Here’s an excerpt of
an interview we had with Dr. Abirafeh.
The
beginnings
I was born into GBV activism, really! I
think I was destined to do this before I was born! I am Lebanese on my father’s
side, and Palestinian on my mother’s side. There were so many aspects to my
identity and nothing was taken for granted. I came from different conflicts.
Being female in this context is a conflict in itself. After being born in
Beirut, we moved to Saudi Arabia, and I remember having questioned gender
issues all the time. My parents were liberal and had strong feminist principles
– although maybe they didn’t realize it at the time. I remember wanting a doll
and my mother telling me no, and that I was going to do more in life. I wound
up with a gender neutral childhood that affected me profoundly. We lived in a
compound and did not quite integrate with the mainstream Saudi population, but
I did see the state of women. My mother would have to wear an abaya in order to move about outside the
house, even if she was wearing shorts underneath. I moved to the US when I was
10. For high school, I went to a liberal all-girls school, called the Madeira
School. They had a class called
Comparative Women’s History. It was an earth shattering experience. We spoke
about foot biding and FGM, they showed us videos and talked about it. That
class set my career in motion. They even talked about violence in a western
context, to clearly demonstrate that no one is immune to it. It cuts across
every boundary one can think of. GBV was the most unbelievable and most
egregious form of violence against humanity!
What was ironic was that I picked up on the
subject and obsessed over it, and marinated in it – and I’ve pretty much done
nothing else. It’s like I’m this one-trick pony that can do this one thing. My
first paper was on FGM. My mother asked me, “Where do you get these grim things
from? You’re such a depressing child!” I could not let it go. You could put me
in any class – European History or whatever, I would always write my paper
around something from about gender issues, such as the oppression of women in
World War II or something on these lines, or a World Religion Class – would
have a paper on Women and Alternative Religions. I could not get over it. I was
constantly customizing every class I took towards my interest. I did it for the
rest of my high school life, I did it throughout college, and then graduate
school, and then while doing my PhD, as well. I went through a Development
Studies framework, but it was still all about gender issues. That was the lens
through which I knew the world. Once I put the glasses on, there was no other
way. It was cemented into my head.
It’s funny because people ask me things
like – You have so many conflicting
issues, you’re Palestinian, shouldn’t you be addressing that cause? As much
as I am an advocate for all those things, gender inequality trumps everything.
That is the most salient aspect of my identity. We come in with all these
hyphenated identities - which issues are you going to fight for? and what are
you going to do? and who do you feel like being this morning? That was it for
me!
Challenges
while focusing on GBV Activism
There are so many challenges. This applies to
so many countries - across the board. The first thing definitely is insecurity.
It is hard to work in places where bad things keep happening. Women are more vulnerable
even without added insecurity, but in these contexts, they’re even more
vulnerable. There’s no chance of building anything sustainable, there’s no
chance of stability, conflicts recur, and violence is cyclical at every level –
in the home, in society or in the country. There’s really no way to ever strike
a balance. Especially now, with all those figures we’re hearing about how human
displacement has been at its worst since World War II, we have a global picture
that is pretty bleak. I want to find some optimistic strands to hang onto, but
I’m really not finding them. That’s the hardest part.
I work in these countries
– whether it is in the Central African Republic, or here in Lebanon, or in
Afghanistan or wherever else, for five minutes you think it’s good, but the
next two years it’s terrible. And then you may have this window where things
are working and the situation again deteriorates for one reason or the other. I
think contexts like that are exhausting, because people no longer have the
energy to pick up and rebuild. I find that to be particularly taxing. There are
a lot of socio-cultural obstacles, also. There are a lot of excuses that
cultures and societies find to oppress women and they might be based on
culture, custom, religion, traditions, or might be a reaction or backlash to
perceived, imported or imposed “western elements”. Women become the poster
children of this sacred cultural ground. That becomes the cornerstone on which
all social movements or lack thereof (backward-moving social movements) rest.
In gender issues, those are the last rights to be granted and the first to be
taken away, at every level. There’s also a level of policy and legislation. I
believe that it helps, but transcending it into lower levels is also
challenging. It’s education, the role of men, the ideas about this being a
secondary issue especially in the context of an ongoing conflict. That
continuously trumps the issues that are fundamental to more than half the
population.
