and action on the topic of gender activism today? Is there more we can do? What else should we post?

I like the term being used by the Shiloh Project: rape culture.  The word “culture” implies that one cannot look at the act of rape by itself; we must understand that a lot of things have happened before and around rape to enable the act.  Because of this, I would like to see more explicit and more intentional research and work being done on sexual invective and harassment.

I am thinking here of the recent work by David Shepherd.  Instead of focusing on the blatant horror against women in the book of Judges (such as the rape and dismemberment of the Levite’s concubine in Judges 19, or the violent capturing of women in Judges 21), Shepherd uses the explicit mention of Judges in the beginning of Ruth (Ruth 1:1) to point to the subtlerpresence of sexual harassment against a foreign, female worker such as Ruth in the fields of Boaz.  The fact that Boaz has to tell Ruth to always keep company with other women workers and to glean so only after the male workers are done, even though he has already told his men not to bother Ruth (Ruth 2:8-9), signifies that Boaz is cognizant of the pervasive danger and widespread threat against women workers and this is further confirmed by Naomi (Ruth 2:22).  Although Shepherd uses explicit violence against women to inform his reading of implicit harassment, one may see explicit violence and implicit harassment against women as mutually reinforcing phenomena.

Since we are talking about a culture that enables and condones rapes and other kinds of gender-based violence, I wonder if the Shiloh Project can develop an instrument (such as a survey) that can help institutions (such as faith communities and schools) to get a sense of its climate and culture regarding gender-based discrimination and violence.  (Note: I owe this idea to Sarah Shectman and Seth Sanders of SBAllies.)

In the year ahead, how will you contribute to advancing the aims and goals of The Shiloh Project?  

In the coming year, I plan to be involved in campus activism that seeks to address sexual harassment and violence within my ownCollege community, including emphasis on preventive measures (such as campus-wide education to increase awareness) and institutional accountability.  These important efforts are once again about changing a culture: institutional culture.  I also plan to teach again a course on “Sex, Money, Power, and the Bible” to help students explore how our readings of the Bible may figure and reconfigure our understandings and practices of sex, money, and power in both helpful and harming ways. Finally, I will continue to research and write about gender violence as a biblical studies scholar.

   

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UN 16 Days of Activism – Day 3: Jo Sadgrove

Today’s activist is Jo Sadgrove!

 Tell us about yourself.  Who are you and what do you do?

I am Jo and over the past 20 years I have developed a hybrid portfolio of work incorporating both practitioner and scholarly aspects. I seek to facilitate dialogue and transliteration across what are often very distinct ways of thinking, feeling and knowing. I am a Research Fellow in the Centre for Religion and Public Life at Leeds University and I have a job as Research and Policy Advisor at USPG, a 300-year-old Anglican Mission agency working in partnership with local churches around the world. With colleagues, we connect our overseas partners to global policy makers to ensure that their voices are represented in conversations about faith and community development.

My interest in questions of gender, faith and power emerged out of my upbringing as the daughter of an Anglican priest in a church which did not ordain women until 1994. My parents were passionate advocates for women’s ordination, and I was always aware that this was an important issue, but that didn’t alter the fact that I grew up in a church in which only men possessed ritual power. Looking back, it was probably exposure to the Church of England inhabiting itstheological colleges, churches, cathedrals and the strange semi-public spaces of vicarages and deaneries – that fostered my ethnographic interests. You live on the boundary between public and private when you grow up in a vicarage and there is a very permeable membrane between the family and the wider community.

When I was 18 I went to Uganda and spent time living amongst different communities of women. The contexts were diverse, ranging from the staff quarters of a large urban hotel to remote rural Roman Catholic convents. These intimate domestic experiences brought me face-to-face with starkly gendered issues of power, labour, economics, mobility, pregnancy and child-rearing, violence, embodiment and HIV. They also shot through any emergent assumptions I was developing about the ways that women can and do have agency within different patriarchal power structures. I learned more about western patriarchies and the ways that they constitute women’s bodies and imaginations refracted through the teachings of Ugandan women than I ever did in the context of my British education. These experiences radicalised my thinking, and I remain focussed on the ways that different worldviews be they ‘cultural’, ‘religious’, biomedical, rights-based both operate as entirely coherent epistemic totalities that need to be understood on their own terms,and intersect with and antagonise each other. It is in such antagonisms that the underpinning assumptions of different worldviews reveal themselves.

Living in Ugandan communities in the 1990s when many were dying of HIV exposed to me the high costs of the misunderstandings between (western) biomedical approaches and the ethos of Ganda community life. The former is premised, amongst other things, on economically independent atomised individuals who perform particular types of health-seeking behaviour. The ethos of Ganda community life is underpinned by social interconnections and respectability, which position men and women differently and can heavily disadvantage women in the negotiation of their own protection from HIV.

