Summary: Learning to Speak Up, Rule by Rape, The Shame of “Honor”: Chapters 3–5

Chapter 3: Learning to Speak Up

In places where rape is rampant, girls are taught to “accept abuse rather than fight back and risk being killed.” Chapter 3 reveals that most rapes in developing countries occur in isolated and poor rural areas, where help and justice are generally unavailable. Poor, lower-class girls are targeted because it’s believed they won’t or can’t stand up for themselves.

To explain this oppressive pattern, the authors offer the testimony of Usha Narayane, a young woman living in a slum near the Indian city of Nagpur. Usha is a Dalit, a member of the lowest caste in India, yet her parents are educated and she’s a university graduate.

The impoverished neighborhood Usha lived in had been terrorized by a gang led by Akku Yadav, a brutal and sadistic man who controlled the slum by terrorizing its residents. Yadav used rape or the threat of rape to control the area, knowing that rape carries such a stigma that the victims and their families would never openly accuse him. He had even brutally murdered women in public as an object lesson for others to submit to his control. He avoided Usha and her family because they are educated, but when he attacked the home of a neighbor, Usha went to the police to report it. An infuriated Yadav came to Usha’s house with a bottle of acid and threatened retribution. Usha barred the door and hurled abuse at Yadav, who left. Hundreds of Usha’s neighbors saw her stand up to Yadav and were motivated by her fearlessness. A crowd marched to Yadav’s home and burned it down, then stabbed Yadav to death when he emerged.

Usha, who did not take part in the attack, was arrested for instigating murder. At court, the women of the slum stated that Usha was innocent and that they were responsible for the killing, reasoning that the court could not arrest and charge all of them. Released from jail, Usha decided to become a community organizer. 

Kristof and WuDunn argue that Westerners can help voiceless, impoverished women in developing countries. They point to a growing movement of “social entrepreneurs” who invest in grassroots women’s organizations and companies that employ women or in some way support women’s rights in developing nations. Social entrepreneurs set up networks of support to develop leadership for nascent women’s rights organizations. 

Sunitha Krishnan, a literacy advocate among the poor in India, is one recipient of financial assistance from these entrepreneurs. When a male gang threatened her with rape, Sunitha switched her focus to stopping sex trafficking, working with a Catholic missionary to start schools and shelters for brothel workers. She also led rescue missions to liberate those held captive in brothels. The brothel owners tried to fight back, but Sunitha was undeterred. She continued to open job training centers where survivors of sex trafficking could learn a trade. Sunitha reports that 85 percent of the women she’s helped have left prostitution forever.

Chapter 4: Rule by Rape

Chapter 4 focuses on rape as a weapon of war or a cultural tradition intended to force girls into unwanted marriage. In the East African nation of Ethiopia, Kristof and WuDunn report, there exists “an entire culture of sexual predation.” Woineshet Zebene lived in an isolated rural area where “raping girls is a time-honored tradition.” When Woineshet was 13, a gang of boys broke into her house at night and took her away. One of the kidnappers raped and beat Woineshet until she escaped. As is common in Ethiopia, a girl can limit the stigma of rape if she agrees to marry her rapist. Woineshet’s rapist wanted her for a wife, but Woineshet was adamant in her refusal. Reporting the crime to the police was useless, so her rapist kidnapped her again and raped and beat her to get her to consent to marry him. Again Woineshet escaped. Her rapist took Woineshet to court, and the judge ordered her to marry him. She would not. Her neighbors accused Woineshet of “breaking tradition,” so she lived for time in a local jail cell for her own protection. It was only at another court hearing that her rapist was convicted, though he was released after serving only a fraction of his 10-year sentence.

Woineshet’s experience was covered in the Western press, and American women were outraged at what had happened to her. A women’s rights organization in New York took up her cause, and its activists impelled Ethiopia to change its law. Before, a rapist could not be prosecuted for raping a woman he later married. The new law made this type of rape prosecutable. Yet, as the authors point out, it’s hard to change cultural traditions from the outside. Local leadership is required if social norms are to be changed. Still, by highlighting sexual abuses, those in wealthy countries can support locals who are working to change oppressive traditions.

During civil wars in Rwanda and Sierra Leone, Kristof and WuDunn report, militia members used rape as a weapon to destroy their enemy. They preferred rape because, unlike murder, it leaves no corpse behind but so stigmatizes a girl and her family that it’s never reported.

The authors acknowledge that women are often complicit in misogyny and devaluing girls. In Pakistan, for instance, wives sometimes kill their female infants when their husbands threaten to divorce them if they don’t. Some mothers poison their own infant daughters after being beaten or abused for the “shame” of having a female child. Zoya Najabi lived in Kabul, Afghanistan, with her husband and his extended family, some of whom beat her mercilessly for little or no reason. Yet Zoya says that such treatment is justifiable “if the wife is truly disobedient.” Kristof and WuDunn reiterate that only education can help weaken such beliefs.

Mukhtar Mai’s 12-year-old brother was kidnapped and raped in the Punjab region of Pakistan. The rapists feared they’d be punished, so they concocted a tale that Mukhtar’s brother had raped a young girl from their clan. The tribal leaders decided that justice would be served by having Mukhtar gang-raped. Afterward, Mukhtar’s parents watched over her to prevent her from dying by suicide. Instead, she went to the police, who arrested the rapists. When Pakistan’s president heard of the incident, he sent Mukhtar money as compensation, which she used to start a local school. Then an article about the incident written by Kristof gained the attention and support of many Western women. Money poured in to help Mukhtar expand her educational and social projects.