I find it so frustrating that people fail
to see how critical this is. Even when rights are granted – I don’t quite like
the word granted – rights are ours, to be seized, enforced and owned. To say
“granted” is to make it tokenistic. To give you an example, in Lebanon, there
was a protracted fight for legislation against Domestic Violence. That finally
came through, but provisions against Marital Rape were removed. All religious
leaders, legislators, government, parliamentarians and also men behaved as
though to say, “Look here ladies! We got you your little law, this is awesome!
Don’t go nitpicking on the small stuff like the marital rape thing!” That fell
short, dramatically short, in fact! For me, that went to the core of the issue.
Religious leaders said that including provisions against marital rape in domestic
violence legislation would destroy the social fabric of the family. Why would
they say this? Let’s unpack it. Are you saying that the social fabric of
society and the community as a whole, is built on the fact that women are
property of men at large? Starting out with her father, at first, and then her
husband – she’s property, throughout. That includes – most dramatically - sexually. They missed the whole point.
We, as feminists must find the delicate balance between politicking
and a cultural way of discussion or diplomacy to get what we want. It is a
constant source of tension to see what form the activism will take. It is not a sellout to choose one over the
other. Are we going to settle for the lowest common denominator, or is it all
or nothing? These are tough things we have to negotiate. We have to have these
critical discussions with the big picture in mind. We’re all fighting for
agency, choice and voice – and then to interpret these in the many different
ways in which we are entitled to.
Dealing
with the challenges
I changed my activist strategy recently. I
took up this position as the Director of the Institute for Women’s Studies
in the Arab World (IWSAW), at the Lebanese American University. I recently
changed my strategy because I was doing emergency and humanitarian work for
many years. There’s a lot of importance and great value in donning that
superhero cape and getting out there in the first 72 hours, with gender issues
on the agenda, and a lot of integrated responses that are critical. But, this
time, I decided that it might be interesting to do something with a foundation
for longer-term change in a system that already existed. I hadn’t considered
working with an academic institution in the past. I had worked with the UN,
with local and international NGOs and even women’s organizations, but not
academia. I felt that it would be an interesting opportunity to see things from
that side. Young people congregate in this setting, so minds are waiting to be
shaped. IWSAW offers full range of activities – education, research,
development projects, outreach. And it has solid staying power. This Institute
has been around for over forty years, and it’s going to be around for a lot
longer. It has the power to influence. An academic institution comes with a
certain amount of credibility, we can do the research needed to understand the
situation, and to work on the field as well. This is an interesting position –
and I realised it was a different way of doing the same type of work, while
also having the opportunity to make a lasting impact.
Milestones
in the journey, Anecdotes on the way
I have to say that people ask me a lot for
what my greatest success has been. I think they want to hear these things – to
know psychologically that there is some traction and hope of positive gains. I
have a few anecdotes of small things - although these things were big for me –
they’re my aha moments, for I feel
that change has happened – even if I won’t see it fully flourish. I have stopped
looking for these moments because I feel that looking for success would leave
me discouraged. Secondly, it’s not possible to see the immediate result of this
work – it’s about social change. What I truly believe is that I don’t know if I
would see changes in my lifetime – but it is still worth it. I can romanticize
and talk about the next generation. I have a niece, and I don’t want her - or
any person - to feel like their choices, freedom and mobility is restricted in
any way. There are so many things that fundamentally bother me about how we are
expected to operate as females, from the female foetus all the way to aged women.
We curb our behaviour, restrict our lives, and manage everything we do because
we have that extra burden, and live a life that is perceived to be
fundamentally unequal. Everything from harassment on the streets to mass
discrimination against women leading to what amounts to a genocide - Where does
it all end? How do we build a society on human rights and equality? That’s the
hardest part of it. The anecdotes are few and far between but it doesn’t mean
that I should stop what I am doing. I am extremely excited by the small things.
For instance - the Institute works with the Feminist Club at the University. In
September, they told me that they wanted to launch a campaign for university
processes to change their name from the Women’s Club to the Intersectional
Feminist Club. They wrote this great piece about all the intersectionality of inequalities,
and how they wanted to address these things, and become advocates and champions
of the cause. I loved it!
