An Essay on Violence, Tradition and Modernity

Rafael Leyre ( Rafael_Leyre@yahoo.com)       Third Edition - February 2007

Submission of women and children

Forced labour turned women and children into economical assets

Submission is what happens to plants and animals – like ourselves – living in confinement for generations. Submission turned wild boars into pigs and bulls into oxen. When women and children were submitted to forced labour, their lives changed tremendously. Still today, many women and children are kept in the confinement of their households. Barred windows of traditional Mediterranean houses rather resemble cages than shields.

As forced labour entered the family, women and children became the first slaves of the master of the house – the ‘husband’. This was a slow but staunch process: the more labour became enforced, the more women and children became a separate brand of humans isolated on the farmyard, while men rallied into hunting, fighting or palavering.

Throughout history, women have rather been bought by a household than that they married a spouse. The price of a woman was regulated in the Babylonian code of Hammurabi at about 2000 BCE. In the Bible the price is set at fifty shekels of silver.223 Also among German tribes marriage was buying a woman. Among African farmers, ‘a wife, her labour, and her children born’ are bought with cattle.224 Customs are similar in South and South-West Asia, among the Uzbeks of Central Asia, and among the Plains Indians of North America. Since women are bought, their owner has the right to use and chastise her at will: some American Indians used to cut off a wife’s nose as a reprimand, and only recently in modern societies men have lost the right of physical punishment.

Anthropologists have listed a variety of social structures, starting from societies dominated by men and linked to herding and farming, to societies dominated by women, hardly found anywhere. This view is rather inspired by a desire for symmetry than by observations in the field. Robin Fox, in the midst of the twentieth century CE, was too optimistic when he attributed this viewpoint to ‘early writers’ only:

Early writers called any system that looked to them as though ‘kinship was through females only’ either matriarchal or as a system of mother-right (to contrast with the patrilineal, patriarchal or father-right). This implied that power and authority were in the hands of women in such a system. This is, of course, simply not true. 225

The same desire for symmetry is also visible when scholars study the residence of a newly married couple (from ‘patrilocality’ to ‘matrilocality’) and the number of spouses, going from one man having more women (the common practice) and one woman having more men (hardly ever found, except when one counts in the sexual rights of male household members to the bride). Feminists tend to appreciate this unrealistic symmetry because it is reassuring that women in alternative societies could be more powerful, and because at least it is a rejection of biological determinism.

The work of Robin Fox quoted above lists over seventy different diagrams with lines, loops, dots, arrows and so on, all representing formal relations between men and women found in various societies. It reminds of the eighteenth century mathematicians who wanted to interpret the whole world geometrically, 226 but the similarity is superficial: anthropologists never agreed on one common interpretation as mathematicians do. It is less demanding to make an objective statement about say a triangle, than about social relations.

As all property, women could be given away, stolen, sold, bought, exchanged or discarded. And as all property, their handling could lead to conflicts, appeasement or alliances. Anthropologists have built whole schools on the theory that bands exchanged women to build alliances. But it makes no sense to single out alliance gifts from all other types of economical transactions, just because it has a nicer ring than steeling or barter. Women have been treated as an economical asset ever since the introduction of forced labour, plain and simple. Darius offered his daughter to Alexander in exchange for peace, and Lot offered both his virgin daughters to the men of Sodom to use them as they pleased, in order to save himself.

Primeval labouring societies deal with women and children in all the ways economical assets are dealt with, as long as they match the essentials of a worker and a breeder.

When she is born in a labouring community, a woman is the possession of her father and his male kin. In many societies she is linked with the land she has to toil, which is often erroneously interpreted as a powerful position. This happens especially in societies where men stay absent for a long time – for warfare, hunting, .. – and leave the management of the household to their wives.227 In less sedentary societies like herding tribes, her new master takes her with him.

If the value of a woman is too high for a man to pay immediately, she might be kept in her own household, as an economic deposit to her father or brothers. Possibly the man will pay for her with services, and for that goal can go live in her father's household until his debt is settled. Only if the full price is paid - if ever - , the bride moves to her husband’s house. But in labouring cultures households produce children above the replacement level, and despite all nice traditions told, simple mathematics say that the usual new residency is not ‘matrilocal’ or ‘patrilocal’, but ‘neolocal’: the farmer looking to establish his own household will either claim grounds unwanted for farming before, or fight to steel someone other’s land.

