by Heather Plett | Nov 18, 2010 | Compassion
After writing my last post, visiting several of the other blog posts written for the Girl Effect Blogging Campaign, and watching some of the Girl Effect videos, I am left with a thought that keeps niggling at me…
We desperately need more MEN to help with the Girl Effect.
Let me tell you a story…
I was an innocent twenty-one year old former farm girl, in my second year in the big city, when a man climbed through the window of my basement apartment and raped me. It shook my world and shattered my innocence.
But this story is not about the rape – it’s about what happened afterwards.
When I finally convinced the man to leave my apartment (after 2 hours of abuse and nearly being choked to death), I ran down the street to the home of my friends Terence and Sheryle. It was a place I knew I would be safe – where I could fall apart and be held together by their strength.
I sat and cried on their couch, and Terence sat at my feet, his hands gently holding my ankles. His face was full of agony and despair, as he held my pain in his strong yet soft heart. I’m sure he was feeling some of the burden by association for the violence a member of his gender had caused me.
Terence didn’t hesitate to phone his supervisor and take the morning off. He knew he needed to be there to help me survive that horrible morning of police reports, a hospital visit, and endless privacy-invading questions. (Incidentally, it was also my friend Terence who, years later, nearly delivered my second daughter when I showed up at the hospital where he was an ER doctor.)
Knowing I needed to be surrounded by people who loved me, that afternoon I phoned one of the most tender-hearted people I knew – my brother Dwight. He too rushed away from his workplace to be by my side. Dwight is one of those rare and beautiful people in front of whom you know you can cry without ever feeling shame. I’m pretty sure he joined me in my tears, making me feel wrapped in a warm blanket of love.
The next day – partly because I’d been taught by my Dad to be strong in the face of obstacles – I was determined not to let the rapist destroy my dreams. So I drove to the town where I was planning to participate in my first triathlon (as a cyclist on a relay team) that weekend. As I got closer though, I knew that the pain in my neck, and the overall shakiness and trauma of my body would not let me ride. I had to give it up, and I had to be somewhere that I felt completely safe, away from race crowds.
I turned my brother’s car around and headed home, to the farm – to the safe arms of my mom and dad.
When I walked in the house, I fell apart, in a puddle of tears and fear and anger and overwhelm. My mom did what she does best – wrapped her arms around me and nurtured me.
My dad fell silent, his body hunched with pain. While Mom soothed me, he walked out of the house. Moments later, he returned.
“I remember,” he said, his shoulders stooped in that familiar way he had of showing humility and agony, “a man whose daughter was raped years ago. He spent the next years of his life trying to find the man who did it so that he could kill him.” And then he paused while his voice shook. “Suddenly I know EXACTLY how he felt.”
Despite the pain I was suffering, I don’t know when I’ve felt so loved. My pacifist father, who didn’t believe in war or violence and never let my brothers have toy guns in the house, was suddenly willing to kill a man on my behalf.
This I know – it has been a significant blessing in my life to be surrounded by men who know how to love, how to show compassion, and how to show up when they’re needed. Though they may not have known it at the time, their tears were as valuable to me as their strength. Even though I had been abused by a man, I knew there were men I could continue to trust in my life.
It is partly because of these men that I can be the woman I am today.
There have been others too, throughout my life. Like my husband Marcel, in whose arms I crumpled when my dad died a sudden accidental death. Or my other brother Brad, who I have turned to many, many times for help – like the time he sent money for my sister and I caught in an urgent situation in Europe. Or my friend Rob, who sat and held my dead son Matthew, said few words but shed the right amount of tears.
There are many places in this world where my rape experience could have turned out so very differently. There are places where my father might have refused to talk to me because I’d brought shame on his household. Or places where I would have been shunned from my village for a sexual encounter before marriage, even if I was an unwilling participant. Or places where I would have been forced to marry my rapist because I was soiled goods and nobody else would want me. Or places where I would have risked yet another rape if I’d shown up at the police office to report the crime.
In Malaysia, Rath escaped a brothel where she was kept as a sex slave, went to report it to the police, and then was imprisoned by the police and later sold by a police officer to another sex trafficker.
