Violence Against Women
Source: The Guardian
With violence against women resurgent and the US president fuelling misogyny, this man is an inspiration. He deserves his Nobel prize.
Today’s announcement of the Nobel peace prize for Denis Mukwege, with co-winner Nadia Murad, is a deeply deserved recognition for an extraordinary man who has risked everything to heal, cherish and honour women. It is a call to men across the planet to do the same. There are many reasons why the world needs to know the story of my friend Mukwege, who founded the Panzi hospital and co-founded the City of Joy in the Democratic Republic of Congo. But in 2018, we need to hear that story more than ever.
This week, the president of the United States mocked a survivor of sexual abuse in front of a crowd who jeered and laughed along with him. Violence against women and the rampant misogyny that fuels it is resurgent all over the world. In the midst of this violence, finally there is a light.
I first met Mukwege in late 2006, when I was asked to interview him by the UN. His eyes were bloodshot from all the pain he had witnessed. Shortly afterwards he invited me to come to DRC to see if the anti-violence movement I had founded, V-Day, could support his efforts to bring the world’s attention to the war in DRC and the atrocities that were occurring to women.
I remember arriving at the Panzi hospital and seeing Mukwege surrounded by hundreds of the survivors of sexual violence he had healed, and whose spirits he had lifted. For years, Mukwege has been literally sewing up the vaginas of rape survivors as fast as the militias who work for multinational corporations who plunder the resources of Congo – particularly coltan, used in phones and computers – for profit have been ripping them apart.
He has not only saved lives, he has also travelled the world to bring attention to these women’s fate, everywhere from the UN to the European parliament to Washington DC. For years, he was shouting into the void, and it seemed nobody wanted to listen. He – together with women survivors – has woken the world to the use of rape as a tactic of war and armed conflict in DRC and elsewhere.
Dr Mukwege called me this morning through the sounds of women singing and dancing behind him. He told me that he “shares this award with women survivors and activists around the world who have for decades worked to end the scourge of sexual violence. Survivors not only need recognition but they need reparations and an end to impunity.”
In 2011, with Christine Schuler Deschryver, Muwkege and I set up a sanctuary for healing and a revolutionary centre for leadership called the City of Joy in Bukavu, DRC. It is a place for women who have been raped to heal, to rebuild their lives, and to train to go back to their communities not as outcasts, but as leaders. To date, 1,117 women have graduated, becoming leaders in their communities, and transforming them with a new paradigm of turning pain into power.
I know of no man who has given his life more completely to ending violence against women. He does it because he loves and values women. He does it because he knows that the women of DRC are the lifeblood of the future. He is a man of profound grace and generosity.
At a time when men are being encouraged – by Trump and many others – to reassert patriarchal domination to demean women, to dismiss women and to define themselves in toxic ways against women, and to brag about how they can assault us with impunity, I would say: he is a model for men. Mukwege has led by love, with love and through love. He has risked his life (he survived an assassination attempt in 2012) to break ranks with a patriarchal culture of violence towards women. He did it by standing with us, for us, when it was one of the most dangerous things he could possibly do.
This Nobel peace prize should be held up as a beacon – in the darkness of swelling sexism and male supremacy – for all men to follow.