Can a Violent Husband Violate Human Rights? more

Journal of Human Rights, 6:131–141, 2007 Copyright © 2007 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1475-4835 print / 1475-4843 online DOI: 10.1080/14754830601104457 Review Essay Can a Violent Husband Violate Human Rights? SERENA PAREKH Books under review in this essay: Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues, by Catharine A. MacKinnon. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. 419 pp. $35.00 hardcover. Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice, by Sally Engle Merry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 269 pp. $20.00 paperback. Breaking the Silence: French Women’s Voices from the Ghetto, by Fadela Amara. Translated by Helen Harden Chenut (originally Ni putes ni soumises). Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. 179 pp. $16.95 paperback. Noteworthy books: Women’s Rights: A Human Rights Quarterly Reader, by Bert B. Lockwood, Editor. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 682 pp. $27.95 paperback.∗ In discussing which rights count as genuine human rights, the well-known human rights theorist Thomas Pogge writes the following: “Human rights can be violated by governments, certainly, and by government agencies and officials · · · —but not by a petty criminal or by a violent husband.”1 Pogge’s view, that human rights cannot be violated by a violent husband, ∗ This book was received too late to be reviewed in this essay. However, since this book is a collection of a number of seminal essays in the history of women’s human rights, it deserves to be highlighted. It is a collection of essays originally published in Human Rights Quarterly on the topic of women’s human rights that have been tremendously influential. Included in this volume as such important essays as Charlotte Bunch’s, “Women’s Rights as Human Rights: Toward a Re-Vision of Human Rights” and Arvonne S. Fraser’s historical introduction to the topic, “Becoming Human: The Origins and Development of Women’s Human Rights.” Anyone interested in understanding how the topic of women’s human rights has developed over the past twenty-five years would do well to read this volume. Serena Parekh is an Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut, in the Philosophy Department and Human Rights Institute. She received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Boston College, an MA from the University of Leuven in Belgium, and her BA from McGill in Montreal. Her manuscript on Hannah Arendt and the phenomenology of human rights is forthcoming with Routledge. Address correspondence to Serena Parekh, Department of Philosophy, University of Connecticut, Manchester Hall 136, 344 Mansfield Road, Storrs, CT 06269-2054, USA. E-mail: serena. parekh@uconn. edu 131 132 Serena Parekh has been a more or less common place assumption within the field of human rights. Violence against women may violate criminal law and be morally impermissible, but it has nothing to do with human rights. Yet for around twenty-five years now, feminists and other human rights activists have been challenging this idea and the assumptions that lie beneath it. The books under consideration in this review go a long way toward showing why this idea—that violence against women does not constitute a human rights violation—is both intellectually fraudulent and politically and morally pernicious. Further, they show why this idea serves to entrench male privilege, not merely at the national or international level, but at the level of universal norms. If human rights are to be taken seriously in the twenty-first century, they must, these authors argue, take seriously the rights of one half of the world’s population that is currently only marginally included. MacKinnon, Merry, and Amara argue forcefully for this point, though their work also points to a number of questions that remain unresolved in the debate over women’s human rights. Why do some, like Thomas Pogge, still consider women’s rights to be different from “genuine” human rights? There are a number of reasons. First of all, human rights violations are said to occur in the public realm and must be committed by official state actors. Human rights were originally intended to limit the state’s power over its citizens. The private or domestic sphere, the domain of the majority of the women in the world, does not involve the government and hence ought not to be regulated by these norms. Violence against women, usually committed by someone intimately known to the victim, is thought to be unorganized and unofficial—something that “just happens”—and precisely because it is not systematic, it cannot be said to involve the state. All three authors offer arguments that refute this long standing view of human rights. It is not surprising that MacKinnon, who has spent her career arguing that legal distinctions of this kind are deeply gendered and support male privilege, argues that this understanding of the public and private realms is also gendered. She begins by arguing that this view entails an impoverished understanding of the way power works, namely that power operates in the public realm and hence requires regulation, while the private realm is power-neutral. However, many feminists have shown that the private