Mukhtar became something of a celebrity, and she was invited to speak at a conference in New York. The Pakistani government tried to stop her from leaving the country. Yet she managed to go to New York, where she told her assembled supporters that they must concentrate their efforts and donations to rural areas, not to well-funded big-city organizations. When she got back home, Mukhtar used donations to build a school for boys and then a high school for all children. She convinced the provincial government to construct a women’s college in the region. Mukhtar drew on her supporters to construct a free legal clinic, a public library, and a shelter for victims of violence. She even had her own television show. Money kept coming from the West, even as some Pakistanis demeaned her efforts because she was “just a peasant.” Mukhtar became one of the most successful social entrepreneurs in Pakistan, and her success inspired others to become activists and builders of social institutions to help girls and women.

Chapter 5: The Shame of “Honor”

Kristof and WuDunn note that, in some parts of the world, the killing of a girl is considered justified if she “doesn’t bleed on her wedding night.” Chapter 5 reveals that the “cult of virginity” is widespread in many developing nations, especially in the Middle East, where “sexual honor is a major reason for violence against women.” Sometimes women thought to have lost their virginity before marriage are punished by rape, but murder is the most common punishment. “Honor killing” occurs when a family kills a girl suspected of “behaving immodestly” or “falling in love with a man” (even if they haven’t had sex). In Kurdish Iraq, Du’a Aswad was killed for staying out late with a boy she loved. There was no indication they’d had sex; moreover, Kurdish Iraq has a law against honor killing. Yet a group of men publicly stoned Du’a to death for her alleged transgression.

The authors provide several other examples of violence resulting from the “obsession with virginity.” Often, as in the Darfur region of Sudan and the eastern Congo, rape and mutilation are weaponized in civil war and rebellions, often killing or maiming the victims. Moreover, in some countries under Sharia law, rape can be prosecuted only if four other men are eyewitnesses to the crime, which Kristof and WuDunn suggest rarely happens. 

The chapter closes by introducing Harper McConnell, who works at a hospital run by HEAL Africa. Harper was a college student when she learned that her church had developed a relationship with a hospital in Congo. During her study-abroad period in college, she traveled to Congo to work in this hospital. She insists that experience on the ground in the developing world is essential for effective activism to truly improve conditions. She encourages other college students or noncollege volunteers to take a year or several months off to work with an aid organization in a developing country. Harper is not a doctor or nurse, but once at the hospital, she organized a skills-training program to help poor Congolese women get jobs or start their own businesses to support themselves and their families. She also started a school for children at the hospital awaiting treatment or surgery. At the time of publication, she was even setting up a study-abroad program for Western students who would spend at least one month at a university in Goma, Congo.

Analysis: Learning to Speak Up, Rule by Rape, The Shame of “Honor”: Chapters 3–5

Kristof and WuDunn argue that the first step in women’s empowerment occurs when a woman summons the courage to speak up and demand that abuse be punished. Fearlessly speaking out is also a step toward gender equality, as men have generally enjoyed the right to speak their minds. Until women find their voice of protest, the authors suggest, subjugation will persist. In part because she spoke up, Mukhtar Mai overcame the oppression of gang rape to re-create herself as a global leader in the fight for women’s rights, gender equality, and education and training for girls.

Education is at the core of motivating women to fearless outspokenness. Usha Narayane was college educated, and it’s likely that her outspoken confrontation with Akku Yadav arose partly because she learned to express herself in school. Yadav is emblematic of the impunity with which men in many developing countries use brutality to oppress and control the women in poor communities. His physical violence is extreme, but it’s certainly not unknown as a widespread means of oppressing women.

Social entrepreneurs invest in local women leaders, which leads to women’s empowerment. Mukhtar Mai became a locus of social entrepreneurship to create educational and employment opportunities for women in rural Pakistan. Although the Pakistani government erected bureaucratic barriers to her activism, especially abroad, she overcame these barriers to pursue her work to create gender equality in her country. In the United States, she spoke of the geographical barrier to gender equality that is created when women’s rights organizations donate funds only to large cities, when the greatest need is in rural communities. Mukhtar experienced class prejudice as a barrier to her work for gender equality. Upper-class Pakistanis demeaned her as a mere peasant who was, by virtue of her lowly social rank, unworthy of respect or support. 

Police corruption and complicity in the abuse of women is another significant barrier to the achievement of gender equality. When Usha reports Yadav’s atrocities to the police, they simply inform him of her betrayal of his authority, leaving Usha open to Yadav’s violent retribution. In several other accounts collected in Half the Sky,police turn a blind eye to incidents of rape or gang rape. Moreover, under some circumstances, entire communities accept rape as legitimate. The abduction and rape experienced by Woineshet Zebene, for example, is a traditional and socially acceptable way to acquire a bride in parts of Ethiopia. Woineshet used her voice to demand self-respect by refusing to marry her rapist; she had the courage to upend tradition by refusing to submit to it. She empowered herself as well as other women when, by her committed action, she got the law changed.

Women’s complicity in the devaluation of girls exacerbates the problem of gender equality and makes it harder to overcome. When women as well as men devalue girls, they (perhaps unwillingly or unwittingly) promote a vicious cycle. What’s more, in countries that condone “honor killings,” girls are oppressed on a mere suspicion of improper behavior, while the boys involved are considered blameless. This is a pernicious form of gender inequality that is deeply ingrained and difficult to uproot.