My doctorate analysed sexual and religious youth identities in a Pentecostal community in Kampala in the context of the HIV pandemic. I then went on to work on debates about homosexuality in different parts of the Anglican Communion. This project incorporated a period of time working with Gerald West at the Ujamaa Centre which afforded me my first experience of Contextual Bible Study work, something of which I am only now beginning to understand the importance and value. Eventually I left full-time academia in a desire to work more closely with local communities, the context in which I find myself doing my best learning and thinking, and I got a job undertakingresearch with USPG.

In the year ahead, how will you contribute to advancing the aims and goals of The Shiloh Project?  

My work with USPG bridges the worlds of research and policy. With colleagues in the UK and South Africa I have recently engaged in a piece of research to map and analyze the Anglican Church in Southern Africa’s (ACSA) responses to sexual and gender-based violence, in particular following the death of Anene Booysen in 2013. The next year will see us disseminating this work alongside our international partners to a variety of different audiences, beginning with the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in New York in March.

On 2nd February 2013, 17-year-old Anene Booysen was gang raped and disemboweled in the small town of Bredasdorp, Western Cape, South Africa. Anene was found by a security guard at a construction site near to her home and she later died in hospital from her injuries. This brutal rape and murder horrified the country and re-focused the attention of leaders as to the catastrophic consequences of violence for women and girls in South Africa. At the time of the murder, ACSA’s development arm Hope Africa and staff in False Bay Diocese (in which Bredasdorp is situated)were engaging in community-based work around gender justice. Hope Africa was also part of theinternational We Will Speak Out coalition of Christian-based NGOs, churches and organizations against gender-based violence. The murder of Anene generated a number of responses on the part of the Anglican Church engaging different constituent groups.  Survivors of rape and sexual violence were brought together for counselling, peer support and to speak out about their experiences to raise national and international awareness. A number of Christian students at Cape Town’s universities have been involved in Contextual Bible Studies engaging questions of gender using the Tamar Campaign resource. A series of masculinity workshops have engaged men in the Western Cape to think about their own experiences of violence in childhood and reflect on the ways that patterns of violence have been replicated in their own lives, in the lives of their communities and in the churches.

The experiences of those engaged in this work, have revealed a number of things to me about where and how the church both facilitates and mitigates gender parity and abuses of power. When we (and development practitioners) talk about working with ‘the church’ and its leaders we need to think critically about where we locate and identify them. We need to incorporate into our understandings the many different spaces in which groups experience themselves as members of the church and through which ‘the church’ looks and feels very different. The space of Sunday worship, we heard,is a context in which it is very rare to hear anyone talking about gender-based violence, despite the fact that congregations are dealing with it daily. Due to contextual social pressures, parish priests are frequently unwilling to open up conversations that might alienate them from congregants and in turn jeopardize their stipends. On the other hand those who have experienced the masculinities workshops perceive the church to be offering unique homosocial spaces in which men can think and talk about their experiences in ways that are inconceivable in any of the other socialenvironments in which they find themselves. The church here has offered something unique and valuable – a reflective space in which to talk about the violence of apartheid, the violence of childhood and how that violence had, for some, been carried into adult relationships and parenting. Wellness groups for women offer a space of psychosocial support in which women can share the troubles and threats that they face daily, not just in relation to themselves, but also those of the children within their communities. Contextual Bible Study groups using the story of Tamar have opened up discussions between male and female students at local universities as to the complexities of negotiating the differing gender norms of ‘culture’, the Bible and the rights-based constitution. These Bible studies have enabled male and female students to critique the church as lagging behind society, to evaluate the challenges and opportunities of western rights based frameworks and to question the nature of ‘cultural’ authority as embodied by the elders ‘back home’.

There are no easy analyses here and no coherent narratives. The intersections of ‘Biblical’, ‘cultural’ and rightsbased norms for gender in South Africa, as everywhere else, are highly complex and varied – mutually reinforcing in certain spaces and highly antagonistic in others. I see the same contests in related work that I am doing within the Church of England around institutional power and sexuality. Across the generations people are struggling with shifting patterns of authority, processes of individuation and the implications for gender norms and the socialization of men and women. I see my own challenge and role in this work as dual and somewhat contradictory; to listen to and amplify the voices that are working hard to redeem the church as irredeemably patriarchal at the same time as broadcasting ever more loudly the critique of all institutions that use their power to marginalize and stratify. We need to remain vigilant and recognize the violent patriarchal biases in the cultural, social and institutional worlds which we inhabit, whilst exploring how norms can be challenged and faith groups can open up distinct spaces of solidarity in which hegemonic gendered worldviews can be resisted.