realm is in fact marked by power relations, both between individuals, and between individuals and the state. MacKinnon concludes that it is not official state power that is involved in the oppression of half the human population, and thus it makes no sense (from the point of view of women subjected to this power) to see power as only what the state does. According to MacKinnon, this is a point the “war on terror” has brought home—nonstate actors like Al Qaeda can do as much damage and can wield as much power as any state actor. Though international law has changed to account for the human rights violations of non-state actors like Al Qaeda, MacKinnon insists that changing the law in a similar way for women would unthinkable within our current international system. At the moment, Al Qaeda can violate human rights, but a violent husband, also a non-state actor, cannot. MacKinnon brings our attention to the hypocrisy that underlies this view. MacKinnon takes this argument one step further. For MacKinnon, it is simply incorrect to say that the government is not complicit in individual, “private” abuses, since the state can be seen to both collaborate with the abusers and condone these abuses. This is because, in her view, the state perpetuates violence against women insofar as it does not act effectively to end it. Even though rape may be formally prohibited, she argues that it is widely tolerated and permitted—understood as an excess of passion, the spoils of victory, or the by-product of war. She argues that the state’s complicity in violence against women can be seen in the way that it treats “domestic incidents” and through the way that courts uphold laws (in ways that favor violators, not victims of violence). This, for MacKinnon, means that “virtually nothing is done” about rape, forced motherhood, prostitution, pornography, or sexual murder, either Review Essay 133 within nations or among nations (MacKinnon 2006: 36). Further, even though these acts are formally prohibited, they are “legally and socially rationalized, officially winked at, or in some instances formally condoned. Most of all, they are overlooked” (MacKinnon 2006: 36). While many would agree with MacKinnon that the state does not do enough to stop violence against women, her claim that “virtually nothing is done” about rape is difficult to accept. Unlike many countries, we do have laws that officially proscribe gender violence, publicly funded institutions that support victims of violence against women, and a court system that has developed a body of jurisprudence around domestic violence and sexual assault. What is lacking in MacKinnon’s work is a sound argument to support her claim, backed up with compelling evidence. Instead, at times we get only powerful rhetoric, which, while it brings to light the importance of this topic, is not enough to convince us of the extent of state complicity in violence against women that MacKinnon is claiming. Fadela Amara also argues that the state is in part responsible for violence against women, but not for the same reasons that MacKinnon gives. For Amara, such violence—gang rapes, forced marriages, domestic abuse—is often justified in the name of culture, Muslim culture in particular. This view would seem to imply that because such acts are cultural, the state is not complicit in them. But, she notes that violence against women now so prevalent in contemporary French society, did not exist a generation ago. In her analysis, violence against women has much more to do with unemployment, destitution, and racism, and ultimately state policies concerning things like education and employment, than to the simple fact that she lives in a supposedly misogynistic culture. To the extent that state policies organize and regulate life in the French ghettos, the state is involved in the violence that women in these ghettos experience. However, she would not agree with MacKinnon that virtually nothing is done about rape (although the police’s response to violence against women in the French suburbs leaves much to be desired), but rather that certain state social policies lead to an environment where violence against women is prevalent and socially tolerated. Sally Engle Merry makes the point that women will not use human rights norms to address their problems if they know they will not be taken seriously by the police or the courts. In other words, the way the state responds to women’s abuses and violations will determine the extent to which they see themselves as bearers of human rights. Merry is then in agreement with MacKinnon that insofar as the state responds insufficiently to women’s abuses, the state is further entrenching women’s subordinate position in society. However, Merry seems to disagree with MacKinnon about the extent to which police reactions can be said to make the state complicit with violence against women. All the authors agree that the state is in some sense complicit in violating women’s human rights to the extent that it fails to protect women from systematic abuses. This is a point that is recognized in international law: a state is considered complicit in human rights violations if it systematically tolerates and supports violations done by private citizens. For example, the government of Afghanistan was