Speech given in 2011.
(transcript)
Between the Mexican city of Juarez and South America, pink crosses haunt the border - there are hundreds of them. Each cross represents a young girl or woman murdered by unknown assailants. The murder of young women has become epidemic since 1993, Amnesty international estimates thousands have been killed or have simply disappeared. The violence is now spreading, like cancer down through South America to Guatemala.
Between the Mexican city of Juarez and South America, pink crosses haunt the border - there are hundreds of them. Each cross represents a young girl or woman murdered by unknown assailants. The murder of young women has become epidemic since 1993, Amnesty international estimates thousands have been killed or have simply disappeared. The violence is now spreading, like cancer down through South America to Guatemala.
Silvia Elena was one of the very first women to go missing, her body eventually found in the Mexican desert; she had been sexually assaulted, mutilated and killed. This pattern would be repeated again and again and again.
Despite the horrific nature of these crimes, authorities remain indifferent the Mexican government pays little attention and international journalists remain mostly, apathetic. Like so many women killed in Juarez the police made defamatory declarations about Silvia Elena to the press, excusing her death by saying she lived a double life as a, “prostitute” and was a “slut”.
This is femicide the direct targeting of women excused by the words, “slut” and “prostitute”. The word “prostitute” meaning “other”, meaning you can fuck her anyway you like, has the power to convince people everywhere a woman’s life is worth less than; deserves no justice; should be forgotten; did not deserve―to―exist in the first place….
In clean, green, human rights loving New Zealand only 13% of all sexual assaults (including males assaulted) reported to the police result in a conviction. If this was a murder conviction rate we would be collectively appalled at our justice systems failure and inability to its damn job.
And this cancer of injustice is blooming everywhere, in the Democratic Republic of Congo the atrocities which have taken the lives of more than 6 million people and left more than 2 million women and girls raped and tortured since 2006, is left unpunished; mostly unseen. Many of these women are blamed for what happened to them. Shunned by their communities; they receive no justice.
And why standing here today, does this ALL feel and sound so familiar?
Because blaming survivors of rape doesn’t just happen “over there”. We fail young girls everywhere; teaching them inherently rape is always their fault.
Right now I am training to be a secondary teacher, and the other day one of female students aged 16 said, “she feels real sad for girls who dress slutty,” she wants tell them, “that’s how they get raped” and all her friends around agreed, “…if you dress slutty you are asking for it.”
And these young girls have my heart breaking because I may as well of been, that person, that parent, that teacher… who taught them to give up before they even began.
And what do I tell these girls? That dressing like a slut has nothing to with it. It is nothing more than a myth. Clothes do not give consent. The action of rape has nothing to do with the word slut or how you dress and everything to do with excusing it.
Tell them it is a small minority of men who rape, but a huge majority of people who condone it by their silence and by perpetuating these rape myths.
These are the girls we are raising. Girls taught to "point the figure" at each other. Turning on, each other. Imagine the power if we taught them to stand together.
But today is a new lesson.
If slut can mean multiple things, today the word slut means, “people unite”, today the word slut means, “I smell fucken bullshit.”
We do not need bombs or bullets or bulldozers like Sharon, Bush or Blair (did) to barricade the world into hearing us; we are warriors of words…
…And I am so tired.
Tired of our bodies being the battleground(s); like the bloodied landscape of Congo where rape is used as a weapon of war, so too has rape been used as an action of femicide in this so called “First World”.
But (today) we are taking back step… by… step.
If our bodies are the battleground that means our bodies are owe, own homelands and we know our homelands intricately. Those MOTHERFUCKAS are stepping on foreign territory. We have the upper-hand we just need to wrap our fingers into our palms and raise-our-fists- into-the-air.
Today we march for every (ordinary and revolutionary) woman who has been condemned as a whore, witch, slut, heretic, bitch, prostitute... Today we (re)appropriate these words and change their meaning(s) forever (in our minds).
Today, I allow no one to dictate my language.
Today these words mean; hero, courageous, fearless, beautiful, immovable, strong and above all (non)violent―DANGEROUS―opposition.
