By Jason Jayology:
The largest genocide happening right now is femicide. The United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide must be expanded to include femicide. It is by this extension that the entire global system should be indicted.
In such an expansion, the entire global system of justice must be redefined proactively.
In such expansion, when the letter of the law everywhere lives up to the meaning of the value of women’s rights as defined by a society, a culture, a nation, an economy, a global economy, living up to the individual value of every single girl and woman, we will shatter caste violence, racist violence, violence against Indigenous and Tribal peoples, violence against Aboriginal peoples, violence against Trans and Non-binary identities, Islamophobia, economic violence, environmental violence.
In expanding this indictment to every institution that upholds this violent system, we shatter the bromidic drivel of commercial media and commercial journalism, and redefine truth.
In expanding this indictment we shatter the commercial industries that undermine the mental well-being, the physical well-being, the body and diverse bodies that shape the narratives of humanity.
In expanding the adjudication we set fire to the invisible flags wavering under the supranational supremacist arbitration of dumping colonial outgrowths of social-Darwinist exploitation on capitalistic markets justifying the political corruption of looting the people’s waters, of polluting the people’s waters, of looting the people’s lands, and destroying the people’s lands. In such an expansion we can shatter the neoliberal colonial flag of ‘futures indexes’ and food price speculations inducing famine and poverty. In so doing we shatter the predatory lending schemes and housing takeovers, the gentrification, and segregation exiling and targeting of people in poverty.
We must now rewrite the definition of genocide to incorporate femicide in the name of Jisha. What justice may Jisha have in this life? The only justice she may have is us, globally, in the value of her life, and in opposition to the misogyny that destroyed her aspiring life, destroy misogyny once and for all. We must destroy it like it destroyed the Jisha before.
What justice can there be for the breath we breathe now that she will not inhale and exhale into the dream that was her life’s vision, the laughter stolen, the pain she triumphed, the ardour of her labour, the belief she held steadfast to so that tomorrow may be better than today, and now that that tomorrow has been shattered forever.
Now, we must make sure that tomorrow, that tomorrow, that tomorrow when police arrive and tell the next of kin that there will never be another tomorrow, must end, and it will not end until we shatter man’s perimeters, and anoint ourselves in the history of women who have been the front lines of man’s omission of history.
Today, as people are marching to the echoing mourning for Jisha, a morning devoid of her being, St. Cruz MLA has been charged with rape in Goa.
This morning, as people are mourning for a woman who may not have even been noticed the day before, we remember the murder of Delta Meghwal.
You ask where the women are in politics. Where are the lawyers, the professionals, the teachers, the artists, the policewoman, the soldier? They are dying. They are being targeted because they are women. They are being targeted because targeting them as women of the Dalit caste, or because of their melanin, or that they are tribal, because it happened at a university, or the respectability of their family, because it was done by a cop, a soldier, a university professor, a child soldier, because it happened in Kibera, because it was in Detroit, because it was in South Chicago, Dharavi, because she was Palestinian, because of her sexual past, because it was at school, because of what she was wearing, or what she wasn’t wearing, because she was a lesbian, because she was trans, have served as a pass for man’s impunity.
A runaway girl escaping the brutality of her home runs straight into three men in Noida, three men who brutally gang-rape her. Why wasn’t there a place for her to go? Where did that ‘investment’ go? Why are women who run away approached by pimps hours after they escape the brutality of their homes as minors? Why is it the same story in New York City? Where did the investment go? Why are pimps celebrated? Why are trans runaways enrolled in the system the moment they escape the brutality of their homes? Why are trans people of colour, Black and every shade of melanin across a spectrum of identities marked for death on the streets?
Yuyun was raped and murdered on her way home from school in Indonesia. You ask why girls aren’t in school? It is because of exploitation. It is because their bodies are exploited. It is because the economy is exploited. It is because politics serves as a means to justify this exploitation until there is no resource left to end exploitation.
At Rhodes in South Africa women protesting the rape and impunity of fellow students were shot at with rubber bullets a week ago. #RapedbyMorehouse at historically black colleges and universities don’t even get column inches in the New York Times, nor soundbites on the neoliberal commercial mainstream media. Why are women raped in colleges across the planet? Why are women at universities in India told to be back in their dorms and locked in before men?
A woman seeking asylum in Australia fleeing an undisclosed country in Africa was brutally raped and impregnated in the illegal detention center at Nauru, and despite this brutality in which she sustained severe psychological and neurological damage, she was refused a transfer to Australia by senior Australian officials to a medical facility despite the expert advice of medical professionals. Whistleblowers in the Cologne police have leaked reports that they were told to omit the words ‘rape’ and ‘gang-rape’ from their initial reports on New Year’s Eve of gender-targeted brutality scapegoated unto the collective identity of refugees. On that night over seven hundred women were assaulted.
All across the United States women are raped in universities with impunity. Women are raped by celebrity athletes and the only reason it is a story is because they are celebrity athletes.
Men, we need to be self-aware of misogyny. We need to shatter misogyny. We need to challenge the instruments of misogyny. We cannot be reductive and censure or censor misogyny, banning free speech, telling girls and women what to wear and not wear, where to go and not go, what time to be home. We can, though, become actively self-aware and burn our privilege in combating misogyny inwardly to create a misogyny-free society outwardly. We can create a mutual cooperation of bystander intervention that speaks up against misogyny when we see misogyny. We can work with women across the spectrum of every identity of being until we shatter misogyny by uprooting caste, race, homophobia, Islamophobia, and every other self-internalised fear, till we end the virile co-opting of the word courage, and redefine ourselves in the true courage that women face every time they open or close a door.
We must undermine the very essence of the madness of misogyny and dismantle patriarchy everywhere not to define history for all mankind, but to redefine mankind for the history of all humanity.