considered to be complicit in terrorism because it supported the non-state actors who carried out terrorism. The government in Honduras was held responsible for human rights violations carried out by private death squads because it did not act effectively to stop them (MacKinnon 2006: 147). The authors under consideration here show why this basic, well-established point must also apply to the violence and oppression experienced by women. What the authors do not agree on is the precise extent to which our state—with its body of laws and legal practices concerning gender violence—can be said to be condoning and even actively participating in women’s human rights violations. This is an interesting empirical question that arises from their work, but one which is left largely unanswered. A less commonly articulated reason why a violent husband cannot violate human rights has to do with how this violence is imagined. Because it is done by private individuals, often 134 Serena Parekh someone very intimately known to the victim, there is an assumption that it cannot possibly be as bad as the kind of violence that states do to their citizens. To use Maurice Cranston’s well known phrase, human rights violations are thought to be of “a totally different moral dimension” than violence against women.2 When we think of a “violent husband” as the paradigm of the violence that women experience as women, we develop a certain domestic image. But, the common image of violent husband is nothing like the images of violence that these authors have in mind. The violence Merry describes in her work with women’s groups includes female genital mutilation (FGM), widow immolation, prenatal sex selection, female infanticide, child marriage, and forced marriage. The violence that Amara writes about in the ghettos of France is physical violence (including being burned alive) and sexual assault (including brutal and repeated gang rape). MacKinnon’s work is even more graphic, and often difficult to read. The following quotation from “Linda Lovelace,” a woman coerced by her partner into making pornography, is not for the faint of heart. When she told her partner she wanted to leave, she said: [H]e beat me up physically and the constant mental abuse began. I literally became a prisoner, I was not allowed out of his sight, not even to use the bathroom, where he watched me through a hole in the door. He slept on top of me at night, he listened in on my telephone calls with a .45 automatic eight shot pointed at me. I was beaten physically and suffered mental abuse each and every day thereafter. (MacKinnon 2006: 19) After she was coerced into marrying him, she was forced into prostitution. My initiation into prostitution was a gang rape by five men . . . They treated me like an inflatable plastic doll, picking me up and moving me here and there. They spread my legs this way and that, shoving their things at me and into me, they were playing musical chairs with parts of my body. I have never been so frightened and disgraced and humiliated in my life . . . I was brutally beaten whenever I showed any signs of resistance or lack of enthusiasm for the freaky sex he required me to act like I enjoyed. The lives of my family were threatened. Each day I was raped, beaten, kicked, punched, smacked, choked, degraded or yelled at. (MacKinnon 2006: 19) The point of this long quotation (it goes on for a number of pages in the book) is that the violence committed by a violent husband can be as brutal and horrific as any torture committed by the state. Whatever Pogge had in mind when he wrote that a violent husband could not violate human rights, it could not have been this, nor any of the other extreme forms of violence that the authors discuss. While it is tempting to think that these extreme examples are merely exceptional forms of violence, the sheer volume of accounts present in these books gainsay this idea. Indeed, violence against women is commonly dismissed as an exception, done by a few sick individuals. Yet the statistics do not confirm this. When one in three women is sexually assaulted in her life, one in four raped, one in three sexually abused in childhood, one in four battered in their homes (including being crushed and burned), the problem is, in part, systemic (MacKinnon 2006: 271). As the authors clearly show, violence against women is morally serious both in terms of the crimes that are committed and the extent to which it is practiced. All the authors agree that violence against women is, to varying degrees, state sponsored and condoned. Further, they all hold a belief that violence against women undermines Review Essay 135 women’s legally guaranteed equality, and that the best way to improve women’s status in society is to diminish the possibility of violence against them. They show that no matter how logically consistent or traditionally entrenched our definition of human rights is, if it does not account for the violations of human dignity by half of the world’s population, we must come to see it as inadequate. While they present convincing arguments for this position—arguments that ought to be taken seriously both by the human rights community and by a more general audience—the precise way that states violate women’s human rights requires deeper