al-m zan Newsletter of the Claremont Main Road Mosque ° No. 19
Mawlud 1438 December 2016 °
16 Days of Activism Against Gender Based Violence Gabeba Gaidien
The critical mission to create a just, equal and safe society for women and children is an ongoing struggle. The 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Based Violence serves to highlight the barriers to success in this struggle but, more importantly, to celebrate the selfless courage of the countless women and children who are leading this process against seemingly insurmountable odds. They are the true victors. Sadly, in our context, we are reminded on a daily basis of the brutal outcomes of a society that fails to uphold the rights of those who are, systemically, set up to be more vulnerable than the rest. There is an array of official statistics which prove that women remain compromised in the man-made social and economic hierarchy of power and that children are vulnerable targets for the most brutal among us. These statistics are crucial as it indicates how we have come to normalize violence as a society. Yet, as feeling, thinking and loving humans, for the most part, we do not need the numbers to remind us that all is not well with our country’s soul. Violence does not have a single narrative frame. It is systemic. It happens within an enabling environment and the enablers are the cogs in the wheel of socio-political, socio-cultural and socio- economic systems that create and maintain inequality as the
status quo. The violation of a thirteen year old girl child last week happened because a group of men made both individual and collective choices to invade her space, to disrespect her right to walk home safely (in a public space where everyone should be safe) and they chose to hurt her in the most brutal manner. This same group of men is part of a larger society that influenced their thinking and choices and somehow, somewhere in their human journey they received a myriad of messages that convinced them that the choices which they made on that fateful day are acceptable. The first instance of violence in this case is revealed in the failure of both the formal and informal education systems to identify and challenge their perception of power in the context of gender dynamics. This lack of education and dialogue about gender matters is a systemic failure that we need to tackle through social and political agency.
“It is fundamental for us to pause in order to consciously interrogate what we hold to be true about power in the context of gender and overall family dynamics” A practical manner in which to unlock social agency is to remind ourselves that our perception of the world and how it should work is shaped by our filters in the form of values, attitudes and beliefs. The latter influence our thoughts, these thoughts become words and words, in turn, evolve into actions. Socialization is the process via which we convey our values, attitudes and beliefs from one person to another across generations. Thus it is fundamental for us to pause in order to consciously interrogate what we hold to be true about power in the context of gender and overall family dynamics, how we live it and how we perceive women in this frame based on our words, actions and attitudes. This is how we remain
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conscious of that which we convey to the next generation in terms of values, attitudes and beliefs relating to gender equality. While there is a universal understanding of the principles of gender equality as a desired state, there is the reality that this reflection & interrogation happens within a context that has been shaped by almost 400 years of patriarchal systemic oppression. Herein is the tangled web of the intersecting narrative of violence that is underscored by racial, colonialist, cultural and political dynamics. I live in a context where most of the people are peace loving humans who want to coexist in solidarity with each other. Yet, in the minority, we have a group of mostly men who struggle with the notion of power. Their core belief is that their power as men, i.e. their drive to self-realize, can only come at the expense of another. And yet again it is women and children who suffer the harsh consequences as mothers are held hostage by their sons and children watch their fathers die in senseless acts of random violence. Our women and children suffer in a broader context where not nearly enough is done to address the enablers of gender based violence. Healing starts with acknowledgement and the journey to acknowledgement requires reflection, dialogue and accountability. This is a personal and individual journey and at the same time it is a collective process in which we should hold and guide each other as community members, family members and citizens. I pray that we find the individual and collective strength and courage to keep walking this journey with each other led by our women and children. (This is an edited version of a pre-khutbah lecture at CMRM on Friday 25 November 2016)
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