In many cultures, when the husband dies the wife falls to brothers, sons, fathers or other male household members. In parts of India, brothers share the sexual convenience of their wives. It is wrong to say that this custom is a kind of male polygamy.

Bride price and dowry

In India, China, Japan, and most of South-east Asia, the bride price remains only for buying concubines.

Virginity and faithfulness of the wife is crucial to secure the household’s capital she really is. Families jealously guard the reputation of a daughter to secure her market value, even up to mutilation, and try to get the best price out of the transaction. To secure the trade value of a girl by guarding her virginity and by reducing her sexual desire, a hundred and thirty million women worldwide underwent genital mutilation, and approximately two million undergo the procedure every year. Female genital mutilation takes place in twenty-eight countries of Africa, in some regions of Asia and the Middle East, and in certain immigrant communities in North America, Europe and Australia. It is an extreme life-threatening, physical and psychological suffering. A recent survey of Egyptian girls and women showed ninety seven percent of uneducated families and sixty six percent of educated families are still practising clitoridectomy. In Morocco, prostitutes regularly attend the mutilation ceremony in order to relieve the sexual tensions generated, and with the Australian Pitta-Patta Aborigines, the mutilation is followed by group rape. Girls incapable of normal sexual behaviour – either by genital mutilation or by social pressure requiring ‘virginity’ –, often have to submit to anal penetration by relatives. All this stresses even more that those cruelties have nothing to do with chastity or morality, but everything with used car economics.

In Bangladesh, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Turkey, and other countries, women are killed by their father or brother when the investment she really is became worthless. This could be the case if she is suspected of adultery, of premarital relationships (sexually or not), of being raped, or of falling in love with a disapproved person. The murder is justified by the claim that the honour of the family must be uphold, meaning that the master of the household does not want be ridiculed at male get-togethers. In 1997 CE, more than three hundred women were victims of these so-called ‘honour’ crimes in just one province of Pakistan. In Jordan, the official toll is rising, while many murders are recorded as suicides or accidents. The penal codes in Jordan that govern ‘crimes of honour’ sanction killing by making the penalty disproportionately lenient, particularly if a girl is murdered by a brother under eighteen years of age. On the other hand, survivors of murder-attempts are put behind bars as a protective custody.

A dowry revalues daughters. It is forbidden for Muslims and restricted for Hindus. In Western society dowry can still be spotted in the uneven burden for the marriage laid on the bride’s household, which is expected to provide the furniture, to organize the wedding banquet and to buy expensive dresses.

Originally meant to secure or enhance the value of women on the market, dowries came to serve various purposes. Often a girl, mostly when she is a land labourer, comes with land dowry. Among kingdoms, princesses bringing dowry of land became a way to alter frontiers. Where less labour was required because of changes in crops or environment, as in India when rice substituted wheat from 3000 BCE on, the worth of women and children was subject to devaluation, and the dowry raised to compensate this evolution.

Dowry can pose a serious danger for the woman if she was only wanted for what she brought with her. Even though India has legally abolished dowry, a UNICEF report shows dowry-related violence is on the rise. Women are killed by their husbands and in-laws in ‘accidental’ kitchen fires if their ongoing demands for dowry before and after marriage are not met. An average of five women a day are burned in India, and many more cases go unreported. The human rights Commission of Pakistan reports that husbands and family members as a result of domestic disputes burn at least four women to death daily. In Japan, Mieko Yoshihama reports that murdering by a partner accounts for one third of their deaths, and violence is the second reason for wives to seek divorce. In most cases, recurrent violence is inflicted when the woman’s behaviour diverges from what is considered acceptable female behaviour - being submissive and catering to his desires.

