This is what bravery looks like.
By the time she was in her early 20s, Rania al-Baz had become one of the best known and best loved faces in her home country of Saudi Arabia. As presenter of a program called “The Kingdom This Morning” on state-owned television, her hair was always covered by a hijab, as is required, but her face remained uncovered, and she would choose head scarves of defiantly flamboyant colors to cover her immaculately styled hair. She became, for hundreds of thousands of Saudi women, admirable, enviable and challenging — and, thus, an implicit threat to a society in which women are forced to cover themselves, are not allowed to drive, cannot vote or participate in political life, cannot leave home unless accompanied by a chaperone or travel without authorization from a father or husband, and cannot establish a business without a male sponsor.
Then, suddenly, on April 13, 2004, Baz disappeared from the airwaves. When she emerged two weeks later, her face was all over the newspapers, but it was barely recognizable. Her husband had savagely assaulted her, slamming her face against the marble-tiled floor of their home until it suffered 13 fractures. He was disposing of what he assumed to be her dead body when she showed signs of life and, panicking, he took her to the hospital, where doctors gave her only a 70 percent chance of survival.
During the days in which Baz was in a coma, fighting for her life, her father took photographs of her grotesquely disfigured face. And after she recovered, she decided to permit the photographs to be published, thus doing what no woman in the kingdom had ever done. Of course, there was nothing particularly unusual about her bruises: Baz was a victim of one of the world’s most common, and least punished, crimes. But in Saudi Arabia especially, Baz had shattered a wall of silence about domestic violence. The images of her grotesquely bruised and swollen face sent shockwaves through her country and around the world, casting an unwelcome but glaring spotlight on the abuse of women that thrives behind the mask of Saudi religious dogmatism. Baz would also go on to divorce her husband — almost unheard of in Saudi Arabia, where divorce is invariably the other way around — and win custody of her children, again in defiance of precedent.
Read the whole article. One of the many things that it brings up is the power of the visual in social movements — Baz publishing pictures of her face after being beaten up by her husband, Donna Ferrato’s Living With the Enemy, Ms. Magazine publishing police photos of Gerri Santoro dead on the floor after an illegal abortion (warning: graphic). The visual is effective because it’s one more way to tell those stories; honestly representing the experience of the people living oppression is far more poignant than simply political sloganeering.
Baz’s story is particularly interesting because it’s clear that it would have been much easier for her to shut up and go back to the man who tried to kill her. Even after pressing charges, her husband was sentenced to 300 lashes and six months in jail — and that was eventually halved (not that I’m advocating lashing people; just pointing out that three months in jail for attempting to murder someone is pretty light).
“The crucial thing,” says Baz, “is that the structure of society — the fact that a woman cannot drive or travel without authorization, for example — gives a special sense of strength to the man. And this strength is directly connected to the violence. It creates a sense of immunity, that he can do whatever he wants, without sanction. The core issue is not the violence itself, it is this immunity for men, the idea that men can do what they like. It is the society of which the violence is an expression.”
Sounds like grade-A patriarchy-blaming. And she’d be right.
It’s too easy to read a story like this and respond, “Wow, they sure are backwards over there in Saudi Arabia,” thus exoticising domestic crimes and excusing yourself (ourselves) from any ownership over this society, which also tacitly excuses violence against women. Yes, women in the United States have far more resources than Saudi women when trying to escape abusive situations, and the cult of silence around such violence has had holes poked in it here. For that, we can all thank feminism. But to claim that the cultural ills which promote and allow intimate partner violence exist there and not here is delusional to the point of being dangerous.