SheLoves Magazine

No Eenie Meenie In My Mouth

“Bottom line, we don’t realize how much we don’t realize and we should be very humble in our place in the world and within our culture.” –Ken Wytsma, Founder, The Justice Conference

By Idelette McVicker | Twitter: @idelette

I am from bobotie and milktart and the southernmost tip of Africa.

In primary school I earned A’s learning the names of Portuguese traders like Bartolomeu Dias who sailed around that Cabo de Boa Esperanza–the Cape of Good Hope–for the first time and Vasco da Gama who first reached India via Africa.

What I didn’t learn was the name of a man or a woman bought and sold as slaves by traders at Portuguese outposts, like the castle at Elmina on the Gold Coast of Africa.

Until recently, these stories were all separate in my head.

Until recently, I also didn’t know that a simple nursery rhyme is part of perpetuating this horrific past.

This Is Not It

When I attended the Justice Conference in Portland last month, I listened as Ken Wytsma, founder of the conference, unpacked the concept of “justice.”

He demonstrated just how insidious injustice could be by telling us a story. In November 2011, Ken traveled to Cape Coast, Ghana, to research the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade and also film a media project with poet Micah Bournes. While there, Ken spoke to a local scholar who had received his PhD in History in England on the slave trade. He asked for evidence of the widespread gender violence … and if anything was in writing.

That’s when he heard about a song that popped up in Portuguese diaries of the time, a song used by traders to pick a woman for the night.

Where the song ended, determined which woman was selected for the night. The scholar then began to sing it in his heavy accent:

“Eenie Meenie Mini Moe …”

Hearing these words, even in a crowd of 4,000 people, hit me like a machete in my stomach.

How have I missed this? How have I perpetuated this?

While Elmina castle is infamous for the buying and selling of slave souls, somehow I’ve missed this other story happening on the sidelines of the slave horror: The story of prostituted women lined up to serve the slave traders’ sexual whims.

Women marginalized even in the margins.

Now that I know, I hear the echo of this counting-out rhyme in my head as words streaming out of Portuguese buyers’ mouths. Men counting out to determine a woman’s fate.

Now I hear these words, thick as rope, woven around the women, tying them to a destiny of diminishment.

I am not ignorant to the power of words to tie up and enslave.

I know the teeth that can sink into vowels and consonants. I am not ignorant to the degradation that can be embedded and perpetuated down the generations. This very rhyme also has thick ugly racist connotations; so much so that in 2003 two passengers sued Southwest Airlines for emotional distress when a steward jokingly employed the rhyme to encourage passengers to find a seat.

But what if I didn’t know before?

I’ve been wondering whether we can we perpetuate the evil, even in our unknowing? Does not knowing and saying the words, carry on the diminishing?

I don’t know, but it makes me sick that I didn’t know. That this story could be so veiled to my seeing and my hearing.

It makes me sick that too many of us still don’t know.

This one thing I do know: Now that I know how these words were formed in the mouths of abusers, these words will not be spoken in my home or in my presence. I will do my utmost to educate and stop the lineage of injustice through these words wherever I can.

Structural Injustice

“My point in telling the story was the structural injustices that can so easily crop up in our life,” Ken Wytsma told me in a message. “I can grow up and sing an innocent rhyme while playing, without realizing the long history that taints the same rhyme for different people … Something can be harmless to me, but harmful to others. Bottom line, we don’t realize how much we don’t realize and we should be very humble in our place in the world and within our culture.”

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Editor’s note:

• Sunday, March 25, 2012 was observed as the fifth International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Transatlantic Slave Trade and is celebrated at the UN all of this week.
• Historians estimate 28 million Africans were violently removed and cast into slavery, mainly in colonies in North America, South America and the West Indies.
• Listen to an excerpt from a UN Radio interview with Prof. Naana Jane Opoku Agyemang, Vice Chancellor of the University of Cape Coast in Ghana, about the transatlantic slave trade.

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My dear SheLoves friends, I would love to hear your response:

• Did you know this dark echo in the story of this counting-out rhyme?
• Do you think it matters if we don’t know? Do you perpetuate the injustice, or not?
• Now that you know, what will you do?
• Any other thoughts or comments?

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About Idelette:

I like soggy cereal and I would like to go to every spot on the map of the earth to meet our world’s women.

I dream of a world where no women or girls are for sale. I dream of a world where women and men are partners in doing the work that brings down a new Heaven on earth.

