The World Health Organization's World Report on Violence and Health estimates that over a million people lose their lives to violence and millions more are injured and maimed every year. The report states that violence is "among the leading causes of death among people aged 15-44 years worldwide, accounting for 14% of deaths among males and 7% of deaths among females."
What's so disturbing is the myriad forms this violence takes and how deeply pervasive and borderless it is. Across the globe and across the centuries, humans have committed the most barbaric acts, limited only by their imaginations, and the march of civilization has done little to change the grim reality that on any given day, in every corner of our planet, gruesome and ungodly things are done to women, children and men.
In Beirut during the '70s and early '80s, I witnessed terrible acts of violence, car bombs at supermarkets and missile strikes on residential neighborhoods, bloody bodies and corpses in the street, the carnage of urban warfare. It has made me keenly attuned to the darker aspects of human nature, the willingness to brutalize one another. Four decades on this planet and I still cannot fathom how a man can rape a baby, how people can gas, hack, strangle, shoot, smother, burn, and torture their fellow humans. Rather than become dulled and inured from violence overload, I am ever more appalled and horrified by it.
Take this CNN report on gang-raping little girls in Darfur:
Can we even imagine the anguish felt by these young victims and their families? Can words and images conjure their REAL suffering and fear?
Or read this Guardian story (and watch the accompanying video) titled Raped and Killed for Being a Lesbian.
In my (admittedly utopian) fantasy, preventing violence is our highest priority. Although the relative scale is disproportionate - vastly more people are at risk from hunger and disease than from violence - part of me feels that violence is the more pressing issue. Violence touches virtually everyone, directly or indirectly. Is there a single person reading this who hasn't been affected by it in some way or who isn't concerned about being harmed or having their loved ones harmed? In many ways, violence - the fear of it, and its many representations/permutations in art, film, music and modern culture - defines our 21st century life.
And one more thing: there is something qualitatively different, something worse, about violence than other existential threats. It may be impossible to distinguish between the mortal terror of being trapped under a building in an earthquake and being trapped under a building after a car bomb, between the agony of death from cancer and being beaten to death. But I believe there is a difference. We all die in some manner or another, but an act of human will, of intentionality, a choice by one person to harm another, is not the same as an act - or accident - of nature or a cruel vagary of fate.
Saying that violence is a more pressing problem than hunger or disease opens up a host of counter-arguments. One could argue that starvation and (some) diseases are preventable and thus it is an indirect act of will by those who do nothing - or don't do enough - to help prevent them. It's true that omission can be considered equally reprehensible as commission, though I think there's still a case to be made that the immediacy, intentionality, and physicality of a violent act sets it apart, precisely because free will is involved, because it is a choice in the moment, because it is avoidable by virtue of being the will of a person. Furthermore, if the point is that we are all morally culpable because we have the means to prevent starvation and disease around the world and we don't do so, then we're really saying that it is a slow, less direct form of violence, defined as "the intentional use of physical force or power, threatened or actual, against oneself, another person, or against a group or community, that either results in or has a high likelihood of resulting in injury, death, psychological harm, maldevelopment, or deprivation."
It's also possible to argue that some forms of violence are unavoidable (or even necessary), that sometimes violence is not the result of free will, that perhaps it's less painful to die of a gunshot to the head than from a long and agonizing illness, and so on. All these points are debatable. Life itself is a continuous moral triage; we face multiple dilemmas and multiple crises, multiple lesser-of-evil options. And with any ethical issue, slippery slopes and gray zones are the rule not the exception. We can get tangled in the endless and eternal questions of the fungibility (or lack thereof) of lives, whether killing is morally worse than letting die, of whether it's worth killing one person to save a million. We can pose thought experiments about trolleys and train tracks, fat men and bridges.
But take it out of the realm of the philosophical and theoretical for a moment and tell me if anything you've heard is worse than this:
Last week, 13-year old Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow was stoned to death in Somalia by insurgents because she was raped. Reports indicate that she was raped by three men while traveling by foot to visit her grandmother ... When she went to the authorities to report the crime, they accused her of adultery and sentenced her to death. Aisha was forced into a hole in a stadium of 1,000 onlookers as 50 men buried her up to the neck and cast stones at her until she died. A witness who spoke to the BBC's Today programme said she had been crying and had to be forced into a hole before the stoning, reported to have taken place in a football stadium. ... She said: 'I'm not going, I'm not going. Don't kill me, don't kill me.' "A few minutes later more than 50 men tried to stone her." The witness said people crowding round to see the execution said it was "awful".
Or this:
Jessica Marie Lunsford was a nine-year-old girl who was abducted from her home in Homosassa, Florida in the early morning of February 24, 2005. ... Couey entered Lunsford's house through an unlocked door at about three o'clock in the morning, awakened Lunsford, told her "Don't yell or nothing," and told her to follow him out of the house. He admitted in a videotaped and recorded deposition to raping Lunsford in his bedroom. Lunsford was kept in Couey's bed that evening, where he raped her again in the morning. Couey put her in his closet and ordered her to remain there, which she did as he reported for work at "Billy's Truck Lot". Three days after he abducted her, Couey tricked Jessica into getting into two garbage bags by saying he was going to 'take her home'. He instead buried her alive as he decided he could do nothing else with the girl. He said he 'Didn't want people seeing him and Lunsford across the street.' On March 19, 2005, police found Lunsford's body at a residence located on West Sparrow Court, buried in a hole approximately 2 1/2' deep and 2' circular, covered with leaves. The body was removed from the ground and transported to the coroner's office. Her body had undergone "moderate" to "severe" decomposition and according to the publicly released autopsy reports was skeletonized on 2 fingers that Lunsford had poked through the bags before suffocating to death.