In Ethiopia, Moinshet was kidnapped by the man who wanted to marry her, and then repeatedly raped by him and his friends. When she escaped and told the local authorities, they refused to arrest him and instead tried to force her to marry him. In the end, she had to leave her village because she was shunned for her refusal to marry him.
In Pakistan, Mukhtar’s brother Shakur was kidnapped and gang-raped by members of a higher caste. When his rapists became nervous that they might be caught, they accused him of having sex with a young girl from their caste. Mukhtar appeared at the tribal assembly on her family’s behalf to apologize and try to soothe feelings. The tribal council decided that an apology was not enough, and instead ordered Mukhtar to be gang-raped. Four men dragged her into an empty stable and, as the crowd waited outside, stripped and raped her on the dirt floor.
There are many, many other stories like this in Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
, by Nicholas D. Kristoff and Sheryl WuDunn. Read it and be moved.
Thankfully, in some of the stories, there were men who stepped in and supported the women (like Moinshet, whose father took her away from the village and refused to marry her off to the man who raped her).
But I keep wondering… how do we change the paradigm for the men in these situations, not just the women? Sure we can insist that countries come up with better laws to protect the women, but how do we educate boys so that they grow up believing it is NOT okay to treat women like this?
What I keep coming back to is this – we need more men who are willing to step in and model a different way. We need more men like those who stood by me in my crisis, shed tears with me and then lent me strength, and we need them to teach others to do the same.
A lot of “what ifs” pop into my head.
What if the man who raped me had been raised by a compassionate father or taught compassion by his teachers at school?
What if our global leaders modeled compassion and deep respect for women?
What if police officers were taught not only to be strong, but to be compassionate? And what if the police officers we send to train police officers in other countries were doing the same?
What if we only elected officials who knew how to treat women with respect (and encouraged women of other countries to do the same)?
What if the peacekeepers we send to areas of conflict were actually modeling PEACE and not further exasperating the situation?
What if more development agencies were sending out male teachers who would model and teach compassion to boys in schools?
I personally know a lot of men who would love to see the world change for young women living with oppression. I sat with some of those men (my friends Larry and Steve) in that run down office in India that I talked about in my last post, where we all mourned the tragedy of so many young girls being sold into sex slavery.
If you are one of those men, THANK YOU. And KEEP IT UP. And know that what you are doing is of vital importance. Don’t give up until you have modeled it to enough other men that we see a sea change in the world.
Compassionate men, we NEED you!
by Heather Plett | Nov 16, 2010 | Uncategorized
This is my contribution to the Girl Effect Blogging Campaign. After you’ve read my post, I invite you to visit the other amazing writers who have participated.
There are images of young girls that sometimes haunt me when I lie in my bed at night trying to cross the divide between wakefulness and sleep.
Some of those images come from a remote village in the Afar district of Ethiopia. In the evening, as shadows lengthened and the sun settled on the horizon, young girls with elaborately beaded and braided hair danced alongside handsome young men whose curly hair shone with the butter they’d stolen from their mothers’ kitchens. With twinkly eyes and sideways glances, the laughing girls teased their eager dance mates.
The next day, we watched those same young girls walking by pairs down an embankment, carrying loads of crushed stones in colourful sarongs slung between them. Working alongside their fathers, mothers, neighbours, and the boys they’d flirted with the night before, they were helping to build a water diversion system that would provide their village with sufficient water for their crops and livestock.
Other images come from a similarly remote village in India. After hours spent traveling by rickshaw, bicycle transport, and boat to get to the island where they lived, we were greeted by young girls dressed in red and white with sparkly barrettes in their hair. They placed garlands of flowers around our necks and then carefully executed the steps of the dance they’d practiced for our arrival. Their young teacher looked on proudly, encouraging them as they danced. Later, after the necessary formalities, these same young girls skipped along behind us as we wandered through the village visiting some of the elders and seeing how the villagers had survived a recent flood.
Girls at risk
They’re pleasant images – and yet they haunt me. Why? Because so much could have happened to those young girls in the time since I’d seen them last.
All of these young girls are at risk. Where they live, they are quite possibly the most at risk members of society.
