Women, Peace & Security
Source: National Geographic
Crowds of police officers and nurses converged in a room painted with bright alphabet letters at a hospital in Rwanda's capital, Kigali. A plush frog and a couple of dolls with Afros lay on the table, props that might be used by a child to entertain herself while her mother seeks care or to act out a haunting scene of abuse for a counselor.
The Isange One Stop Centre is just the first in a growing, countrywide network of clinics where survivors of sexual violence can seek medical treatment, counseling services, and legal help filing claims against their attackers. The design is intended to ensure that the patient has to tell her story only once.
Before we stepped into the center, we'd spent an hour with Rwanda's top police commander, Inspector General Emmanuel Gasana. A wide-chested, muscular man, he peppered his comments with surprising phrases like "prevention mechanisms" and "gender budgeting."
"When we first started this gender-based violence work," he said, "we started to see the numbers [of reported attacks] going up. I was asking all the time, What's happening? But because of the campaign, it moved things." Women began to see attacks on them as crimes and, very gradually, as traumas they'd endured for which they shouldn't feel ashamed, Gasana explained. Given his gold-decorated epaulets and pants tucked into polished boots, the words seemed incongruous. But he delivered them with an obvious sense of pride. Community-policing committees—90,000 civilians across the country, he noted—are also on the case, charged with maintaining security.
Twenty years after a genocide, these efforts are evidence of the impact of Rwanda's new vanguard of leaders: women who have played a central role in all aspects of the country's rebuilding. The One Stop Centre and the broader system of trained officers the police are putting in place are the consequence of a major push to make good on the government's policy of zero tolerance for sexual violence.
New Laws and Protections
The most famous example of strides for Rwandan women came in 2008, when Rwanda became the first country ever to have a female majority in parliament. That same year, the legislature adopted a progressive law making domestic violence illegal and mandating harsh prison terms for rape.
"We don't want to just make a law," Judith Kanakuze, who led the bill's drafting, said in a prescient 2005 interview. She wanted to change behavior—to stop men from beating their partners and stop women from tolerating the beating. Kanakuze saw the law as one element in a larger strategy to change cultural expectations that were dangerous for women.
In years prior, Rwanda's parliament had passed pivotal laws enabling women to own land and daughters to inherit property. The legislature's newly formed Forum for Parliamentary Women played a central role in both bills.