Would you ask a grown woman, a complete stranger, if she had ever been raped?
Would you ask her in front of a video camera, surrounded by people?
These questions aren’t meant to be hard. The answers should be obvious. Unless you’re a police officer, a crisis counselor or a close friend, common sense says asking a woman if she’s been raped is inappropriate. For reasons unknown to me, however, common sense is often misplaced en route to Africa. There, people think it’s appropriate to ask a woman if she’s been raped while shoving a camera in her face. And, even worse, this brutish behavior is righteously justified in the name of “giving Africans a voice.”
Last year, MTV University (mtvU) sent three college students — including Andrew Karlsruher from Boston University — to Chad to investigate the genocide occurring in Darfur, Sudan. By exposing students to the effects of genocide, mtvU got a pseudo-documentary with young person appeal. The final product, Translating Genocide: Three Students Journey to Sudan, is a well-intentioned film — but one lacking in common sense and, in a few unfortunate scenes, respect for human dignity.
In the most troubling exchange, a young college student (who is Rwandan but attends school in the United States) asks a female refugee a series of questions, through a translator, meant to determine if she had been raped. During the encounter, the refugee asks her cousin, Solemon — who is the translator — NOT to tell the group of foreigners what happened to her. The screen flashes the Sudanese woman’s words, “Solemon, don’t say what happened to me, please” while she looks away.
Instead of allowing this particular clip to fall to the cutting room floor, someone decided to include it. Solemon eventually says that his cousin “lost her clothes,” leading to an even more ridiculous exchange in which the Rwandan student asks if the clothes were “lost” or “exchanged.” The following scene shows the Rwandan unrepentant: “I just wanted her to say it. I guessed it [that she had been raped]; but I wanted her to say it.”
Shame on the young Rwandan student. Nothing good comes from forcing the refugee to imply on camera that she’d been raped. There was clearly no consideration of the possible consequences for the woman. In some places, raped women are treated as the perpetrators of a crime rather than the victim, and are viewed as perennially damaged property. This may or may not be true in Darfur, but it would have been prudent to at least consider local implications. That such intensely private information about this Sudanese woman was disclosed against her wishes is an obvious affront to her dignity.
If I thought this was just a cultural faux pas, I’d be sympathetic. Cultural misunderstandings happen; looking back on my own time spent living in Africa, I grimace when remembering all of the unseemly questions I asked, inappropriate places I stormed into, and sensibilities I offended. There is, however, a big difference between my mistakes and the exchange in the Darfur film. In my case, when I found out my errors I corrected them and apologized. The college student in the Darfur movie remained unapologetic, showing a fundamental lack of respect.
But blame shouldn’t be placed entirely on the student — it also belongs to the filmmakers. Why was the scene included? Perhaps it was because she appeared so different from the filmmakers’ own sisters, daughters and mothers that such obnoxious behavior was assumed to be acceptable.
Another possibility is that the filmmakers saw this woman as a means to an end. If their task was to create a film capturing “reality,” they might have thought the Sudanese woman’s forced testimony would educate people and ultimately do more good than harm. But I don’t buy this justification for one second. No one is surprised to hear war and genocide are ugly events and often include atrocities like rape. By including the forced admission, the filmmakers didn’t empathize with the Sudanese woman, but rather displayed a shocking indifference to her plight. When filmmakers, or researchers in general, forget the humanity of their subjects, something is seriously amiss.
Since a stated goal of the movie was to “give them a voice,” I’m scandalized by what I saw. Why can’t Africans “have a voice” by deciding what they want to talk about? There are no benefits to be reaped in coercing testimony. When going to Africa to do research, make films or write stories, we ought to aspire to give Africans the freedom and respect to choose what they want to say. Only when this happens will we truly be giving them a voice.
Melissa Graboyes, a graduate student in the School of Public Health, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at [email protected].