My word for the year is “Roar,” but I have learned it’s not about my voice rising as much as it is about our collective voices rising in unison to bring down walls of injustice.

I have three children and this place–right here, called shelovesmagazine.com–is my fourth baby. I am African, although my skin colour doesn’t tell you that story. I am also a little bit Chinese, because my heart lives there amongst the tall skyscrapers of Taipei and the mountains of Chiufen. Give me sweet chai and I think I’m in heaven. I live in Vancouver, Canada and I pledged my heart to Scott 11 years ago.

I believe in kindness and calling out the song in each other’s hearts. I also believe that Love covers–my gaps, my mistakes and the distances between us. I blog at idelette.com and tweet@idelette.

Image credit: Woman (Mbororo) in Foumban, Cameroon. Originally published 1919.

She Ran on Her Toes

How Human Trafficking Hit Home for Me

“She stood beside me, in front of the choir room chalkboard, waiting to be heard.” 

By Kisa MacDonald | Twitter: @kisamac

Sandy lived around the corner.  She was blue-eyed, whimsical and often singing to herself.  She was the girl who always ran everywhere on her toes. Every day, she would prance down the big hill after school, softly shuffling her feet like an unstoppable, beautiful ballerina. Our growing-up streets and houses were just scenery for her afternoon stage, witnesses to her perpetual performance.

We were good kids, with well-educated parents and middle-class ambitions: sports, arts and music. What we looked like and how we performed was often emphasized, praised and corrected. We wanted to do it all: be better, win at everything and be rewarded. We were the material girls, listening to Madonna, watching Grease over-and-over, loving Olivia Newton John.

I remember watching Sandy audition for the lead role in the school play.  She stood beside me, in front of the choir room chalkboard, waiting to be heard.  She was shaking, whispering rehearsed lyrics like prayers. Our eccentric teacher loved her song, but didn’t choose her for the big part.  She said that her voice was too soft, did not carry enough impact on the room.

I remember her tears.

I felt sorry for her.

During our first year of junior high, Sandy became hard to see. I ran into her once behind the movie theatres. Her hair was all messed up.  She smelled like too many cigarettes. She was wearing high heels. Her new boyfriend was a few years older.

I was only 15 when I first stood inside The Supreme Court of British Columbia. Sandy was being sentenced for prostitution, and I wanted her to know that someone cared.

The judge felt sorry for her. He only charged her a $1 fine.

We stood outside, squinting awkwardly at each other in the February sun. She thanked me for showing up, while her boyfriend paid the one-dollar fine. A few days later, they moved to Alberta, or some other province.

I never saw her again.

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For six months last year, I worked beside The International Centre for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy (ICCLR) on UBC campus. The ICCLR has issued a commissioned report called “An Exploration of Promising Practices in Response to Human Trafficking in Canada.” (Click on the link for the PDF download.)

I read the report and thought about Sandy standing beside me, in the old choir room, waiting to be heard. I thought about how little I felt, standing as a 15-year-old, on the steps of the courthouse. I thought about the shadow of her old boyfriend.

Please read the report.  Take a long, hard look at what can be done better. Promise me you will raise your voice.  Someone, perhaps like my Sandy, needs to hear.

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About Kisa:

Kisa completed her law degree earlier last year and is currently finishing her articling year at a non-profit that focuses on law reform, legal research and outreach. She grew up on Vancouver Island but has lived all over: North America, Southeast Asia and Europe. In this next season of life, she hopes to see creative community and access to justice established in Vancouver.

Image credit: Nima Mir via Pinterest

Our Lives to Fight For: Students Advocate for the Abolition of Prostitution

“If you stop talking and pay attention, racially and economically marginalized women are telling us very clearly that they do not want their daughters, sisters, aunts, or mothers bought and sold by men.”

By Alexandra Mackenzie | Twitter: @OLTFF
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In my fourth year at Simon Fraser University–last year–I took class with an amazing professor who gave us an assignment to create a campaign about a social issue. Nine other women and I chose to create a documentary with an abolitionist perspective on prostitution and trafficking in Canada. We called it: Our Lives to Fight For.

Our film focuses on interviews with activists fighting to end the sexual exploitation of women and girls. However, what started as a simple school project grew into something I believe changed my life. I’d like to share with you what it taught me about advocating for human rights.

You can watch it here:

Our Lives To Fight For from M on Vimeo.