In most countries, marriage gives a man the right to rape and abuse his wife. Unlimited sexual access and permanent terror by the male are considered normality. In Indian households, Junko Kozu reports, patriarchal values support female inferiority, and are transmitted to younger generations with family violence tolerated as a male right to control those dependent. A close correlation between domestic violence and suicide has been found in the USA, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Peru, India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Suicide is twelve times as likely to have been attempted by a woman who has been abused than by one who has not. In the USA, as many as thirty to forty percent of battered women attempt suicide.

Sex-selective abortion, female infanticide, and systematic differential access to food and medical care have led to the phenomenon known as the ‘missing millions’: an estimated sixty million women are simply missing from the population statistics. The phenomenon is spread over South Asia, North Africa, the Middle East and China.

Religion and prostitution, war and rape

The main industrial form of violence is warfare; the main ideological form of violence is religion. To their victims, a ruthless religious doctrine is as hard to escape as a ruthless military campaign.

Temple economies make no distinction between religious and profane institutions. Temple prostitution existed in Uruk, Babylon, India, Persia, Egypt, Lydia, Armenia and Greece, where Corinth was the most famous centre. In the sixth century BCE Solon officially established prostitution in Athens. Since he built a temple for Aphrodite at the same occasion, scholars must accept with pain that also Athens had temple prostitution.

In Vedic India as in Egypt during the Late Kingdom, wandering holy men had prostitutes with them to uplift their spectacles and provide earnings.

In the eighteenth century CE still one hundred prostitutes (devadasi) belonged to the temple at Indian Kanchipuram. A revival of this practice is reported from the Indian states of Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. When parents dedicate their seven or less year old daughter to the temple, the child is violated by the Hindu priest and then sold for sexual abuse or enrolled as temple dancer and prostitute. In Northern Ghana and parts of Togo, girls are donated to priests, and are forced to live as ‘wives’ and submit sexually to the shrine priests in return for protection of the family.

Collective rape was and is frequent among soldiers. Military mass rape exists from long before the ten thousand women of Susa raped by the soldiers of Alexander the Great, and persisted through the hundreds of thousands ‘comfort women’ enslaved, raped and killed by the Imperial Japanese army, until the hundreds of thousands of women raped in armed conflicts during the two decades before and after the turn of the millennium, in Rwanda, Bosnia, Sudan,… Women’s associations in North Africa found that in Algeria rape is used as a weapon by Islamic armed groups in the absence of laws to protect women. In a few years more than a thousand women were the victims of systematic and collective rape, and Women’s associations believe that other North African countries are similar.

Western universities remained, until the sexual revolution of the sixties, male environments in which women slowly gained access, and as such were male bands resembling and romanticizing armies. Mass rapes attested for the American universities in that period resemble the rape cases in armies when isolated females sign on. It has also been an epidemic and spreads through ghetto-gangs since the second half of the twentieth century.

In September 2002 CE, BBC World News reported a woman convicted to collective rape by a village council in Pakistan, who also carried out the verdict themselves. This was the reimbursement for an alleged misdemeanour of her twelve-year-old brother. Since over six months hundred-and-fifty convictions to mass rape took place in the same region, it can hardly be held that uncontrollable sexual urge is the main motive.

In European capitals, boys offer their girlfriend to his gang in order to win prestige. First the girl needs to be alienated: she is thrown on the ground, kicked from all sides, pulled up by her hair, spit in her face. Only when she was depersonalised by disfiguring beatings, uninhibited rape can begin, while cellular phones are used to call in more comrades. The fast growing number of such events alarms Justice departments, and can be estimated to be one per week in the big European cities, or two thousand cases pro year in Western Europe. Where scientific research has been done, it turned out that two-thirds of the perpetrators belong various ethnic minorities, while three quarters of the victims are native European girls, who usually knew at least one of the rapists.228 No society should ever stretch cultural tolerance to the point where contempt for women is accepted. Multiculturalism leading to contempt of individuals is despicable and dangerous.

Children: an easy workforce, an easy sexual commodity

In the Roman Empire, a father decided over the life of his children, and could command his wife to make a redundant child disappear. German tribes allowed the killing a new child before it had sucked from its mother’s breast. Cathari in Europe and Jains in India killed newborn children slowly by feeding them only water. Throughout history, bodies of new-borns were found on dunghills, in canals, in pig grub. Of the numerous abandoned children raised in European nunneries, eighty percent died of deprivation. In New York today, lifeless bodies of new-borns are found on garbage piles each morning.