All this work aside, I actually feel that the most important thing I will continue to do is engage conversations with men and women about gender and power in the home, at the school gate, in the pub, in interactions with colleagues and students and in all of the social contexts in which I find myself. I have benefitted immeasurably from a powerhouse of older female mentors who have gently challenged and steered me through and around my own blind spots. They have helped me to recognize what I might be negotiating as a woman and as a mother and offered me different ways of thinking about what it is to be a feminist in such a challenging set of institutional structures – the church, the university, motherhood. I am supremely grateful to the women whom I meet from around the world who have spent their lives challenging unjust structures and taught me much about how to use my privilege to do my part.

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Outlander Soul Podcast: Sexual Violence in Outlander (discussion with Emma Nagouse)

Outlander Soul continues part 2 of their conversation with Emma Nagouse, whose research at the Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies (SIIBS) at the University of Sheffield (UK) focuses on religion and sexual violence. In this episode, Emma and Jayme Reaves discuss Christ imagery and suffering, the Geneva & Laoghaire question, Fergus, and sexual violence as depicted in Outlander more generally.

(An obvious trigger warning that there will be discussion of rape, sexual violence, and rape culture in this episode).

 

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UN 16 Days of Activism – Day 2: Saima Afzal

Tell us about yourself! Who are you and what do you do?

 My name is Saima Afzal and I am founder and leader of a community organization called SAS RIGHTS CIC, founded in November 2016. I have worked in the field of the intersections of gender and religion both as an activist and as practitioner since the age of 18. Most of this has been undertaken in a volunteer capacity. I still to this day undertake volunteer work but in 2016 I founded SAS RIGHTS CIC, together with my partner Sven Richter. This community interest company invests its time and energies in raising awareness of the issues that have an adverse impact upon a number of marginalized communities – including women and men vulnerable to sexual violence. 

The SAS RIGHTS CIC team is not averse to starting difficult conversations and tries to deal with what comes out of these in a sensitive manner in order to bring about positive change. I myself was in a so-called Forced ‘Marriage’ – though I categorially state that I have never been married and I will stop and correct those that refer to my abuser as my ‘husband’. I continue to speak about discrimination and inequality and unlawful practices without fear. I am a registered ‘Cultural’ Subject Matter Expert and I am registered on the National Crime Agency Database.

 I am often called to assist Police Forces or, increasingly, Children Social Care Services to help advise and also to produce reports for both the Criminal and Family Courts.

 I have worked very closely with the Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWAG) agenda – not least because of my own forced ‘marriage’. I always state clearly that I have never been married and that I was forced into a situation beyond my control. This does offend some ‘communities’, especially those where faith plays a key role. It offends, for example, that I have a child from my forced ‘marriage’, because being Muslim and having a child out of ‘wedlock’ is widely considered a ‘sin’. I am often encouraged to say I was married, for the sake of my child, or my reputation, but that is offensive to me. It suggests that I did something wrong, or that I should bear the burden of shame. My passion is to help any person, male or female, who has been abused, controlled or coerced, so they, too, can find support and speak out with confidence.

 I understand the realities of speaking out. Adverse and/or unlawful consequences are often faced by those that challenge cultural norms, including gender norms. I try and help not only in situations of crisis but before crisis occurs. So much work has been undertaken to identify and address crises but not enough to prevent, intervene and to engage with families, individuals and communities trapped in cycles of damaging behaviours that lead up to and precipitate crises. SAS RIGHTS CIC tries to do just that.

 How do you think the Shiloh Project’s work on religion and rape culture can add to and enrich discussion and action on the topic of gender activism today? Is there more we can do? What else should we post?

I would love to hear more about how the notions of marriage and consent within faith-based communities are understood, and about how these inhibit the reporting of sexual abuse. I wish to explore and understand, in collaboration with the Shiloh Project if viable, the impact that the notion of ‘being married’ has on first-response practitioners. Some anecdotal accounts from victims, suggest that when they have mentioned that they were raped by their husband (and it is most often women who have disclosed sexual abuse to me), the responding officer has not appeared to understand or has not confirmed that rape within marriage is real and acutely harmful. In some cases they have informed the victim, ‘your husband can’t rape you’, or have said undermining things like, ‘are you sure that was rape?’.

It would be wonderful to undertake research with the Shiloh Project and to bring together the  expertise of researchers and of practitioners who help victims of gender-based violence in marginalized and vulnerable communities

In the year ahead, how will you contribute to advancing the aims and goals of The Shiloh Project?  