examination. Catherine MacKinnon Are Women Human? is a collection of essays that MacKinnon has written over the past 20 years that develops various themes, some new and some that appear in her other works. Each of the four parts of this book contains a variation on a theme. What is both frustrating and helpful about this book is its level of repetition. Certain points are made over and over again in each essay—such as the difference between formal and substantive equality, and the reasons why pornography should be considered as harming women, rather than merely obscene or violent. There is enough repetition that an individual essay can be read independently from the others, though this level of overlap makes it frustrating to read the book as a whole. Indeed, Are Women Human? should be seen primarily as a collection of essays and not as a book with a unified theme and thesis. While MacKinnon makes a number of important arguments, I will focus on only one that is directly relevant to human rights. MacKinnon claims that women’s rights are better served by civil law than either criminal law or human rights law. The reason human rights law fails to help women is because of the circularity involved in human rights. Although only the state can officially commit human rights violations, only the state can bring complaints of human rights violations to international bodies. In other words, the state polices itself. MacKinnon highlights the fact that no government has ever has stood up for women’s rights—such as by bringing complaints about the way another state treats its women to an international body—and thus, there is no reason to suppose that they will in the future. Likewise, criminal law fails to help women because criminal laws, such as those against pornography or prostitution, only work if state officials choose to do something about it, such as press charges and prosecute offenders. More often than not, this does not occur. In contrast, civil law suits allow the victim to bring civil cases against the perpetrator. Civil laws keep the law in women’s hands. For example, while anti-pornography laws simply drive pornography to the underground, civil laws, which allow women to sue the manufacturers of pornography for the damage done to them, are effective in keeping pornography off the market, and in making the pornographers criminals instead of free speech heroes. In her view, civil rights are concrete and can remedy the problems felt closest to home, while human rights are abstract and rarely able to remedy actual problems. MacKinnon has had tremendous success with this model. She was one of the lawyers involved with a group of Bosnian Muslim and Croat survivors who brought Radovan Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, to trial in the United States in 1993 under the Alien Tort Claims Act. This act gives jurisdiction in US federal district courts for non-US citizens to sue for torts committed against them in violation of the law of nations.3 Though criminal prosecution by the international community had failed to prosecute Karadzic, they were successfully able to try him in a civil suit. On August 10, 2000, a New York jury awarded the plaintiffs $745 million dollars in compensatory and punitive damages and Karadzic was given permanent injunction to cease his activities. It is not surprising, given the success 136 Serena Parekh of this case, that MacKinnon concludes that the domestic civil forum is better than the international criminal trial for remedying the damages done to women. Though MacKinnon’s support of civil rights over human rights is helpful in pointing out some of the deficiencies in human rights legislation, there are problems with her view. The main problem is that MacKinnon never fully articulates her understanding of human rights. Given the picture of human rights drawn above, one is tempted to say that her understanding is excessively legalistic—her notion of human rights focuses only on how human rights are understood within international law. Even international documents like CEDAW (the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women) articulates a role for social and cultural forces in protecting and implementing human rights. Further, MacKinnon fails to acknowledge how her notion of civil rights are predicated upon the existence of human rights. If it were not for the fact that genocide is a human rights violation, there would be no ground for a civil law suit. The moral force behind these civil suits comes from the language of human rights. MacKinnon would do well to adapt a broader view of human rights, one that includes the cultural and social features so important to Sally Engle Merry’s work. This is connected to a deeper flaw in MacKinnon’s book, which has to do with how MacKinnon makes a number of her arguments. Often, MacKinnon’s arguments are clear, precise, and almost unassailable. Yet, there are parts of the book where she relies on association, suggestion, and description, rather than argumentation. Take, for example, a fundamental claim she makes throughout this work, that pornography is intrinsically connected to rape in general and to the genocidal rapes in Bosnia in particular. She argues that pornography acts as a rule book for these rapes—explaining how they should