Living Behind the Veil

I'm often asked what I wear in Afghanistan and what it's like to wear a veil. It's freedom. Freedom to have a bad hair day, freedom to arrange my chadar to conceal the curve of my breasts and backside, freedom to not be an expatriate for a little while. It means freedom to hide even on the street from the Afghan men's eyes which seem to strip me naked.
When I relax my shoulders and walk less purposefully, less confidently, my eyes downcast and covered by sunglasses, I pass for an Afghan woman. I hear the men whisper in Dari, "Is she a foreigner or local woman?" I chuckle but am silent. On the street, I'm also a free target....freely exposed to groping, sexual innuendos whispered to me as a man bicycles by, free to have stones thrown at me, freely seen as no one's wife, daughter, sister, mother, friend, or boss. I step inside my gate, and remove my chapan and chadar. Now I'm someone's boss, motherhood returns to me as little steps run to greet me, and I receive a kiss from my adoring husband. Now I'm free to his loving and gentle eyes which know and enjoy my curves, free to once again be under the protective umbrella of being a wife, mother, friend, colleague, boss, niece, sister, daughter, woman.

Wednesday, March 7, 2018

Women's Bodies as Battlefield

Yazidi women for sale

Each generation asks different questions, and each generation has different needs, different traumas, different pain. Theology, to be relevant, begins where the pain is, where the questions are, that place where truth and heart meet.

How we offer a cup of cold water to parched lips and bruised bodies is the embodiment of what it means to be Christ's healing hands to those crying in pain and suffering.

The war on women is as old as Genesis 3, but there seems to be an escalation of the war on women in the 21st Century.
 "Is it true being born a girl is a curse in many countries around the world? Must a woman always pay the price for being a woman? Will she always be considered a commodity to be passed over, a slave for hire, or property to be possessed, transferred, and owned?(1)

Can we remained unmoved when we read the following sample statistics? 

  • ...The India crime clock on women is ticking at an alarming rate: one woman is beaten every minute, one dowry death occurs every 77 minutes, and one act of cruelty against a woman is reported every 9 minutes." (Ibid)
  • Yazidi women reveal being raped hundreds of times in a day, then passed on to the next ISIS commander who commandeers her for his purposes. 
  •  In the U.S. alone, a woman is victimized every twelve seconds. (2)
  •  In Islam, the "seat" of family honor is the status of the hymen of the women of the family. (3)
  • South Africa is the 4th most dangerous place for women to live. (4)
  • In a report by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) in 2000, the agency noted that in interviews in Africa and Asia, “the right of a husband to beat or physically intimidate his wife” came out as “a deeply held conviction.” Even societies where women appear to enjoy better status “condone or at least tolerate a certain amount of violence against women.”(5)
  • The church allows for violence through a sick interpretation of Paul's writings. According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, every 9 seconds in the U.S. a woman is assaulted or beaten. (6)   According to the same article, there is a greater frequency of domestic violence in Christian homes than in non-Christian homes in America.  "The conservative and complementarian doctrine of some wings of Christian denominations provide a shelter for abusive relationships to flourish. As a consequence, women learn that they are helpless, without agency and worse of all that their lives are worth ‘less’."(7) 
  • 30% of women globally are victims are domestic violence abuse. According to WHO (World Health Organization), this puts it at the level of  a public health crisis. (8)
  • the estimated 20,000 men, women and children who are still captives of Boko Haram. In Northeast Nigeria, sexual violence is a characteristic of the ongoing insurgency, during which thousands of women and girls have been kidnapped and raped by Islamic extremist group Boko Haram. Many are forcibly married to their captors and become pregnant from rape.(9) 
  • India and South Asia continue to be some of the world’s most notorious areas for sex trafficking, making the globe’s second-most-populous country an often dangerous place for women and girls. Experts estimate that millions of women and children are victims of sex trafficking in India, and the most vulnerable are those from the most disadvantaged strata—including religious minorities. (10)

Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite writes about this in her book, Women's Bodies as Battlefield: Christian Theology and the Global War on Women."

In her introduction she describes the war against women happening Globally 24/7:
All day long, all night long, every day and every night, the bodies of women and girls are turned into battlefields. Their bodies are penetrated against their will; they are burned, maimed, bruised, slapped, kicked, threatened with weapons, confined, beaten with fists or objects, shot, and knifed; their bones are broken; and they lose limbs, sight, hearing, pregnancies, and their sense of personal and physical integrity. They are terrorized and killed. This is what battlefields in war are like.  Bodies are damaged, flesh is ripped apart, and minds and lives are destroyed.
Some are guilty, all are responsible. (11) 

But this isn't the only war today. 

It's impossible to be blind to the thousands of babies being murdered every day from abortion, the increase marginalization of the white male, the despair of the African-American community against police brutality, global drug epidemic as people numbify their pain, the ethnic cleansing happening in Turkey, parts of Africa, and elsewhere, the terrorism and violence popping up where least expected, the suffering felt all over the world.

...we each have to decide which  injustice of our day are we called to go and fight. 

To remain on the sidelines, neutral, unengaged or uninformed is increasingly impossible and abhorrent.  Our children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews will need guidance and wisdom on how to respond with Christ's love, and even how to heal from these types of traumas and sins. 


(1) The Power to Break Free: Surviving Domestic Violence, by Anisha Durve, from the Foreward by Kiran Bedi.
(2) Ibid., KL
(3) My Mother's Sons: Managing Sexuality in Islamic and Christian Communities, Patrick Krayer
(4) State of Emergency: The War on Women's Bodies
(5) Taking on Violence Against Women in Africa
(6)  Domestic Abuse in the Church a Silent Epidemic
(7) The Church and Violence Against Women
(8) World Health Organization
(9) Kidnapped, Raped, and Mocked in Nigeria
(10) In India, Christian Teen Kidnapped and Raped
(11) Heschel, The Prophets

 Related Posts
Women's Bodies as Battlefield - conservative Evangelicals highest domestic violence rate in USA.
Christianized Purdah
#silence is not spiritual
response to #missionarywomentoo
#missionarywomentoo
What if the Good Samaritan was an Orthodox Sunni Muslim Woman?
Sexual Harassment in Cross-Cultural Work
Women with a Wartime Mentality
A Tribute to the Single Woman Missionary
Androcentric Translation: A Poem

No comments:

Post a Comment

Feel free to comment related to this post or ask additional questions. All comments require moderation. I do not post sales or non-related links.