The point is that no fate seems more ghastly or any act more abhorrent than the kind of evil deeds described above. That it occurs every day, every hour, across the planet is horrific beyond words.
Nature may be red in tooth and claw, but the defining characteristic of our species is the capacity to resist our impulses (described at the neurological level in the fascinating work of Benjamin Libet, where the impulse to act takes place in our brain before we are aware of it, but there is a brief instant where we can resist that impulse).
I believe that the decision by an individual or group of individuals to destroy or inflict damage on others, to rob them of their freedom, to strip them of their dignity, to dehumanize them, is fundamentally worse than any other mortal threat we face. Violence is an affront to our souls, a stain on our humanity.
Should it be our top order of business to eradicate violence? Is it possible to do so? The report I referenced at the top of this piece is a good place to start.
Follow Peter Daou on Twitter: www.twitter.com/peterdaou
By lowering the amount of Starvation and Disease in a society you lower the number of people who need to commit violence and the number of people who can excuse the violence based on the circumstances. Then you are mostly left with the individuals who would be violent no matter what the situation and they will be easier to locate and imprision so that they no longer harm others.
Perhaps one reason much of the world ignores the sort of disturbing violence presented in this article is simply that it is so difficult to look at and think about and stirs up the desire to do violence in ourselves. It is with great shame that the only answer I have to the likes of john Couey or the murderers of Aisha Duhulow is to kill them first. I guess that's a sad commentary on human nature, too.
Of course many of the people reading this were complicit in millions being slaughtered in Asia and the vast majority complicit in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands in the Middle East but because that at some point involved people in uniform it's not seen in the same manner and those who carry out the actions are not reviled but lauded.
But I was not much encouraged to read another poster's comment that well, at least it was "only" fifty of the thousand who were present...A thousand men came to WATCH this evil thing? That nation and its laws, and clearly many of its people, have sunk below the level of being human. And one reads of the atrocities elsewhere - the children of the "Lord's Resistance Army" forced to commit murder...
I see some comments refer to innate flaws in "the human heart." Although one must wonder if the monsters possess such a thing, it did cause me to remember how, in one of Durrell's "Alexandria Quartet" novels, Justine says (admittedly apropos of troubles in more everyday relationships) "Who invented the human heart, I wonder? Tell me - and then show me the place where he was hanged." Perhaps grimly apposite here.
"We all die in some manner or another, but an act of human will, of intentionality, a choice by one person to harm another, is not the same as an act - or accident - of nature or a cruel vagary of fate. "
This is the same argument that I have made regarding abortion. It is relevant to this discussion based upon the topic. I am as liberal as they come, except I am pro-life, and yes, I am against the death penalty.
I find it hard to accept his logic when western countries allow abortion without any exception. How can we in the "civilized" western hemisphere lecture the world when we allow abortions to take place on an unprecendented level? Targeting anyone based upon orientation, sex, or age is indefensible, and that includes unborn who could survive outside the womb. Of course there have to be exceptions, but they should not extend beyond the health of the mother or the viability of the infant.
He is absolutely right in his limited framing of this argument, however limiting the scope excuses the full bridge of the concept. I honestly and sincerely would love to hear his reply, again, based upon his own statement of the difference. I invite logical, rational discussion of this topic. Would love to hear his reply.
In Western countries, these acts are usually committed by psychological outliers; deviants and misfits. On the other hand, the gang rape of children in Sudan, rape of lesbians in South Africa, stoning of rape victims in Muslim countries and "honor" killings in India all reflect serious differences in societal morals between their countries and ours. The question is how to effectively influence changes in these societal morals.
Sexism is the biggest problem this earth has to deal with. If this were happening to men it would be all out war. Beheadings, impalings, and castrations to be televised on a cable channel near you.
But for women and gay men no matter the race its all brought on by the victim. The rest of the world is in a helpless position of doing nothing because boy will be boys.
Lesbianism is mostly unacceptable so on some level maybe a little rape now and then is a good thing
it might help to turn them straight. ? !
As for the little girls -where were their fathers/brothers or maybe they should be married or something to protect them from other "mens".
Daou thank you for this article. I saw the South African rape story earlier this week. Sickning. How do you stop a cycle when a female is born into a world "that says" she is inferior? And brainwashed into believing that her body belongs to a man. Submissive and genteel is not only expected of her them but in some cases demanded.
Certainly there is this element of lack of empathy and caring about one's fellow human beings. But for this type of behavior to be so widespread, it takes a cultural phenomenon that morally brainwashes people on a large scale - into believing that women are inferior or that gays or lesbians are evil, into rationalizing murder and rape. That cultural phenomenon is known as religion.
the local planned parenthood is routinely picketed by angry people bearing loud voices and bloody images. not a one of them does positive outreach in the community...
i could go on