Tiger Beatdown

Today marks the anniversary of the political assassination of three women known as the Mirabal Sisters. The Mirabals were four sisters who grew up in Salcedo, a city in the Dominican Republic, during the era of the dictator Rafael Trujillo. Three of them — Minerva, Patria, and Maria Teresa — were killed by Trujillo’s henchmen for their involvement in efforts to overthrow his dictatorial government. Their murders took place on November 25th 1960 and since the ‘80s, activists in Latin America have been commemorating their deaths as a symbol of gender violence. Since 1,999, United Nations has marked the day as International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women.

Back in July, I wrote about the UN Women report about “Progress of the World’s Women”. The report was an exhaustive analysis of the socioeconomic realities of women across the world. The report highlighted issues such as the fact that, on average 10 percent of women in 57 countries said they had been sexually assaulted, but only 11 percent of those who had been assaulted reported the crime. In some countries like Costa Rica, Paraguay and Peru, as many as 20% of interviewed women said they had been sexually assaulted. In the USA, 16 percent of women and men agreed that it is sometimes justifiable for a man to beat his wife. In Canada, this figure was 6 percent.

Few people would argue that gender violence is a reality and, in some places, an epidemic.

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[Content warning for very racist images, links to videos of police brutality and depictions of State endorsed racism]

Ah, my home, The Netherlands. Tourists from all over the world wax lyrical about the tulips, the windmills and the widely available weed. What these tourists hardly ever get to see is how institutionalized racism works in this country and the lengths the State will go to in order to protect it. Or how, if you are personally affected by this racism and you summon the strength to protest it, you will be brutally beaten up and arrested.

Now, here is the thing: this is a small country. All matters of racism happen here but they go unreported in international mainstream media because the Dutch language is mostly inaccessible to the world at large. So, these matters remain untold, underreported, downplayed or just ignored. However, international media loves to talk about our most famous homegrown xenophobe: Geert Wilders. His influence is far reaching and international. His words repeated all over the international press; he gets invitations for public engagements and speeches; fellow populist and xenophobe politicians from all over Europe and places as dissimilar as the US, Canada or Australia cite him as a source of “inspiration”. Meanwhile, the general public abroad struggles to come up with an explanation of why, a country that is present in popular imaginations as “tolerant”, “multicultural” and “modern” could be represented by such a divisive and racist force. That is, because systematically, mainstream media misses the context. And I believe that the events that transpired on Saturday, during the official opening of what I like to call “Black Face season”, can provide some of that context.

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European countries are always praised for the strides they make towards gender equality. European nations consistently rank on top of quality of life rankings and measurements. Moreover, the EU is held as a sort of modern gold standard for the promotion of human rights and the values of “reason and enlightenment”. Gender equality and anti discrimination laws are enshrined in the European Constitution and the upholding of human rights is considered one of the measurements for admission of new member states to the Union. However, while so many paternalistic European politicians claim to want to save Muslim women from their “oppression”, there is a group that hardly ever gets the same kind of “savior complex” discourse: Roma women. Their status as “Other” invisibilized and erased from mainstream discourse; their systematic persecution, more often than not, State endorsed, a small item in the back pages of European press.

This week, the European Human Rights court in Strasbourg issued a verdict in favor of Slovakian woman of Roma ethnic origin.

Judges today ordered Slovakia to pay €43,000 in damages, costs and expenses after finding that the sterilization of 20-year old Roma woman in a public hospital without her informed consent violated her human rights.[…]

The applicant, V.C., is a Slovakian national of Roma ethnic origin. She was born in 1980 and lives in Jarovnice (Slovakia). On 23 August 2000 she was sterilized at the Hospital and Health Care Centre in Prešov (eastern Slovakia) – under the management of the Ministry of Health – during the delivery of her second child via Caesarean section. The sterilization entailed tubal ligation, which consists of severing and sealing the Fallopian tubes in order to prevent fertilization.

The applicant alleged that, in the last stages of labour, she was asked whether she wanted to have more children and told that, if she did have any more, either she or the baby would die. She submits that, in pain and scared, she signed the sterilization consent form but that, at the time, she did not understand what sterilization meant, the nature and consequences of the procedure, and in particular its irreversibility. She was not informed of any alternative methods. Her signature next to the typed words “Patient requests sterilization” is shaky and her maiden name split into two words. She also claims that her Roma ethnicity – clearly stated in her medical record – played a decisive role in her sterilization.

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