A year after my visit to Ethiopia, I met a man who’d been in that village recently. He shook his head sadly when he told me of the sadness in the village since our visit. A large number of young girls had died because of infection. In village gatherings, when families bring their young daughters to be subjected to the ritual of female genital mutilation, the same dirty knife is used for dozens of girls. Many of them succumb to infection and – with no hospitals close by – too many die.
These were the same beaded and braided young girls we’d watched innocently flirt with the butter-haired boys.
In India, after our visit to the villages in the Sundarban Islands, we sat with the staff of a local organization called HASUS who told us that their region – being one of the poorest regions in India – has the largest number of young girls who are taken from their families (with the pretense of being offered jobs in the city) and forced into the sex trade. While we were there, a list of names was passed from hand to hand around the table. On that list were at least two hundred names of missing girls (some of them as young as 10) that HASUS was trying to find and hopefully rescue.
Since our visit, the names of those young girls who danced on the dock especially for us (pictured above) might have been added to that list.
The many faces of discrimination
The more I travel, the more I hear stories about the vulnerability of young girls. Rape, murder, mutilation, sex trafficking, abduction, forceful confinement – all of these abuses put an alarming number of young girls at risk.
According to the latest estimates available, some 1.2 million children are trafficked worldwide every year. Most of these are girls who are being forced into the sex trade. Others are being used as domestic slaves.
In parts of India and other Asian countries, not only are girls being forced into the sex trade, but baby girls are being killed (simply because they’re not boys), and – where there is not enough food to feed the whole family – young daughters are sometimes left to starve. Mostly because dowry payments make them the most expensive members of the household, girls are expendable. Unicef estimates that 60 million girls are ‘missing’ due to prenatal sex selection, infanticide or neglect. In China, similar problems exist because of the one child policy and the desire of many families to have sons rather than daughters.
In many parts of Africa, female genital mutilation puts many young girls at risk. The World Health Organization estimates that more than 130 million girls and women alive today have undergone female genital mutilation, primarily in Africa and, to a lesser extent, in some countries in the Middle East. In Ethiopia, an estimated 80% of women aged 15 to 49 have been subjected to female genital mutilation. In some countries (eg. Egypt) the numbers are as high as 97%. The UN estimates that approximately 12% of girls die from septicaemia, spinal convulsions, trauma and blood-loss after circumcision. By those estimates, approximately 3 million little girls have died in Ethiopia in the past 20 years alone.
There’s more. In conflict situations, young girls are particularly vulnerable. An estimated 90 per cent of global conflict-related deaths since 1990 have been civilians, and 80 per cent of these have been women and children. Not only are they being killed, but they’re also being forced to join the conflict. Latest estimates suggest that more than 250,000 children are currently serving as child soldiers – many of them are girls who’ve been captured not only to serve as soldiers but as “wives” for the commanders of the armies, and mothers to their children.
In many conflict situations, sexual violence is used as a method of warfare. Women and young girls are terrorized and raped, and often left for dead. In recent Unicef studies in Liberia, a country that has seen significant conflict in recent years, people surveyed agreed that young girls are the most endangered group in Liberia and that there is no place and no time of day or night where adolescent girls could be considered safe.
Even in the absence of conflict, many young girls are raped and/or forced to become child brides. Globally, 36 per cent of women aged 20–24 were married or in union before they reached 18 years of age. An estimated 14 million adolescents between 15 and 19 give birth each year. Girls in this age group are twice as likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth as women in their twenties.
The facts are clear – especially in countries dealing with instability because of conflict or extreme poverty, young girls are the most vulnerable members of society. Even in North America, rape is considered a “silent epidemic”, with sexual violence remaining one of the most underreported crimes.
Is there any hope?
What does one person do in the face of such overwhelming statistics? More specifically, what do I do when the faces of those young girls haunt me in the night?
Sometimes I do the only thing I can do – I cling to my own young daughters and promise I will do everything in my power to protect them from such atrocities. I know that I can’t fully protect them (I myself was raped at the age of 19, shortly after leaving my parents’ home), but I will certainly continue to try. But sometimes that’s not enough. Increasingly, I’m feeling the need to stand up and do more – for my own daughters and for the girls who danced for me in India and Ethiopia.
