The Link between the Inbox and the Brothel

Today I read two things that have me thinking, and at first they seem worlds apart.  This morning I was alerted by a friend on Facebook to a blog post.  It discusses the risks that feminist bloggers take when they share their opinions and observations with the internet.  They are subject to violent and vitriolic threats that, frankly, ought to warrant legal attention, although they usually don’t.  The second reading I did today was from the autobiography of Somaly Mam, an incredible and courageous Cambodian woman who not only survived being sold into sexual slavery as a child, but then has gone on to be a heroine to thousands of other girls whom she has rescued from brothels.

Both readings troubled my spirit.  As I say, at first, they seem worlds apart.  But when I reflected on it, I realized they are a part of the exact same problem.  What begins with a coward spewing offal into an email meant for an unsuspecting blogger ends with an eight-year-old girl chained to a pipe in a Cambodian brothel.

Both the hater and the john/pimp have one thing in common: they treat women as objects of violence and scorn.  As the recent “rape joke” Facebook scandal has revealed, so-called “humour” about violence-against-women is “just a part of culture” and therefore ought to be free of censure.  But it boggles my mind that the people who make these “jokes”—and  the people who aren’t outraged enough by them to chastise the “jokers”—cannot see the connection between “jokes” about raping a woman and the actual act, which is being played out every moment somewhere in the world.

If it’s okay to joke about rape, then what is wrong with raping a virgin child in order to “cure” yourself of AIDS?

If it’s okay to send a vicious, hateful email threatening rape and violence towards a blogger, then it must be okay to pay to have sex and beat a fifteen year-old girl who was sold to the brothel by her grandfather (or, unspeakably worse, her own mother) in order to pay off debts.

At the root of this culture of violence, I must reiterate, is the belief that woman are objects and that they can and must be used by men as men see fit.  They aren’t human, so human rights don’t apply to them.  They can be harassed, threatened, and assaulted because what they feel about it doesn’t matter.

If we can be scandalized by the treatment of women and girls who are the victims of human trafficking, then I argue that we have a moral imperative to be scandalized by the attitudes that undergird this treatment.

Matthew 5:21-22 reads (in the TNIV):

“You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘You shall not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with a brother or sister will be subject to judgment. Again, anyone who says to a brother or sister, ‘Raca,’ is answerable to the Sanhedrin. And anyone who says, ‘You fool!’ will be in danger of the fire of hell.

I’d like to argue that the anger-murder connection is similar to the connection between an attitude of scorn towards women and actual violence against women.  If we don’t check our hearts to see how we feel about women (i.e. do we laugh at “rape jokes”? do we think the feminist blogger “deserved it”?), then it is as if we also raised our hands against them.  For women who might share these attitudes, we become both violator and victim, for we commit this violence against ourselves.

The distance between a “joke” or an “idle threat” and the brutal violence against women perpetrated in a brothel that traffics in children might seem galactic, but in the eyes of the God who physically reached out even to the least of these, there is no difference at all.