occur and why they are acceptable. Her way of making the connection is to describe, vividly, scenes of rape that are linked to pornography. Yet one cannot help but wonder if the connection between pornography and rape is necessary, as MacKinnon suggests, or merely contingent. At a certain point in the book, MacKinnon goes to great lengths to describe how sexualized the Nazi Holocaust was, even though this is often denied by Holocaust scholars (MacKinnon 2006: 209–233). She argues her point successfully. But, if sexual torture occurred in the Holocaust, at a time when pornography was not nearly as violent or as widespread, that fact would seem to suggest that the relationship between pornography and rape is more contingent. The reader is left wishing MacKinnon had addressed such questions directly. Sally Engle Merry Sally Engle Merry’s work, Human Rights and Gender Violence, tackles one of the most difficult problems for women’s human rights—culture. One of the few widely accepted excuses for violence against women is that it is cultural. There is a widely held assumption that we ought not to interfere with another culture’s beliefs and practices, regardless of how harmful or “wrong” they may seem to us. The relationship between culture and rights is all the more important because gender based violence is often embedded in the ways cultures regulate marriage, women’s sexuality, divorce, inheritance and child custody. Indeed, Merry insists that “diminishing violence against women requires cultural transformations” (Merry 2006: 25). Consequently, there is an inevitable conflict between women’s rights and traditional understandings of things like marriage. Though both MacKinnon and Amara reject the excuse that women’s violations are simply a matter of culture and shouldn’t be tampered with, Merry develops an argument for why even those most sensitive to cultural diversity— such as anthropologists like herself—ought not to allow culture to be used as an excuse Review Essay 137 to harm women. Moreover, she goes beyond both MacKinnon and Amara in showing how this can be done while still emphasizing the importance of culture and cultural diversity. Indeed, she argues that the human rights community has an impoverished notion of culture, one that sees culture as merely a hindrance to social justice, and therefore, prevents us from using culture to further human rights. The heart of her argument focuses on how we understand the term culture. The term can be understood in three distinct ways, each with different implications for how human rights can be realized. The first way is to see culture as tradition. This view presumes an evolutionary understanding of how cultures change. That is, they evolve from “traditional” societies to modern, civilized ones. When the human rights community employs this view of culture, it tries to replace traditional practices (which are seen as harmful and backward) with modern ones (which promote gender equality). A second way of viewing culture is to see it as a national essence. This is the view of culture inherited from the German romantic movement, where culture was understood as the national essence, the spirit of society—that which expressed its genius and distinctiveness. This was the view of culture that Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore had in mind when he claimed that “Asian values” were not compatible with human rights. He wanted to protect his national essence from the onslaught of external values. Indeed, this is the definition of culture that is most often assumed when leaders claim that certain human rights violations are fundamental to their culture. It is also the view that is most often used to oppose women’s rights. In contrast to both these definitions, Merry argues for a view of culture as contentious. Rather then being seen as homogenous, culture should be seen as contested, filled with struggles for power, and the product of historical influences rather than evolutionary changes from primitive to modern. She emphasizes that cultures are made, not eternal and unchanging. Culture is made not only through practices and beliefs, but also through institutional arrangements, political structures and legal regulations. As the latter institutions change, so do the beliefs and practices. For example, since many people speak out against the practice, gang rape in Pakistan ought not to be understood as a natural expression of their culture, but a highly contested part of it. Gang rape in Pakistan should not be considered an essential part of Pakistani culture anymore than the Enron thefts should be seen as an expression of American culture (Merry 2006: 7). As laws and institutions change concerning women, so will cultural attitudes and beliefs. These distinctions are important because the view of culture that one holds will determine how one will envision human rights protection and promotion. If culture is fixed and unchanging, as the first two views hold, then it is simply a barrier that needs to be removed. These views of culture obscure ways that local arrangements and institutions can promote human rights, and thus limit activists’ ability to work in local situations. However, if one understands culture in the way that Merry advocates, then culture is malleable, and