Though the statistics and stories are crippling (and they almost make a person want to throw up her arms in despair and never read a newspaper again) they don’t tell the whole story. Fortunately in my travels, I have not only seen the dark sides of the stories, I’ve seen the bright sides. I’ve seen hope and I’ve seen deep levels of commitment. Most importantly, I’ve seen people who are making a difference.
In India, the young staff of HASUS are about as committed and compassionate as any people I’ve ever met. Working out of small, cramped, and run-down offices in Mandir Bazer, they work tirelessly to gather the names of the missing girls and search for them in brothels and sweat-shops in the city. While we were visiting, they took us to a construction site where they are building a new facility to house the young girls they have rescued from the sex trade and are helping to rehabilitate and re-integrate into society. In a small shack on the property, three young girls (former prostitutes) were being trained to do needlework so that they’d have a trade to provide for themselves in the future.
A couple of years ago, I met Mrs. Angelina Acheng Atyam, a mother whose daughter was abducted and forced to serve with the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda (and, while in captivity, gave birth to 2 of her abductor’s children). A few years ago, while her daughter was still in captivity, she decided that the only way to move forward from the depth of grief and anger that held her in its grip was to find a way to forgive and then stand up and fight. In a visit to Canada, she told a story of how she’d visited the mother of her daughter’s abductor to offer forgiveness and compassion. She started an organization called Concerned Parents Association Uganda to advocate for peace in her country and the return of all children held captive by the Lord’s Resistance Army. Her daughter and two grandchildren managed to escape the LRA and now live with her. Her daughter is going to university and is working to build a better life for herself and her children. Other young girls are being rescued and returned to their homes because of Angelina’s courage and determination.
In Ethiopia, I met a vibrant young woman named Elizabeth. She’d moved from the large city of Addis Ababa to the remote village we visited in the Afar region because she cared deeply for the people there and wanted to help them. She was teaching them to build water diversion projects so that they’d have access to water for their crops and livestock, but more importantly, she was serving as a model for the young girls of the village so that they could stand up for themselves in their village, take on leadership roles, and not accept the abuse of female genital mutilation. Because of her influence, the role of women is slowing changing. Women now sit on local government bodies – something that was unheard of before she moved to the village.
There are others like Elizabeth and Angelina and the staff of HASUS all over the world. They might not be able to change the whole world, but they’re changing their little corners of it. The least I can do is commit to joining them in their efforts.
What can I do?
Here are a few things that you and I can do to make a difference for young girls suffering from a myriad of abuses:
- Find and support good organizations that are actively involved in protecting, rescuing, educating, and standing up for young girls. I’ve mentioned a few that I’ve come into contact with recently – HASUS, Concerned Parents Association Uganda, Stephen Lewis Foundation, Unicef. There are lots of others. International Justice Mission (“a human rights agency that secures justice for victims of slavery, sexual exploitation and other forms of violent oppression”), V-Day (an organization started by Eve Ensler’s that believes “rape, incest, battery, genital mutilation and sexual slavery must end now”) and The Girl Effect (an organization known for their powerful communication tools like this video).
- Write letters to your members of parliament urging the government to invest in the protection and education of young women all over the world. Even though the statistics may be lower in North America, it is important that our policies not only protect our own daughters, but that young girls who seek asylum in our countries can be protected from their oppressors.
- Educate your daughters, nieces, and all of the children you care about so that the future can look better than the past. Just as importantly, educate yourself. For starters, read Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
- Stand up to the oppressors and abusers. Don’t let them win. Look for ways to get involved. You might not be able to travel to India to help rescue young girls from the brothels, but that doesn’t mean you can’t help them. Some of the girls who are trafficked are being used as sex slaves right here in North America.
I don’t know if I’ll ever see the girls I met in India or Africa again, but their images will stay with me. They will serve to remind me that, until every little girl is safe from rape, mutilation, abuse, and murder, the world is not a just place. Until justice is found, none of us should get too comfortable or complacent.
