My latest hobby? Collecting human rights reports issued
by international and local organizations. Seriously.
I'm mostly into
gender-related documents, but I also like the more
general assessments of human rights in Lebanon. So, if
you’d like to read accounts of abuses happening right
under our patriotic noses, you could check out, for
example, the Khiam Rehabilitation Center's Report about
Torture and Human Rights in Lebanon (2007/2008). It's
good, but I wish it were more gender conscious. It does
have a tiny segment on discrimination against women,
citing our bigoted laws regarding nationality and
domestic violence. But what about sexual and bodily
rights? And how about cases of gender-based violence?
Discrimination goes even deeper than that. It's in the
misogynist mentalities we are steeped in. It's in the
fear we grow up with: the fear of men who are the
potential rapists, and whereas we are always the
potential victims, who constantly have to watch out what
we do, how we dress...
The Khiam report
also addresses the exploitation of domestic migrant
workers, pointing out that in these last 4 years, 200
housemaids have committed suicide; none have elicited
any serious investigations. And while the report exposes
severe ill-treatment in men's prisons, it totally
neglects any description of the conditions of women
prisoners.
The one manuscript
that I know of which uncovered widespread maltreatment
of incarcerated women is the 2001 Amnesty International
Report: the interrogators were all men, the detainees
were abused verbally, physically, and sexually; women
were sometimes abandoned by their families when found
guilty. The Amnesty report further adds that migrant
workers are isolated from the other prisoners who would
otherwise be able to help them.
Why don't accounts
of human and women's rights violations like these get as
much attention as our usual overdose of media coverage
about which politician visited who, and what each one of
them bitched about other politicians?
http://www.khiamcenter.org
http://www.peacewomen.org/resources/Lebanon/aitorture.pdf |