I and my organization with willing volunteers hope to continue to work directly with those affected, to capture their experiences, to support them to overcome and challenge unacceptable norms, whilst also raising awareness amongst practitioners, communities and society as a whole of the challenges faced by those that are in abusive and violent situations.

In the coming years we hope to undertake some of the following: 

We would like to work in collaboration with like-minded individuals and organizations and welcome co-production to help maximize the impact of activities.

We will submit bids to undertake engagement and knowledge activities, as well as community empowerment work. We wish to access funding for film making with a view to  bringing to life the day-to-day struggles of those who are trapped in either abusive relationship or ‘cultures’.

We will continue to work with men in addressing and exploring the reasons why some abuse and control women in their communities. We particularly wish to focus on Visible Minority Ethnic and faith-driven communities. I have already undertaken significant work over the years in this area and have developed some impactful resources to explore some of the reasons some men are more likely to participate in abusive and controlling culturally-based norms.

We wish also to explore further Minority Ethnic Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transsexual communities and to address the the culturally-based discrimination, abuse and control inflicted on members of these communities.

I have an established history of over 25 years of tackling controversial, taboo and sensitive issues. I will not stop any time soon.

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The #MeToo Movement, Intersectionality, And Its Implications For Dalit Women

The phrase ‘Me Too’ originated with Tarana Burke, an African American civil rights activist, to raise awareness of the magnitude of sexual harassment and assault among women of colour.  Yet the recent upsurge in its use, and the face of the Hollywood movement, has been spearheaded by Western (and mostly white) celebrities.

Their campaigning has undoubtedly exposed the severity of sexual harassment in the film industry, but it has raised some troubling questions about the influence of race on perceptions of violence and the granting of support to its victims.

These questions have opened a vital dialogue about the importance of intersectionality in the feminist movement and of making space for women from vulnerable minorities who face discrimination on multiple axes.#MeToo revealed the everyday (and sadly unexceptional) nature of sexual harassment, whilst providing women with a safe platform to voice their experience, without having to disclose explicit details.

Yet for many women, including those living in stigmatised Dalit (‘Untouchable’) communities in postcolonial India, this sort of platform remains largely unavailable. Their low status in the caste system and position within economically impoverished communities exacerbates their vulnerability to severe discrimination. The small distance separating women from their attackers, and from the violent repercussions of men surrounding them, further restricts their ability to seek support and refuge.

Notions of purity are essential to the caste system and rest exclusively on female behaviour, marriage practices and reproduction. Transgressions from social norms frequently lead to the gendered humiliation of Dalit women, which presents a means of collectively punishing the family and wider community. [1] This ranges from verbal abuse and harassment, to violent physical and sexual assault.

The distance separating Dalit communities from caste Hindus and Muslims makes them easily identifiable, and they often become the sites of violence. A letter sent to the secretary of the Home Department of Bombay in 1928 outlines the violence inflicted on a group of Dalits within their own village, as punishment for refusing to continue customary ‘untouchable’ practices. [2]

Historians like Nicholas Dirks have done much to emphasise the role played by colonial administration in the construction of the caste system. Vast ethnographic volumes and official censuses were produced for the colonial government, categorising groups according to their perceived varna status. By doing this, the British imprisoned their Indian subjects into castes, whilst largely granting political representation to higher caste groups that controlled access to material resources. [3]

Historian Rupa Viswanath, in particular, has documented the increasing influence of ‘untouchability’ in the public consciousness since the late nineteenth century. [4] Such narratives demonstrate the historical construction of caste and lend understanding to the problems afflicting Indian society today. The use of caste in the Census of India was withdrawn by 1931, but its rigid hierarchical organisation continues to influence discriminatory practices against lower caste groups. [5] Dalit communities remain bound to the bottom of caste and class hierarchies, separated both spatially and economically from caste Hindu villages.

The denial of basic resources such as water requires Dalit women to leave their homes to provide for their families in a way that upper caste women avoid. [6] Without access to toilet facilities, they are forced to defecate openly, and often at night, away from their homes. The distance this demands leaves them vulnerable to humiliation and harassment from upper caste individuals and groups.

Physical and sexual violence against Dalit women is so common place that it receives very little attention. In contrast, cases involving the rape of higher caste and middle class women, such as the Jyoti Singh case in 2012, are given significant attention in international media coverage. This disparity begs a comparison between the influence of racial and caste prejudice in responses to gendered violence.

Utilising a discourse of human rights legislation, academics are beginning to draw comparative histories that categorise caste and race under ‘descent-based discrimination’. [7] This presents a vital development in widening understanding of caste issues by placing them within a global context.

