A brief description of atrocities in Congo, in a mostly-unrelated article:
...husbands were forced to watch as their wives and daughters were systematically gang-raped
Awww, they had to watch! Poor babies! I mean yeah, it's certainly unpleasant, but the husbands weren't the ones being raped! They aren't the primary victims! Presenting it that way is so...unempathetic! Honestly, I was shocked to see that the author is female. I would think that maybe a more narrow-minded man would think of it in those terms, but I simply cannot fathom how, in a situation where all the rape victims were female, a woman would not identify directly with the rape victims and automatically focus on their pain.
A more appropriate phrasing would be "Women were systematically gang-raped in front of their families." Because the women were the victims, so they should be the focus, and the fact that their husbands or fathers had to watch just added to their humiliation, which should also be the focus. Taking the focus away from the rape victims' ordeal and focusing instead on the pain of their family members is just a slap in the face of all the rape victims.
I'd expect better from a female writer who appears to work for some kind of humanitarian organization.
2 comments:
I wonder if it is because the pain of the rape victims is very obvious, whereas the pain of the husband and/or family that is forced to watch is apparent from your comment to be somewhat less so?
Because I have to think that while the pain a husband/father would feel to see their wife or daughter subjected to violence is not at the same level as the victim's, I also have to think it would be far beyond merely "unpleasant."
Don't you?
Yeah, beyond unpleasant, I didn't have the right adjective, but certainly far, far less than that of the rape victim, and it certainly should not be presented in a way that takes away any sympathy-producing focus from the rape victim!
If I were raped in front of my father and then I caught him complaining that he was forced to watch as though that were the primary tragedy in the situation, I would kick his ass. And I'm not just tossing that phrase around casually - even not taking into consideration any PTSD I would be suffering, I can say with complete certainty that he would require medical attention when I was done with him. It's a kind of rage I haven't felt since I read Schindler's List and then tried to think of ways to torture Hitler.
I'm sure the husbands and fathers did have an extremely negative experience, but they're going to have to keep that between themselves and their therapists because it is so not about them, and to even imply that it is about them in any way is so assholish that I can't even think of a proper analogy.
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