recent pattern of violence against female circumcision activists ?

I noted the recent news stories about two activists against female circumcision encountering potentially suspicious violence. The first whose name I don't recall was found dead in Paris with the suspicion that she fell into the Seine while trying to board her houseboat while intoxicated. The inquest apparently concluded this but the family is suspicious of foul play.

The second, Waris Dirie, disappeared for several days and then reemerged with a bizarre story involving the Brussels police, in which she was trying to return to her hotel from clubbing, went to the wrong Sofitel in Brussels, got driven around by the police for hours and interrogated in a moralizing way, and then slipped off into a taxi whose driver proceeded to hold her captive in his house for two days.

My question is whether there is a recent uptick in mysterious events being experienced by public activists for women's rights. Political activity, legitimate or not, frequently comes in waves triggered by word of mouth if not a more centralized structure, and I'm wondering whether, it being spring and an election year and the crappers being threatened and all, they're striking back and the vermin is coming out of the woodwork.

I notice that these can be Muslim fundamentalist vermin just as readily as western sexist trash. Clearly reactionary trash is on the warpath in European immigrant communities and this could be a sign of merely that (which is bad enough and should be neutralized). The presence of the Belgian police in the second scenario though suggests the possibility of coordination with western authorities (in an illegitimate operation).

Replies in the neighborhood of tin foil and conspiracy nutiness will be ignored - if you're naive, that's not my problem.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waris_Dirie (citations omitted)

In March 2008, she went missing for 3 days in Brussels, Belgium. She was last seen in the early hours of Wednesday, March 5, 2008. She was found alive on Friday, March 7, 2008 by a plainclothes Brussels policeman, in the presence of a local window cleaner. He told press, that the couple met in a pub and was planning to spend dinner together. Dirie could not give an explanation over what happened, and only said that she was lost, and couldn't find her way back to her hotel. Since she had no money on her, she had been sleeping in hotel lobbies. Afterwards, she declared that she was kidnapped for two days by a taxi driver and the story of having been lost was to keep the press from asking her too many questions. She also knew the window cleaner for less than an hour. A few days later she again changed her story and told Austrian media that she was kidnapped and held by a taxi-driver who tried to rape her, she also said that the Brussels police refused to help her. She finally admitted she had a drinking problem and enrolled in a hospital program to help her sort her problem.

The unfortunate catch 22 that arises in trying to assess reports like hers is that:
(a) people with psychological disturbances and/or substance abuse problems (commonly found together) sometimes give reports of events that do not reflect reality;
(b) people with problems of those kinds, especially women, are very vulnerable to exploitation and harm, both because they often lack the resources to protect themselves and because of the expectation that their reports will be regarded as not reflecting reality.

A video interview with her after the incident:

http://www.eux.tv/article.aspx?articleId=19936

I've been abducted and sexually assaulted and had to rely on my wits and my feet to live, and have experienced (brief) police skepticism (it really is part of their job). I have also dealt with an alcoholic who could fabricate tales so brilliantly interwoven with believable elements that I had no hope of identifying the falshoods, to generate sympathy for himself and avoid responsibility for his actions. I don't have what is needed to assess the credibility of Darie's account, which could be a relatively true report of something like what happened to me or a complexly false report of the kind a clever alcoholic can produce when the need arises.

What I don't see is any basis for assigning responsibility, for whatever happened, to anyone other than herself or the person(s) who victimized her, as the case may be.

I've been missing the news due to overwork lately, and hadn't heard of either of these incidents.

http://lifeandhealth.guardian.co.uk/fashion/story/0,,2261520,00.html

Katoucha Niane
Paris fashion model and founder of a campaign against female circumcision

... she described a pleasant, privileged childhood that ended when she was nine: her French-educated mother claimed to be taking her to the cinema to see the Beatles film Help!, but in fact surrendered Niane for genital mutilation, in filthy conditions, and without anaesthetic, according to the local custom.

The next year, her father sent her for safety to Mali, as Guinea's post-colonial dictator, Ahmed Sékou Touré, had threatened him. Alone in an aunt's house, Niane was safe from the Guinean regime, but nothing else: she was sexually abused. ...

... she had a cigarette and a glass of champagne in hand. They were not her only addictions. Although Niane told Summers that she avoided going to New York because the drugs temptation there was so strong, she admitted in her book that she had misused drugs as well as alcohol, and had had bouts of mental illness: at one point she was declared unfit to care for Amy, and her two younger children, Alexandre and Aïden. She became aware that the pain and fear of her childhood had made her self-destructive and yet had constructed her stage presence. "I embodied the most arrogant and admired kind of femininity, I who was supposed to be diminished," she wrote.

... Niane had lived for some years on a houseboat on the Seine, and is thought to have fallen in on her way back from a night out. ...

Another complicated, troubled individual, a victim of many horrors and of her own behaviour, diminished as her responsibility for it obviously was by those horrors.


Personally, I regard it as demeaning to people like these two women to invent tales to explain their lives and deaths that reduce them to victims of some unseen force moving them about like pawns. There is real tragedy in those lives and deaths, and we honour them more by acknowledging and facing it than by ... well, there's no other way of saying it: using them as pawns in the service of some ideology or plan of our own.

always increases during times of war - and the increases occur both among the military population itself (domestic violence, rape, human trafficking), and among the civilian population as well. It's like the death penalty in that way, a level of condoned regulated violence creates an atmosphere of acceptance of violence in general.

During war, violence against women in particular increases because masculine aggression becomes idolized as a "warrior" trait, and part of that mystique of the warrior is domination over everyone - but particularly those who are different (as opposed to "brothers in arms"). If the men in those communities either are coming directly from war torn areas, or feel solidarity and identify with people in those areas, unfortunately this is a "normal" reaction. Not normal as in we should accept it, but normal to the extent that it is entirely predictable as a side affect of war that some men (on all sides of the conflict) will react with increased violence against women who are advocating for equal rights.

do you perceive a ripple in ongoing activities which would have prompted this innate reaction you describe ? (I use 'innate' to paraphrase what you describe instead of 'natural' since that it's not.) As opposed to a deliberate conscious choice ?

The actual events here occurred in France and Belgium. And not even the alleged victim in Belgium attributes the mistreatment she claims to have suffered to anything other than the acts of the people who mistreated her and the attitude of local police toward immigrants.

Both women had/have serious personal problems, both involving heavy substance abuse.

Women with those kinds of problems are at considerably elevated risk of misfortunes like falling into a river and drowning, and being criminally mistreated by men. They are also at elevated risk of not receiving assistance from police when they do suffer such misfortunes. An example I immediately think of is a First Nations woman I knew, a community activist who was also an alcoholic -- and who fell on the road on the local bar strip after being hit by a car on a winter night and was left there by local police who decided she was just another drunken Indian, and died.

Conversely, as I mentioned, because they are at elevated risk of having their (and their families') concerns not taken seriously, they are easier targets for harm. Robert Pickford killed dozens of street prostitutes in the Vancouver area before anyone started to pay attention to the deaths. He was able to continue killing vulnerable women in a way he could never have done had his acts been directed at male stockbrokers.

So if someone did want to kill or harm an activist against female genital mutilation, the fact that she was an alcoholic with a history of erratic behaviour could indeed make it easier to do and to get away with.

But it could also just be that an alcoholic who lives on a boat fell into a river and drowned while drunk, and an alcoholic who wanders around in a big city at night getting lost while drunk was abused by someone who took advantage of her vulnerable condition and then dismissed by police who were undertandably put off by her (even if understandable) decision to give multiple different accounts of the events.