The persecution women face is exacerbated by patriarchal practices within the home. Dalit men often enforce their own superiority within these rigid social hierarchies by subordinating women in their own communities. In interviews conducted with 400 Dalit couples in Tiruppur district, Tamil Nadu, between 2009-2010, over 60% of the women reported high male alcohol consumption and violence. [8]

The complications of reporting sexual violence when it occurs at the intersection of several spheres of loyalty was emphasised in Burke’s original MeToo campaign. African American women were much less likely to report violence committed against them when they risked incriminating men within their already-vulnerable homes and communities. [9] The position of Dalit women presents a similar problem and one that requires a unique human rights discourse.

The rise of international online movements such as #MeToo present a promising shift for women working in established industries. Yet for those trapped at the bottom of caste, class, and gender hierarchies, in economically impoverished communities in postcolonial India, the sentiment of the movement is lost. The violence faced by Dalit women is a relentless, everyday occurrence deeply embedded within the socio-religious framework that dominates Indian society.

Raising awareness of the historical context behind contemporary discrimination is vital. However, more needs to be done to make international women’s movements and the contemporary human rights discourse inclusive for those facing violence and persecution under vastly different circumstances.

Frances Hargreaves is an undergraduate student at the University of Sheffield. Her interests lie in gender history in late colonial and postcolonial South Asia. 

This article was originally published on the History Matters blog. Read the original piece here.

[1] Anupama Rao, The Caste Question: Dalits and the politics of modern India (California, 2009), p. 222

[2] Letter available in the India Office Records at the British Library, London. File L/PJ/6/1959.

[3] Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the making of modern India (Princeton, 2001), p. 5

[4] Rupa Viswanath, The Pariah Problem (New York, 2014)

[5] Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the making of modern India (Princeton, 2001), p. 16

[6] Aloysius S.J Iruduyam, Jayshree P. Mangubhai and Joel G. Lee, Dalit women speak out: caste, class and gender violence in India (New Delhi, 2014), p.12

[7] Deepa S. Reddy, ‘The Ethnicity of Caste’, Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 78, No. 3 (Summer, 2005), pp. 543-584

[8] Nitya Rao, Marriage, Violence and Choice, Gender and Society, Vol. 29 Issue 3 (2015), p. 428

Feature Image: https://pixabay.com/en/india-wedding-saree-women-978488/

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Communal Theodicy and #MeToo

It has been a few weeks now since that day when Christine Blasey Ford gave testimony as part of Brett Kavanaugh’s hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee in relation to his nomination to be a US Supreme Court Justice.  For several days before and after, my social media timelines were full of women in pain, women who had told similar stories to Ford’s and were likewise vilified, rejected, mocked, or ignored.

The same day Ford gave her testimony, I was interviewed for a research project about growing up in Christian purity culture and the effect that it has had on me and my theology as an adult.  Reasonably, I found myself – like many women – angry and working to make links between my thoughts and what I had been seeing and hearing that day (or over weeks… or years… take your pick).

Feeling tetchy and provocative, I asked on Twitter:

Why, in the context of a female victim of #rape/sexual abuse, does the implementation of pedagogical #theodicy (suffering teaches us) focus on what the woman can learn (e.g. where not to go, who not to hang out with) & NEVER on what men can learn (e.g. don’t rape, believe women)?

See, while answering my colleague’s questions about the after-effects of purity culture on my theology, I told her that I no longer found meaning and comfort in the idea that suffering has positive value because it teaches us something.  Such a way of thinking was common in the purity culture I grew up in: that sexual abuse and assault was directly or indirectly the fault of the one victimized, and that God allows bad things to happen to teach us a lesson.  

Since then, I have continued to pick apart my original question.  Why, when it comes to women being raped or sexually assaulted, do we only focus on what she can learn from her victimization and never focus on what men can learn?  Why does the learning become the responsibility of the victim and not the perpetrator and/or the community at large?

While there are some conversations happening out there about how men can step up, pay attention, test their own behaviour, and join the cause, these conversations remain fairly marginal.  Instead, I think the answer to my original question boils down to two factors:  the gendered ways we understand sexual violence and abuse (obvs) and the individualised way Western Christianity tends to understand theodicy. 

By the term ‘theodicy’ I mean the numerous ways we answer the questions ‘Why does God allow suffering and evil in the world?’, or ‘Why do bad things happen?’ One of the ways to understand the meaning (and, therefore, value) of suffering is in its usefulness in teaching us lessons. This theory is known as ‘pedagogical theodicy’, or Ireanean theodicy, because it became well known based on the 2nd century teachings of St. Irenaeus. 