can be shaped by institutional practices. In this sense, culture is not “a barrier to human rights mobilization but a context that defines relationships and meanings and constructs the possibilities of action” (Merry 2006: 9). She gives us a clear example of how the difference in viewing culture manifests itself in policy. At a CEDAW meeting, both Uruguay and Denmark were criticized for not having more women participate in the meetings. Uruguay responded by claiming that their cultural traditions limit women to domestic duties, and therefore, nothing can be done about the lack of representation. Denmark, on the other hand, responded by offering funds to offset child care expenses to women who attended the meetings. In the first case, culture was seen as a barrier to change that simply couldn’t be crossed. In the second, culture was seen as malleable. One could change the culture (women’s level of participation in politics) by 138 Serena Parekh changing the social arrangements (providing child care). In other words, whether culture is seen as fixed or changeable determines to a large extent how human rights will be implemented in a culture. Merry’s view of culture disallows people from using culture or the need to preserve culture as an excuse for resisting changes that benefit weaker members of a society. This is no doubt an important contribution. But, there is another implication of her argument—one that is particularly important for human rights activists and theorists. Her view of culture means that the human rights community needs to pay attention to local cultural practices, and not simply dismiss them out of hand. Merry gives us an example that demonstrates this clearly: the issue of reforming personal law in India. In 2000, the CEDAW committee complained about India’s separation of civil laws, which are uniform, from personal laws (marriage, divorce, inheritance, custody, etc) which are regulated by the separate religions. The women’s movement had, for a long time, also advocated abolishing this separation, but political circumstances in India changed in ways that made this goal no longer desirable. Hindu nationalism began to flourish in the 1980s, and the Hindu nationalists used the issue of personal law reform as an excuse to criticize the Muslim religion for its supposed backwardness and barbarism concerning women. The feminist movement in India ultimately backed away from this issue because it was so instrumental in increasing tensions between the two communities. The CEDAW committee, however, did not see this issue in context and simply insisted that the separate systems of law be abolished. Merry notes that this act ironically strengthened positions of the Hindu nationalists and Islamic leaders, while diminishing the position of women. Hindu nationalists were able to use the CEDAW recommendation to demonize Muslims, and Muslim leaders reaffirmed the inferior status of women as essential to ethnic identity of Muslims, thus increasing the subordination of women in that community. The committee failed to see this issue within its contemporary political context, its history (the practice was rooted in colonization, not ancient cultural tradition), and the ways that gender oppression intersected with race, ethnicity and class. The real aim of Merry’s book is to show us how we can overcome a fundamental tension within human rights—the need to remain on the level of the universal and yet be part of local contexts and cultures. This, she argues, requires a process of translation. Human rights need translators—people who can translate the universal human rights norms into a language that local cultures will be able to hear and understand. But, they must also translate the other way. They must bring local cultural contexts to the attention of international institutions, such as the CEDAW committee. NGOs especially need to take more seriously those who are able to move between the local and the global. These translators include political elites, human rights lawyers, feminist activists and movement leaders, social workers and academics. By listening to such people, Merry hopes that CEDAW and other institutions will be able to avoid mistakes like the one described previously. Finally, I’d like to conclude this section by mentioning Merry’s fascinating discussion of the way that human rights are able to shape the subjectivity of individuals. That is, individuals come to see themselves as having human rights and are willing to use human rights to analyze their problems only under certain conditions, specifically when police, courts, and others in their community respond affirmatively when they assert them. She describes this as a process of “trying on” human rights to see how they fit. In this section, she shows how deeply intersubjective human rights are: they require recognition to be made real. Her conclusion is that adopting a rights consciousness requires a change in one’s subjectivity (how one sees and understands oneself) that depends on the wider culture (Merry 2006: 192). Review Essay 139 This affirms that the way women’s rights are seen within the international community makes a difference to how women see themselves. If women’s violations do not have the political dignity of being human rights violations, as