Here’s what I’ve learned: Prostitution is violence against women and a direct deterrent to gender equality. It may be the most normalized human rights violation in existence. Systemic inequalities such as sexism, poverty, abuse, racism, and trafficking coerce our most marginalized women and children into the sex trade. Realizing this taught me to examine my own privilege. But this is about more than just realizing that I am lucky to be white and middle class in Canada. Examining one’s privilege is really about LISTENING. I believe that, as a society, we have failed to listen and as a result we have abandoned our most vulnerable citizens.

In Canada, Aboriginal women are strongly overrepresented in street prostitution, while impoverished women from Asia are trafficked into brothels and massage parlours. When you look at the back of newspapers such as The Georgia Straight, you can see women blatantly advertised to men based on their age, ethnicity, body type, etc. Patriarchal ideologies are so entrenched in our beliefs that we have ceased to even question this and often even frame it as an issue of choice and empowerment.

While there are a very small amount of middle class women who “choose” prostitution, laws are only effective if they protect the most vulnerable and marginalized. This is why legalizing prostitution does not work. In countries, like the Netherlands, where prostitution has been legalized, sex trafficking has increased exponentially. Illegal brothels outnumber the legal ones and disadvantaged women and children are not safer from johns, pimps or traffickers. Most importantly legalization normalizes the male demand for paid sex.

However, if you stop talking and pay attention, racially and economically marginalized women are telling us very clearly that they do not want their daughters, sisters, aunts, or mothers bought and sold by men. These are the voices that we need to place at the forefront of the prostitution debate. Laws surrounding prostitution need to protect the equality, freedom and human dignity of our most disadvantaged women and children. Not the rights of the few privileged women “choosing” prostitution and certainly not the rights of pimps, traffickers and johns.

Realizing my own privilege also taught me that we all have a human obligation to speak out about violence against women. In the past I was too anxious to speak in public or even let anyone read something I had written. While I still have much room for improvement in these areas, I now force myself to speak out and write regardless. Because it simply isn’t about my pride, embarrassment or anxiety, it’s about the women and children who are have been raped, beaten, abused, and degraded because of the male demand for paid sex.

Lastly I want to address the often used excuse for allowing prostitution to continue: “We will never get rid of prostitution, it’s the oldest profession, so we should just accept it”. One of my personal heroes, Trisha Baptie, says: “Abolition as a movement is about dreaming BIGGER. I don’t think people have dreamed as big as full equality.”

We need to envision and work towards a Canada in which no women or child is for sale. We need to demand better from our government and those around us. We need to start listening. There is no other alternative. As I type this, prostituted women will be murdered, beaten, raped, degraded, and dehumanized. We simply do not have time to wait any longer.

“You, a well-trained person, can stand with the abuser or with the rebel, the resister, the revolutionary. You can stand with the sister he is doing it to; and if you are very brave you can try to stand between them so that he has to get through you to get to her. That, by the way, is the meaning of the often misused word ‘choice.’ These are choices. I am asking you to make a choice.” –Andrea Dworkin, 1993

For more information please check out our documentary at www.ourlivestofightfor.wordpress.com.

UPCOMING EVENT: Next Wednesday, Oct. 5, we’ll have a viewing of the film, Our Lives to Fight For, followed by a discussion at the SFU Surrey campus from 7-9pm. Come and learn about the Nordic model of Prostitution law, abolition and why this is crucial for our Canadian women.

About Alexandra:

Alexandra Mackenzie recently graduated from Simon Fraser University with a degree in Communications. She is one of the co-founders of Our Lives to Fight For, a small SFU student group advocating for the abolition of prositution. She hopes to become a human rights lawyer.

Getting Real with Trisha: On Sweden and Experiencing the Effects of the Nordic Model of Prostitution Law

Thoughts and observations from a society where women and girls are not for sale.

By Trisha Baptie | Twitter: @trisha_baptie
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“We had an art show/contest with 200 pieces of art. There was a equal amount of men and women represented and no one knew who had painted what. There were no names on the art and the top 50 pieces were to be picked and put on long-term display. We were surprised by the findings: of the fifty picked, forty were from men. Which suggested what many thought; men were in fact better at art. Or, did it mean something different? Did it mean that men had created the filter in which we judged what ‘good art’ was and that was in fact what needed to be changed.” –Mr. Claes Borgstrom, former Gender Equality Ombudsman, Sweden.

This is the story Claes Borgstrom started his portion of a presentation I was a part of last week in Stockholm. I was part of a two-day program put on by the Swedish Institute for international journalists that looked at the Swedish model of prostitution law and combating human trafficking.