For Irenaeus, humanity needs evil and suffering in order to develop and grow. He believed that suffering has redeeming value because it teaches us something, and human goodness can only be known and cultivated in a context where there is potential for evil. Setting big questions about God’s role in the creation or perpetuation of that evil aside, we see pedagogical theodicy exhibited by both religious and non-religious people when they say something like ‘Everything happens for a reason’, ‘There must be something we’re supposed to learn here’, and/or ‘God is trying to teach us something’. 

As humans, we need to make meaning out of the bad things that happen to us. It is human nature to try to understand why. We want to believe that there is a lesson to be learned, or a warning sign to avoid for next time. Or, we want to know that there’s something bigger than our pain, some purpose that makes pain endurable. The problem comes when our need for those lessons, or for that bigger purpose, becomes more important than acknowledging the trauma experienced.

We’re all familiar with the rhetoric and speculation that gets said when someone becomes a victim of rape or sexual abuse: ‘You must have done something to deserve it’. You did something wrong; there is a lesson to be learned. Likewise, here at The Shiloh Project and elsewhere, it is well documented that prevailing rape culture says that when a woman experiences rape or sexual abuse, it is somehow her fault. Rape culture denies the equality and viability of a woman’s experience, saying that either 1) what happened to her didn’t really happen; 2) what happened to her wasn’t as bad as she says; or 3) what happened to her was deserved, or for her own good.

Therefore, the first factor in answer to my original question – why is the focus on what the woman (or victim) can learn and never on what men (or perpetrators) can learn? – is that there is a pervasive culture of victim blaming, stigmatising, and shaming in response to suffering. Job’s friends were adamant that he must have done something wrong to cause his suffering, and if he can find this something and rectify it (i.e. learn his lesson), all will be well.  

When the victim is female, this push to blame, stigmatise, shame, becomes all the more pervasive. The pedagogical understanding of theodicy takes on the guises of rape culture by saying: 

‘You were hanging out with drunk boys, so what did you expect?’  

‘You were asking for it by wearing that short skirt.’

‘You know better than to go out at night.’

Whatever the lesson is, the victim is the one to blame. The victim is the one with lessons to learn. Next time, don’t do or be that (whatever that is). And we all know that’s bullshit.

But there is a second factor to my original question that we do not talk about and is more hidden. Western Christianity and its prevailing culture tend to understand suffering, including rape, in an individualised manner and victimisation is generally conceived of as something that happens to an individual, not something that happens to a community. For example, we ask the question ‘Why did this happen to me?’ instead of ‘Why did this happen to us?’ or ‘What can we learn from this experience?’ 

This individualised understanding of suffering is despite the prophetic biblical witness that points to communal suffering and communal guilt (e.g. in Isaiah and Jeremiah), as well as other biblical texts such as Ecclesiastes and Job that say suffering happens for no reason, or – at the very least – for no reason over which we as humans have control.    

Nevertheless, we see this individualised understanding of suffering over communal responsibility play out in conflicts large and small: individual cases that point to a greater, communal truth of oppressive power, domination, and abuse largely remain unrecognised and unaddressed in any wider communal way that affects systemic change.  Of course, change comes in toppling those oppressive powers, which, let’s face it, is not in everyone’s interest to do. To acknowledge and to address communally calls on the community to take responsibility, which, understandably, it may be loathe to do. It is much easier to focus blame and responsibility on one individual.

So, when a victim experiences sexual abuse or violence, the question becomes about the victim as an individual and what that individual could or should have done and not about the community or those who perpetrate or uphold systems that enable oppression and abuse.  

So back to my original question:

Why, in the context of a female victim of #rape/sexual abuse, does the implementation of pedagogical #theodicy (suffering teaches us) focus on what the woman can learn (e.g. where not to go, who not to hang out with) & NEVER on what men can learn (e.g. don’t rape, believe women)?

The obvious answer is that the emphasis is never on the lessons men can learn, because we don’t generally understand suffering in a way that has lessons for all of us, not just for the victim.  ‘We suffer because you have suffered’ just isn’t part of our understanding of theodicy in the West.  Instead, we feel bad for the person who has been traumatised, but secretly thank God it wasn’t us. Or, if we do understand it communally, most often it becomes a scapegoating scenario where it is the victim who is to blame for the ills of the community, rather than the one with whom the community stands to show solidarity.

The #MeToo movement has presented us with an obvious opportunity to challenge this individualised notion of theodicy. Because for so many of us – it was us too.  These are not individual cases. Sexual violence and rape culture is a communal issue and if there are lessons to be learned here, they are lessons that apply to all of us – men included – and not just to the victims.  