Pogge insists, then it will be all the more difficult for women to see themselves as bearers of human rights. In other words, the human rights community has a large role to play in the way women see themselves as either the bearers of rights and dignity, or the opposite. This point might be seen as an implicit critique of MacKinnon, who assumes that women will automatically see themselves as bearers of rights and sue whoever violates these rights. However, if Merry is right, then the process of women coming to see themselves as a bearer of human rights is a much more fundamental task that the human rights community needs to address. Fadela Amara Breaking the Silence is written from the point of view of a human rights activist, not a scholar like MacKinnon and Merry. Fadela Amara is someone whose life has been shaped by the struggle for human rights. She writes that human rights are “a combat that marks my life, first as the daughter of immigrant workers, but also and very simply as a woman whose fundamental rights were too often thwarted” (Amara 2006: 152). The book is an account of the formation and activities of a group she founded called Ni Putes Ni Soumise (Neither Whore Nor Submissives), a group that did much to gain public support for and awareness of the struggles of women within the French ghetto. Because of her particular point of view—an activist—her book has certain qualities that the others do not. It contains powerful personal descriptions of the lives of women who are affected by violence in the French suburbs, as well as a powerful account of how difficult it was to advocate for women’s human rights within this context. On the other hand, her work lacks a critical perspective that is present in the other two books. For example, she claims that violence against women is directly tied to poverty in the suburbs, and at the same time acknowledges that middle class women in France experience the same level of violence (Amara 2006: 130). That she does not investigate apparent contradictions like these remains a shortcoming of the book. Nonetheless, Amara highlights a number of themes raised in the other books—such as the way that culture is used to excuse gender violence (Merry), and the role that the state plays in supposedly private violence (MacKinnon). The lives of women in the ghettos of France, as described by Amara, are constituted by sexism and violence—both physical and mental. Women’s sexuality is controlled, policed by the men of the community—usually their brothers or brothers friends (as opposed to parents). The accepted penalty for expressing femininity or sexuality range from physical beatings to gang rape. Indeed, as she reports these practices, young men see this as their duty and do not understand why anyone would object. Gang rape is so common in the ghetto that it is referred to by the banal term “tournante” or “pass-around.” Even the women themselves think of this violence as completely normal. She writes that some girls never report being raped because they do not know that rape—even being sodomized and forced to fellate three boys—is against the law.4 Forced marriage is another punishment for young girls who violate the sexual codes of the ghetto or whose parents fear that the daughter’s reputation will ruin them.5 The sheer terror that women live in—fear of being raped, verbally abused, spit upon—should not be underestimated. This is compounded by the law of silence that forbids speaking of it. Most surprisingly, Amara insists that her description only applies to the most current generation, the third generation of immigrants (roughly, those raised in 1990s). Amara 140 Serena Parekh is of the second generation (1980s), and her upbringing was nothing like the description above. Certainly her parents were strict and virginity was prized, but the difference is that authority laid with the parents (not the brothers) and respect characterized relations (instead of hostility and fear). As long as women were discrete, their going out with other women, even going to school in another city, was tolerated, even a source of pride. In other words, women had a level of freedom that disappeared a generation latter. Why the change? Amara traces it to the unemployment which robbed the fathers of their jobs and hence place in society. When the fathers lost their authority, the eldest son took over the job as protector of the family and “all moral references explode[d]” (Merry 89). Racism, discrimination, and unemployment characterized the lives of their brothers, and this led to a situation in which young men exercised their (limited) power over the women in their lives. While this explanation does not fully account for the change, it does show that the violence against these women in the 1990s was a product of social and economic forces and that state policies for the ghetto played a large role. This violence was not simply a traditional cultural “fact.” One of Amara’s biggest achievements—both in the book and in France—is to demonstrate that violence against women in the ghetto is not an inevitable part of Muslim “culture,” but a social problem that can be remedied. In fact, she gives a list of very moderate, inexpensive changes that would go a long way toward protecting women, such as providing better