It is partly for the young girls who danced for me in Ethiopia and in India, and who deserve a chance at a full and vibrant life, that I am pouring my passion into Sophia Leadership. Something must change.
by Heather Plett | Nov 15, 2010 | Uncategorized
I bet you didn’t know I was about to give birth! Okay, so it’s not a flesh and bones baby, but it certainly feels like I’ve gone through all of the steps of the birthing process – germination of the seed, gestation, labour, and even the occasional heartburn. And… it’s another girl!
I’m talking about my new website… Sophia Leadership. She is alive and well and ready for you to come on over and ooh and aah and tell her how beautiful she is. 🙂
Thanks to all of you for being part of this birthing process – for inspiring me, encouraging me, challenging me, and just for sticking around and listening when I was full of new-mom angst. You are all wonderful.
by Heather Plett | Nov 14, 2010 | Birthing Sophia, Leadership
There’s a question that’s taken up residence in my heart. It’s a big question, so it takes up a lot of room. Even when I try to ignore it, it keeps nagging at me, imploring me to engage.
What could happen for the world if all of us – women AND men – learned to trust our feminine wisdom more and let it inform the way we live, the way we lead, the way we treat our earth, and the way we make decisions about justice and politics and relationships?
It’s not a question that’s easy to answer. It’s one of those big, potentially world-changing questions that is sometimes easier to ignore because of what it demands of us. It’s a scary question – one that requires the kind of stretching and changing that can be uncomfortable for all of us – individuals, organizations, governments, non-profits, and communities of every kind.
It’s scary, but I have come to believe it is absolutely necessary. We have to ask the question and we have to be prepared for how it might change us. There are enough crises going on in the world today that we cannot deny the urgency with which we need to explore alternatives to some of our past models.
This blog is going to serve as a space for inviting that question into our hearts, sitting with it for awhile, and letting it gradually change us.
The question is not about whether women should take over the world. That would only shift the kinds of problems we have, not overcome them.
What I’m talking about is the wisdom that we ALL have access to, gifted to us by our Creator. It’s the kind of wisdom that is embodied in the Greek word Sophia. It’s wisdom that is spiritual, intuitive, visionary, compassionate, creative, and yes, feminine. It sits in circles sharing stories and wisdom. It welcomes art and music and dance into the houses of power. It remembers that wisdom resides not only in our minds, but in our bodies and in our souls. It believes in the Sacred and allows for spirituality to impact the way we treat our earth.
When we learn to trust that kind of wisdom, and give it equal space with masculine wisdom that is more rational, direct, practical, assertive, then I think we can make transformative things happen for ourselves, our communities, and our world.
Let me just say that I don’t claim any proprietary ownership of this question. It’s a question that is on the hearts of many great thinkers in the world today. I’ve been exploring the wisdom of some of these great thinkers, and some of them will be joining me for some meaningful conversations in this space.
Stick around – I know there will be lots of interesting ideas explored here.
I’m so glad you’re joining me in this quest.
Let’s be sojourners together on this journey.
Let’s do it for our daughters and our sons. Let’s do it for the earth. Let’s do it for ourselves.
Note: If you want to learn more about the birth of Sophia Leadership, I’ve added some of the posts from my personal blog below this one. You may also want to visit the “About Heather” page for a story of my journey to Sophia. And if you want to see a list of some of the books that have inspired me on the journey, check out the “Sophia Reads” page.
by Heather Plett | Nov 14, 2010 | Birthing Sophia
This post originally appeared on my personal blog, Fumbling for Words, in October 2010 when I was imagining Sophia Leadership into existence.
As life and time take me further and further away from that incredible circle of women who met by a lake last weekend, I continue to reflect back on the powerful things that can emerge when we sit together and imagine “what transformation can we birth if we share our hearts in circle and story?”
Let me share one of the stories I’ve brought with me from that weekend…
In the middle of the afternoon on our third day together, we had free time to replenish ourselves in whatever ways we needed to. Two beautiful older women (“crones”, we came to call them, and not in a negative way) who brought the wisdom of the labyrinth into our circle invited me to join them in creating a labyrinth out of the fallen leaves outside our meeting room. I was eager to join them, but knew that first I needed some time to myself to wander in the woods.