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For Such a Time as This? #UsToo: Sexual Trafficking, Silence, & Secrecy in the Book of Esther

Ericka S. Dunbar is Ph.D. candidate in the area of Hebrew Bible at Drew University (Madison, NJ, USA). Her dissertation project is entitled, “Trafficking Hadassah: An Africana Reading of Collective Trauma, Memory and Identity in the Book of Esther”. In her project, Ericka places the biblical story of Esther in conversation with the sexual exploitation of African diasporian subjects during the transatlantic slave trade in order to investigate the intersections and consequences of sexual exploitation of minority girls and women across time and contexts and, in order to assess the impact of collective, intergenerational and cultural trauma on identity and memory. Her teaching and research interests include:  Religion and Social Change; Africana Biblical Studies, Africana Diaspora Studies, Trauma, Studies, Ethics, Cultural Studies, Women’s Studies, gender-based violence, women and children in the Bible, Human Trafficking discourses, the role and impact of religion on individual and collective/cultural identities.

For Such a Time as This? #UsToo: Sexual Trafficking, Silence, & Secrecy in the Book of Esther

Not all silence sounds the same. Some silence is, well … quiet. Other silence is deafening.  The silence around sexual trafficking and the hyper-invisibility of victims of trafficking is deafening … striking …. disturbing. Silence is also what allows trafficking and exploitation to thrive. It plays its part in systemic oppression, perpetuating suffering, diminishing agency, limiting mobility. Yet silence is disruptive and it is vocal! If only we would listen to the quiet screams, the hushed pleas, petitioning us, “see me, hear me, protect me, advocate for me!” Attention to the silences in both biblical texts and contemporary contexts can and should disrupt normative modes of interpretation, illuminating traumatization and psychological truths that have gone unvoiced for far too long.

There are troubling silences in the book of Esther that have been muted and ignored throughout the history of interpretation. The book of Esther presents representations of collective trauma in the form of sexual trafficking. In the second chapter of the book of Esther, the female collective includes Esther and countless virgin girls who are trafficked by the Persian King Ahasuerus and his officials.

Sexual trafficking is “the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbor, or receipt of people, by coercive or abusive means for the purpose of sexual exploitation.”[i] It is right there in the book of Esther where the king’s servants suggest the following:

Let beautiful young virgins be sought out for the king. And let the king appoint commissioners in all the provinces of his kingdom to gather all the beautiful young virgins to the harem in the citadel of Susa under custody of Hegai, the king’s eunuch, who is in charge of the women; let their cosmetic treatments be given them. And let the girl who pleases the king be queen instead of Vashti. (2:2b-2:4a)

The failure of readers to identify and/or perceive recruitment, transportation, and harboring of subjects in the biblical text as characteristics of trafficking prevents them from expressing outrage and from taking action. Esther and other virgin girls are abducted from their native lands, which span from India to Ethiopia (1:1), are transported to Persia and held captive in the king’s palace so that he can engage in nonconsensual sex with each of them until he determines which one satisfies him best sexually. These vulnerable girls are seized, brought against their wills, and secluded in the king’s palace, all elements of trafficking. They are transported from their home provinces, harbored in the king’s harems, undergo a beautification/ preparation process (which includes pampering and perfuming for a year), and repeatedly sexually abused, night after night. What stands out to me is that the girls in the narrative world are taken from provinces that are inhabited predominately by brown and black minorities in our contemporary contexts. Further, brown and black females are disproportionately vulnerable to and targeted by traffickers.  I believe that our understandings of sexual trafficking in contemporary contexts illuminate trafficking in this ancient sacred text.

Historically, biblical interpreters frame the exploitation of the “virgin girls” as a harmless, even “fun,” beauty pageant. Defining the exploitation as a “beauty contest,” however, ignores the elements of capture, captivity, and forced displacement and prevents the analysis of such experiences as exploitative and trauma- inducing trafficking. Perhaps understanding the various parties as involved in trafficking will better illuminate the process of prolonged exploitation in the book of Esther. In trafficking, there are generally four parties involved in a transaction although not all four are necessary for the facilitation of abuse: the perpetrator, the vendor, the facilitator and the victim(s). The perpetrator, or the king, sexually exploits the victim(s). The vendor(s), or the king’s servants, extend the services/bodies/capital that make sexual trafficking possible. The facilitator(s), that is, the officers in the provinces of the king expedites the victimization process, and the victim(s) are the object of sexual exploitation: namely, the virgin girls. Attention to both the processes and parties involved in trafficking exposes the violence and horror of this text. The book of Esther is often read as comical, or as a celebration of a beautiful and clever heroine that ascends to queen – but such a reading does not tell the whole story as it obscures, suppresses and condones large-scale abuse in the form of trafficking women and girls.