sex education (so that both sexes learn that gang rape is not acceptable),6 and ensuring a secular education so women can learn about their rights, such as the right to “security.” Security, in this context, requires practical measures to help women who are beaten, raped, forced into marriage at a young age, both through providing counseling for these women (including counseling centers within police stations) and by creating emergency shelters for victims of these gender-specific crimes.7 Amara would no doubt argue that the state is complicit in violence against women insofar as it fails to enact these measures. Yet if MacKinnon is right, these measures by themselves will not be enough to end rape as an effective tool of power and domination. Amara is clearly calling on us to view culture in the way that Merry does—we should see the Muslim culture in the French ghettos as contested, a struggle for power between men and women. Culture for Amara is clearly not an eternal essence or an unquestionable tradition. Like Merry, Amara would disagree with MacKinnon that civil law is more appropriate than human rights law, since many women in the ghettos do not understand that rape is illegal, let alone something that they can litigate. Nonetheless, she is in agreement with MacKinnon that the state plays a immense role in how gender violence is conceptualized and addressed. Conclusion Though the authors under discussion in this review are in complete agreement about the conclusion of their arguments—that domestic abuse and gender violence constitute human rights violations—their methodologies could not be more different. While MacKinnon focuses almost exclusively on the legal impediments to seeing women’s rights as human rights, Amara focus on the social and cultural limitations. Merry, on the other hand, shows how both these factors mutually influence each other—the legal is influenced by the cultural, culture is influenced by the law and institutions. What is clear then is that in order for women’s rights to be seen as human rights, all the social, cultural, and legal limitations must be overcome. One of these limitations is that even the human rights community often does not consider violence against women to be a human rights violation. One of the Review Essay 141 main aims of this essay was to argue that the human rights community, including theorists like Thomas Pogge, must view women’s violations as human rights violations. This is a necessary first step in the larger project of eliminating gender-based violence. It is fitting to end this review with a point that Mackinnon makes in the powerful essay with which she concludes her book, “Women’s September 11th.” There is tremendous hope in the fact that the world was able to respond to the atrocities of 911, which killed close to 3000 people, by changing the paradigm of international law to include non-state actors like Al Qaeda, and, further, to make states that harbor and condone terrorism (even if they do nothing themselves) equally culpable. If this is possible, it may also be possible for the world to respond with similar passion to the 3000 women a year, in the USA alone, who die at the hands of men (MacKinnon 2006: 260). Unlike September 11, these atrocities are usually seen as exceptional, inevitable, or entirely banal. Yet, MacKinnon, Merry, and Amara give us ample reasons why human rights need to be reconceptualized to include the specific violations that women experience as women. While it may take a sea change for this to take place in popular culture, their work confirms a moral imperative for the human rights community to recognize gender violence for what it is—a human rights violation. Notes 1. Pogge (2001:192, italics added.) Originally published in 1995 in Jahrbuch fur Recht und Ethik 3, pp. 103–120. 2. Maurice Cranston (2001) Human rights, real and supposed. In The Philosophy of Human Rights, Patrick Hayden, ed. (St Paul: Paragon House), p. 171. Of course, what Cranston was contrasting genuine human rights to was social and economic rights, which he thought were of a “totally different moral dimension” to civil and political rights. It is interesting that both sets of rights— social and economic rights and women’s rights—have had to fight for recognition of the moral seriousness. 3. Chapter 20, “War Crimes Remedies at the National Level,” explains this case in detail. 4. Samira Bellil, who published the book Dans l’enfer des tournantes (In the Hell of the Pass-Around), which described the experience of being gang raped, wrote that she did not know that being raped, sodomized, and forced to fellate three boys was a crime punishable by French law. The publication of this book marked turning point for the women’s rights movement in France. “Revolt Against the Rapists,” The Guardian, Saturday April 5, 2003. 5. The French government estimates that in the past 3 years, there were around 7000 forced marriages in France (Amara 71, from an National Public Radio story on Dec 6, 2004). 6. “We even met boys who had participated in several collective rapes and who did not understand what was wrong with their behavior and why we were protesting” (Amara 2006:123). 7. See “the Manifesto of Neighborhood Women,” Appendix 2, for a complete list of their demands (Amara 165).