The golden energy of so much wisdom and authenticity and yearning and love that had been shared around the circle that afternoon carried me off into the woods on a cloud of peace and fullness. Or perhaps, to use a more personal analogy – carried me off on a horse named Sophia. We had been sharing that afternoon about how much we yearned for more feminine wisdom and energy in our workplaces, our halls of learning, and our communities.
Punctuated throughout our circle time that weekend, and again as I headed into the woods for some personal time with God and Gaia, were the sounds of gunshots from the other side of the lake. Geese hunters, we presumed.
The sharp contrast of the circular, gentle, feminine energy on one side of the lake and the violent, loud, masculine energy on the other side of the lake was a constant reminder of the tensions that exist for all of us. Not only in society as a whole, but within each of us individually, there exists both masculine energy (animus, from Jungian psychology – rational, direct, practical, assertive qualities) and feminine (anima – creative, intuitive, feeling, visionary qualities). Both have beauty and yet both have the possibility of becoming corrupt or too all-encompassing.
As I followed the path through the woods, and listened to the rustling of the leaves, the honking of the geese flying overhead, and the occasional gunshot across the lake, I found myself yearning to (figuratively) row into the middle of the lake to meet the men for a pow wow. To move past the tensions and find a way for the masculine and feminine energy to co-exist without either swallowing the other up. To encourage both men and women to embrace their feminine side along with their masculine side. Yin and yang together in a circle.
Despite the gunshots, the walk through the woods replenished me as I knew it would, but then something happened to deplete my energy once again. Near the end of the trail, someone had dumped a lot of big household garbage – an old couch, old appliances, etc. Standing there with the tranquility of the woods behind me, and the jarring presence of garbage in front of me, I found the sadness welling up within me. This garbage suddenly represented oil spills, the plastic island floating in the middle of the ocean, and all of the other travesties humans are causing all over the world (including, shamefully, the garbage that comes from my own household.)
What blights we allow to appear all around us when we stop caring about the way we treat our earth!
Carrying on down the path, I spotted a path marker – a weathered old wooden sign standing with its back to me. When I reached it, and read what was written on the front, I stopped short. Just one word – “Lifeline.”
In that moment, God whispered in my ear “You are called to offer a lifeline. All of those things that saddened you back there – the tension with the (distorted) masculine energy across the lake, the garbage marring the face of Mother Earth – they represent a lot of lost and hurting hearts. They need a lifeline. Badly. And it’s you. And your circle of powerful women.”
Wow. That’s a pretty huge calling! I felt a little shaky. I had to stand there for a moment before I was ready to move on.
As I got closer to the retreat centre, I paused for a few more photos in the woods. On the ground, half buried in dry leaves, I spotted something white that was clearly not organic. Moving the leaves away, I realized it was a bowl.
I almost ignored it, but then the voice came again “you can’t do anything about the couch or all of that big garbage, but you CAN do something about this bowl.” Right. Just do my small piece.
So I picked up the bowl and carried on. As I fingered it, though, it became more than just a ceramic bowl someone had discarded. It became a begging bowl, like the ones the Buddhist monks carry into the village every day, trusting that it will be filled with just enough food to sustain them for that day. It was a reminder that, if I am called to offer a lifeline, I also need to trust that God and my village will sustain me with the energy and hope that I need every day.
Back at the retreat centre, I found the women near completion of the labyrinth. I rejoiced with them as they swept the last of the leaves into their designated circles.
And then, because it seemed like the right thing to do, I walked to the centre of the labyrinth and danced with my begging bowl, honouring the labyrinth, and honouring this incredible circle of women who were filling my bowl with so much goodness to sustain me for my journey away from the circle and into my future.
Note: it is never my intention to point blame when I talk about “masculine energy” or to imply that men have it wrong (gunshots) and women have it right (circles). That would be far too simplistic and not at all what I believe. I do, however, believe that we have not sufficiently learned to blend the feminine in with the masculine when it comes to leadership and organizational structures in our politics, communities, businesses, and homes, which is why I am working on launching my Sophia Leadership site soon.