The university administration asked me what I
thought, and I endorsed it. I loved watching them unpack their reasons for
doing what they did – and cultivating their own feminist consciousness
In Afghanistan, I remember seeing women who
were offered literacy classes turn them down because they didn’t see value. They
sought safety and survival first – of course! They had starving kids and needed
to put food on the table – and it wasn’t the right time. They went through
programs that helped them receive vocational training, learn skills, and
rebuild their lives. It was only later that a woman told me that she had been
there for six months, and she was getting a little money, and had regained some
power and control over her own life, and she just realized that she had never
once written her own name. Afghanistan has one of the highest illiteracy rates
in the world for women – so making that demand was empowering for her. I
watched this woman be guided in writing her own name for the first time ever –
and I cried my eyes out because it was just so amazing to see that she came to
that place on her own. She regained her sense of choice and voice and felt
empowered about the other basic things in her life. Her fundamentals were taken
care of. Once that happens, other things
had materialized and became important to her.
An
idea to end violence against women
Giving a TED talk was a fascinating
process. I thought I could give a speech – and I can do that in “auto-pilot”
mode. And so I wrote an initial speech that
sounded more like a training. But that’s not what these talks are about – they
need to be simple, relatable, not technical. Something interesting and relevant
to all audiences - to motivate the masses to take action, and to share that one
big idea. My one big idea was to end it, end violence against women, because I
couldn’t stand it. But I had to leave the audience on a positive note - with a
take home message. I put it all out of my head when I was sent to Nepal as part
of the humanitarian response for the April earthquake.
But then the epiphany happened exactly as I
told it in the talk. On the day of the second earthquake, three weeks after the
first one, I was walking to the office and I saw the message I wanted to convey
spray-painted on the wall: Start Where You Stand. It was amazing . I wanted to
tell people that it is everybody’s responsibility, ending this violence. We
have to look around and see how pervasive it is, and the impact of such things.
I wanted to convey the idea that it was personal – that we are all affected,
all responsible. I was hung up on it. I saw this little graffiti, and it hit
me. I wrote the speech on the plane returning from Nepal. When I went to
London, I pieced it together.
The day of that second earthquake, all of
us held onto that column, and there was so much fear in everyone’s eyes. It
clears your head in a creepy way, and your priorities align. It is about
survival. When it comes to GBV, it is REALLY about survival. It cuts right to
who you are as a person. There’s no one who is immune to it. One of the things
that still bothers me is that while making the case about the importance of
GBV, there isn’t much of an understanding that it is a fundamental element of
our existence, life-and-death, life-saving. People would rather go hungry than
to lose safety and bodily integrity. Hunger seems small in comparison with the
safety and integrity of my body. I wanted to leave people with that feeling in
the pit of my stomach. That feeling has rendered me unable to watch movies with
excessive violence – particularly GBV. For instance, I had to pause watching
The Whistleblower so many times because I wanted to vomit. It makes me so sick!
Without wanting to make people vomit in the audience, I wanted people to feel
that feeling that is inside you – like a rot inside you. It bothers me so much.
You don’t need first-hand experience to know that this is wrong.
GBV occurs because of inequality, fear, and
a belief that power is a zero sum game. It is about the belief that giving
women their rightful due will somehow affect men adversely. Of course it
affects men and boys too – but we know women are the majority. It is the
longest running violence that we’ve known to exist. It is the most ugly and
unfortunate and unacceptable by-product of humanity. I don’t think this exists
in the animal kingdom! And yet we feel it all the time, and at so many
different levels and in so many different forms. We just need to recognize how
pervasive it is – and scream This is enough!
The
coming days
The Institute for Women’s Studies in the
Arab World is doing a lot of exciting things. It is a critical time to address
Arab Women’s issues - by and for Arab women. As we say: Nothing about us
without us! All these global policies and dialogues and opinions without engaging
Arab women thinkers, activists, academics - that’s not the way things should
work. We should raise the profile of those voices and critically be the bridge,
helping to ensure that what is said and done FOR Arab women is done BY Arab
women. That is critical for us in the next year. We just launched a new Minor
in Gender Studies and we have a Master’s in Gender Studies, and we’re also
going to launch a program in continuing education for training on gender issues
in development and humanitarian assistance. We have a bi-annual journal called Al-Raida, an Arabic word that means The Pioneer.
I love that word – I like that idea and that identity - we need to embrace it
strongly. There’s also other kinds of research, for instance focusing on
economic empowerment, and to update a nearly twenty year old study on female
labour force participation in Lebanon. We are also looking to continue our work
on the human rights of female migrant domestic workers. Next year, we’re also
launching a training program for police officers on GBV. I’d also like to
create books for children that include GBV prevention and protection messages –
we should start young!
Follow Lina on Twitter as @LinaAbirafeh. Follow the IWAW website for regular posts and updates from Lina.