Ira Gelb, 'NOT For Sale', https://flic.kr/p/9xSTCc

Perpetrators, vendors, and facilitators of abuse depend on and capitalize off silence, suppressed voices, and secrecy. They weaponize our silence and use it to perpetuate the abduction and transportation of girls across national and international borders. Secrecy is a prominent theme in chapter 2 as Esther’s identity is kept a secret, Moreover, the identity and names of the numerous other virgin girls brought in two rounds remain obscured too.  One might ask what role Esther’s guardian, Mordecai, plays in her exploitation and oppression as he orders her to maintain secrecy. The absence of the sound of the virgin girls’ voices leads to physical harm and perpetual psychological suffering. They are not allowed to protest their suffering neither do their male guardians protest their exploitation.  The absence of protest is horrifying. Yet, if we pay attention to the words not spoken, or narrated in the case of the book of Esther, we’ll see that the muteness and silences throughout present soundless shrieks and inaudible stutters of throbbing hostility, paralyzing trauma, and shocking terror.

Collective trauma is experienced when groups share in catastrophic events that lead to suffering. Read closely, this story reflects the woundedness and torture of the female collective. They are confronted with displacement, subjection under imperial rule, and legalized gender oppression through the creation of hegemonic and sexist laws, exploitation, and rape. In the first chapter, in response to Vashti’s resistance to the king’s attempt to sexually exploit her, the female collective’s subjugation is legalized as the king’s advisors create the law that, “every man be master in his own household and speak according to the language of his people” (1:22). Women are victims of patriarchy and misogyny, become the property of the empire, and with the exception of Esther, disappear into the narrative world, never to have agency again in the biblical text. These experiences reflect those of girls and women captured, transported, and harbored on plantations during the transatlantic slave trade throughout the 16th to 19th centuries. They were raped and impregnated against their wills, beaten and killed if they attempted to resist in any way. Their enslaved male counterparts had similarly brutal fates.

Not surprisingly, the book of Esther fails explicitly to detail the female collectives’ responses to the horror they endure. However, I argue that silence here is a narrative device that reflects the traumatic impact of the horrors they endure. Silence is a feature of horror that often reflects a “numbing effect” of devastation. The absence of the women’s speech and the lack of narration of their emotional responses highlight how blistering these experiences are and reflect the physical and emotional toll on the girls. Their inaudible responses reflect the unutterable horrors they withstand. Instead of screaming voices, we are presented with and forced to focus on the spectacle of inaudible, dislocated, physically and psychologically injured and sexually transgressed bodies which shocks, arrests, and disgusts us as readers. These silences are and should be just as telling as audible screams.

Each time I read the text, the deposition of Vashti and of the graphic sexual imagery representing sexual trafficking, it arrests and terrifies me, especially when I consider the impact of this text in light of recent trends in trafficking and the global #MeToo movement. I am passionately concerned about abused and trafficked girls and women and I hope that by engaging the sacred texts, a hermeneutic of trauma and horror might aid us in our ability to confront the causes and consequences of trafficking. I hope that such a reading and hermeneutic may underscore the impact of sexual violence, terror, and traumatization on group identity, memory, and history.  If we are to respond effectively to issues of trafficking and exploitation, we must transform the silence around trafficking and traumatization first. We must also illuminate the powerful impact of ancient – including biblical – cultures, ideologies, theologies and practices, particularly on such topics as sex trafficking and abuse, and we must engage in ethically responsible readings and interpretations of sacred texts, ­even, or especially if they are horrific. My interpretation of the book of Esther has the potential to galvanize us towards collective advocacy and action for vulnerable and exploited females across the globe.

Silence in texts and in our contemporary contexts should serve as a stimulus to investigate stories and expose suffering. After all, “Perhaps this is the moment for which [we] have been created” (Esther 4:4). Perhaps, this is the moment to sound off in solidarity for our sisters that have been silenced and oppressed. Perhaps this is the moment to shatter the silence and reclaim, “Not in My Name!”

#unspokentruths #stopnormalizingsilence #textsofterror #traffickingtraumatizes

[i] US Department of State, Trafficking in Persons Report (Washington, DC: US Department of State Publications, 2014), http://www.state.gov/j/tip/rls/tiprpt/2014/index.htm.

Black and white image titled ‘NOT For Sale’, courtesy of Ira Gelb, https://flic.kr/p/9xSTCc

 

 

 

 

 

 

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