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W
hen the rape and the beating were over, Carol had to
crawl across the room on her belly, because she could not
stand, and spell out her name for the bored bureaucrat
who had watched it all. He crossed her name off the list of women
who were to be punished that day.
Carol, the pseudonym she used when I reported her story in 2008,
was a 39-year-old Zimbabwean who was targeted and punished
by supporters of then president Robert Mugabe for backing an
opposition candidate in the election earlier that year. Vengeance
for the women’s bid for democracy was exacted from their bodies.
Carol later told the story of that day to a small group of
international human-rights lawyers, all women, who were
working to try to hold Mugabe responsible for the crimes he
had committed against humanity in his successful bid to retain
power into a third decade. That’s how
I came to hear her story.
I had covered the election, and I saw
such joy and hope in Zimbabwe on
voting day. People walked for 10, 15, 20
kilometres to cast a ballot in the hope
of unseating the increasingly brutal
Mugabe, convinced that, this time,
their determination and unity could
stop him from rigging another election.
In the aftermath, when the dictator did
manage to steal the vote, I saw such
relentless violence, such determination
to crush that hope.
Carol’s story stays with me, years
later, and so do the stories of women I met in Iraq, Afghanistan
and Sierra Leone—women who took enormous risks to be able
to vote, to campaign or to stand for office.
When I moved home to Canada a few months before this
federal election, I was struck by how little people were talking
about it. In South Africa, Brazil, India, Mexico—any of the
countries where I have lived—a federal election dominates the
public conversation for a year before it takes place. This lack
of engagement in Canada is a reflection, I think, of how lucky
we are: The truth is that regardless of who wins this vote, you
probably won’t see a huge change in your daily life. Canada is
so prosperous and so peaceful that a big change in Ottawa may
cause only small ripples in your day-to-day.
I’m grateful for that: It’s an enormous privilege. But I also
think about Carol in Zimbabwe and all the other women I have
met over the past 25 years while reporting abroad. I think of what
THE TRUE COST OF
Complacency
Award-winning foreign correspondent Stephanie Nolen has
witnessed women around the world risking everything for
democracy. So why, she wonders, don’t Canadians care?
they were prepared to risk, and I find it somewhat disconcerting.
What responsibility comes with our kind of privilege? And what
if there’s more at stake than we’re able to see in the moment?
I was living and reporting in Brazil in the months that led
up to the election of the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, who
took office this year. Many of the Brazilians I know found his
homophobic, racist, misogynist rhetoric abhorrent—Bolsonaro
famously said of a woman who was a fellow member of Congress,
“I wouldn’t rape her because she’s very ugly.” But others were
so invested in his promise to wipe out endemic corruption that
they were prepared to overlook the hate speech. And then there
were those in the middle: Bolsonaro made them nervous, but
his opponent, Fernando Haddad, seemed like more politics as
usual and they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for him either.
So they just didn’t vote.
Fast-forward nine months and
Bolsonaro has proven to be as corrupt
as those who preceded him and has also
stripped the Amazon rainforest (and
its Indigenous inhabitants) of the most
basic protections, creating a massive
climate threat not just for Brazil but for
everyone on the planet. When I hear
from my Brazilian friends these days,
they are watching the new president roll
back the clock on gay rights and trans
rights—his new Minister of Women,
Family and Human Rights decreed
that schools will teach that pink is for
girls and blue is for boys, along with other ideas that reinforce
that a woman’s role is to stand behind her husband. For many
of the Brazilian women I know, the notion that their vote was
irrelevant suddenly seems like a costly mistake.
This isn’t to say that women’s political choices must be dic-
tated by what are traditionally defined as women’s issues. For
me, personally, the critical issue in the upcoming election is the
climate emergency, and the party that seems most serious about
addressing it will get my vote.
But years of living outside Canada have made me aware
of just how lucky I am that voting will involve no bigger an
inconvenience than a few minutes spent standing in line in
the gym of the school down the road; that in an increasingly
turbulent world, an apparently low-stakes election is a luxury
indeed; and that the basic dignity that comes with voting freely
is still too recently won, and too rare, to be taken for granted.
What responsibility
comes with our kind of
privilege? And what if
there’s more at stake
than we’re able to see
in the moment?