Among the ten- to fourteen-year-old children the working rate is around forty percent in Kenya, thirty percent in Senegal and Bangladesh, twenty five percent in Nigeria and Turkey, almost twenty percent in Côte d’Ivoire, Pakistan, Brazil and India, and around ten percent in China, Egypt, and Mexico.

In countries such as Colombia, Sri Lanka, Sierra Leone, and Uganda, armed rebels force children to serve as soldiers or recruit them with promises or threats. More than three hundred thousand children under the age of eighteen are enlisted as soldiers. The problem is most critical in Africa and Asia, though children are used as soldiers by governments and armed groups in many countries in the Americas, Europe and Middle East.

Lloyd DeMause estimates that at least sixty percent of girls and forty five percent of boys, aged two to sixteen, are victim of sexual abuse within US households.229 Though no reliable statistics are available, it is feared that numbers could be even higher in Europe. A parent or guardian is somehow implicated in over eighty percent of the cases. Often parents invite neighbours to sleep with their children, or look away when older brothers molest younger siblings, or leave children with babysitters after they discover evidence of molestation, possibly with a boyfriend involved. In Latin America, anthropologists report a great deal of sexual activity within households, and widespread pederasty as part of macho masculine behaviour. In Mexico, J. M. Carrier reported a large proportion of Mexican men having sexual relations with nephews, cousins or neighbours between the ages of six and nine. In most cultures, the child sleeps in the family bed for several years. By the time children are four or five, others members of the household take them to bed. This practice reminds of the customary free sexual access to brother’s wives in some areas in India.

Like many other early civilizations, Lloyd DeMause found, ancient China institutionalised pederasty of boys, child concubinage, the castration of small boys to abuse them as sexual eunuchs, the marriage of young brides with a number of brothers, widespread boy and girl prostitution and the regular sexual abuse of child servants and slaves. Sexual abuse of adopted girls was said to be common. Parents would send their boys to aristocratic households for sexual services, and possibly would have cut off their boys’ genitals, which were carried with them in a jar. At least since the fourteenth century CE Japanese shudo resembled both India and China as institutionalised anal pederasty of boys by priests and monasteries as well as by samurai. Those boys sometimes were worshipped as gods incarnate, in religious cults similar to those of the cult of the Virgin in the West. Next to shudo exists temple prostitution of both boys and girls, and widespread child prostitution, including the ancient geisha system. Japanese brothels would force girls in sexual service when five to seven years old. In Thailand a survey of 1990 CE found that seventy five percent of Thai men had had sex with child prostitutes. The remainder of eastern Asia follows the same pattern.

Patrick Tierney described how a father sent his beautiful girl to the Inca in exchange for promotion when she was ten years of age. After her return she had lost her will to live (the family claimed out of happiness for the honour she was given). She and was buried alive as a religious sacrifice.230

The Middle East is not different. Abuse includes child concubinage, temple prostitution, child prostitution, sex slavery and so on. In the oasis of Siwa mothers regularly offer their boys for sex to older men, both related and outside the family, and fathers regularly lend their young sons to each other, similar to the Central Asian tradition of bacaboz, where fathers trade their sons with others. Muslim holy men (imam) regularly have boys available for sex, saying the ingestion of the imam’s semen is necessary for absorbing his spiritual powers. One report found that four out of five Middle Eastern women recalled having been forced into fellatio between the ages of three and six by older brothers and other relatives. As in eastern Asia, young servants are particularly favoured sexual objects when wives are absent, menstruating, pregnant or frigid. Adolescents sometimes feel less guilty having sex with servant girls than with their sisters. Still recently the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini bluntly ordained that

a man however is prohibited from having intercourse with a girl younger than nine, other sexual act such as foreplay, rubbing, kissing and sodomy is allowed. A man having intercourse with a girl younger than nine years of age has not committed a crime, but only an infraction, if the girl is not permanently damaged.231