It was a jam-packed two days that representatives from the National Police Board, Prostitution Unit (exiting services), Council of the Baltic Sea States, Former Gender Equality Minister and others presented to us. I recorded the whole two days and will be putting together audio clips together in the coming weeks. What spoke to me the most about society in Sweden, however, were the Swedes themselves.

The Impact of Gender Equality

I acknowledge that being in a major city like Stockholm, I did not see how smaller towns fared, and only being there for about a week I only scratched the surface on all the issues. That said, I was intentional about talking to a wide variety of residents about the laws and culture–like talking to some high school students about what they thought of their country’s laws. I must say what struck me about the young women was their confidence … the fact not one wore a stitch of make-up. In fact, I noticed that throughout my whole time there. I will right here interject some general statements about my observances on my time there, remembering I was in Government offices a good majority of the time, went grocery shopping, ate out, interacted on transit and such.

Women don’t wear make up. Not even kidding. What I noticed more was when women were in fact wearing it.

Heels, or rather the current trend of stilettos that have women from all walks of life and professions here in North America cramming our tender tootsies into them … women don’t wear them there. Again, I could count the number of women wearing stilettos. Once relegated to the uniform of prostituted women, sometimes it seems like all women are “required” to wear them now.

European women are known for their fashion sense. Swedish women are no different. What surprised me about their wonderful fashion sense was not what they wore, but how much material was involved with their clothing.

Was it because of the adverts they saw?

A friend noticed a gym advertisement portraying a woman in real gym clothing, lifting weights as one would in a work-out. Not one thing about that ad was hypersexualized. In fact, it seemed cars, food, liquor, gym memberships, cell phone providers, etc, often had women in their ads, but not any more than men. Still, it was not women’s sexuality that was selling the product. Rather the product seemed to sell itself, the models were just in the ad to hold it up or point it out. It was not the commodification of women’s bodies that sold the item.

I saw rows and rows of magazines and although they were complete gibberish to this non-Swedish speaker, the pictures spoke volumes. It was not rows of perfect bodies in too tight clothing that pushed the cleavage boundary. It was rows of women, some recognizably famous, other not so, but the common theme was their average and non-manicured beauty.

When talking to the high school students, they were baffled at the thought of their male counter parts watching porn, or treating them like some rap videos teach our boys to treat girls. Does flirting happen? Yup. Does teenage sex happen? Yup. What they did know though is that prostitution is self-harm. Not even kidding. That is what they themselves called it–and taught me. It’s self-harm. Prostitution is self-harm and men who buy women, well, shame on them.

Shame: Doing Wrong Against Society

That’s a word they use freely in Sweden about men who buy sex. Shame.

I bristled at that at first, but as they talked I realized the shame they mean is the shame that an act carries with it that is in fact a wrong done against all of society. It is a shame that says, “This is wrong. You know it’s wrong and you know why it’s wrong. (It’s against gender equality and is a form of power imbalance and thus a form of violence against women.) And why would you do this horrible thing to vulnerable people?”

It was the shame that changed behavior.

Which is exactly what the Swedish laws on prostitution aimed to do: change behaviors. Lawmakers set out to change the way men see women. Better yet, they changed the filter in which women are viewed.

Core of the Problem

I always thought feminism was about standing up to patriarchy, standing up to men’s entitlement. Legalizing or fully decriminalizing prostitution does not do either of those things. Adopting the Swedish model of law does. It’s the true feminist embodiment of gender equality and is the step Canada must take.

All the systemic reasons women get involved in prostitution are not in fact the core reason. The core–the heart of prostitution–is because of gender inequality. I have to wonder: What other forms of inequality can we end by starting with saying our women and girls are not for sale?

Check out these interesting articles on Swedish society, gender equality and the Nordic model of Prostitution Law:

In Sweden, Men Can Have It All, The New York Times

About Trisha
Trisha Baptie is Executive Director of Honour Consulting and founding member of EVE (formerly Exploited Voices now Educating). In 2008 she won BC’s Courage to Come Back Award for her bravery in transitioning to a healthier lifestyle, for giving the murdered women of Vancouver a voice through her trial coverage of Vancouver’s serial killer and for her ongoing activism. Follow Trisha’s tweets at @trisha_baptie or friend her on facebook. She recently founded EVE (formerly Exploited Voices Now Educating.)