WOMEN MATTER
First and foremost, welcome back to our blog after the long hiatus. We have missed you but we we are now back with new content for you.
That is why, today we have a guest writer on our blog.
So about the author..
Her name is Nasteha Farah. She is an aspiring blogger who loves reading, writing and traveling. She’s a third-year psychology major in the United States International University-Africa(USIU). She is passionate about human rights, social justice and the importance of mental health.
Below is her piece. Enjoy
It is easier to blame a woman dressed in a short skirt for her rape than it is to admit that we have been raising our boys wrong. It is easier to blame a 17-year-old girl for being raped because she was wearing a laced front thong than it is to put the man who raped her in jail.
I mean, putting him in jail will ruin his whole life, right? Then who will feed his children? Or protect his wife? The world is funny like that. We always think about how the man’s life is ruined, how he was a good man all his life, he just slipped once. But we never think about the girl, and how being raped has ruined her life forever. Oh, I forgot, women ask for it. We want to be raped. We want to be looked at as objects which can do nothing but satisfy a mans sexual needs.
Sometime last month, I read this story of a dad who was a church elder but he had been sexually abusing his adoptive daughter for two years since she was 14 years old. Do you want to know how much jail term he got? 12 years. The reason for leniency was because he is a good man of God. The judge was impressed by his religious faith. He did not care about the teenager, who in a statement said that she wanted to throw her body away. That no day goes by without her thinking of what he (her father) did to her. The case is still in trial but I could name many more just like this where the perpetrator got away with the crime, leaving victims feeling scared and with permanent scars.
Last year, #metoo and #timesup were trending with people sharing their stories of sexual assault. Some were seeking justice; some were looking for closure, but all wanted to share their story.
I will acknowledge the men who stood up and shared their stories, and I will acknowledge their strength and their pain. My focus though is the staggering number of women who shared their story. Some had lived a life of sexual abuse, their abusers lived with them. They were their family members; they shared their meals with them. But when they stood up and told on them to their other family members, they were not believed. They were called liars, and attention seekers. Now they are still forced to live with them, to be nice to them. Do you know what that does to someone’s mental state? How much that affects their mental stability?
We have to do better!
As a society. As human beings. We need to do better. We owe our girls that. We owe them a world where they can live there lives freely, where they can experience happiness and love without fearing for their lives;for their safety. Why is it that an 11-year-old girl has to change the way she dresses because a 40-year-old man has already decided she is a piece of object that can only be used for his sexual pleasure? Why don’t we blame rapists for rape instead of blaming a girl for being a girl.
Let us style up, raise our boys to know that girls are not sexual objects. Raise our girls to know that it is not her fault when a man rapes her and that she does not have to apologize for being a girl. Let us hold people responsible for their actions.
You can also visit Nasteha’s blog and check out more of her work. Click here to do so.
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Sub Saharan International Model United Nations (SAIMUN) is a five-day international relations simulation for both high school and university/college students that is held annually at the United Nations Office in Nairobi (UNON) Gigiri. The international meeting is attended by more than 800 students from all over the world, in which they debate the major issues of the international political agenda. SAIMUN19 now beckons all of us to once again take part. The theme is “Youth Leadership at its Peak:The role of the Youth In Sustainable Development” It will be held from 1st-5th July 2019, so make sure your calendars are marked!
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