In the last two weeks I have been deeply shocked twice, once by a story and once by the use of a word and I can no longer keep myself from writing about it. In both cases the guilty parties were using a term or story which related to great suffering to a great number of people, to illustrate amusement.
In the first case it was the use of a word. It was well after midnight on January 1, 2012 and most of us had, had more than enough to drink. My friends and I had settled into our host's living room and one male suggested that he and another male play a video game. The second male responded with "I'm totally going to rape you at that game!" This annoyed me, as it always does when people use the word rape in such a context but I let it go. There was a pause and then the second male continued to use the word three or four more times at which point I interrupted and simply said "would you stop being so negative?" Part of the reason the use of the word rape to describe anything other than a sexually violent act perpetrated against a woman, is because of my work on the conflict of the Congo and now in Uganda. Being aware of the fact that rape is often used as a weapon of war, either to repress a population or to force child soldiers into complacency, as well of the fact that it is an act which destroys the lives of women around the world is enough to turn me off from its use. After I finished talking, another woman interjected by saying "Do you have any idea what it is like being raped?" Both males went on to try to justify their use of the term and the other woman left the room followed by the host and another party guest. I followed a short time later to discover the woman standing in the backyard crying. As it turned out, she had been raped. After about 10 minutes I returned to the room where everyone else was sitting and I was upset to find the group still talking about the use of the word "rape" as an appropriate verb in conversation. Again I cut in and said "you really need to stop talking about this," they continued, I added sharply "I said, change the subject." Silence.
The second incident happened today in the car in Lango. Lango is in Northern Uganda, a district which was affected by the LRA and the northern war. I was attending a seminar at an area cooperative enterprise on soybean plantations and had driven up with the driver. On the way to the presentation I was already unimpressed with his topics of conversation which belittled women and mocked slum-dwellers (I doubt he's ever visited one). At the beginning of our return to Lira he started telling us this "amazing story". He told us of how his friend, a former Ugandan soldier who had served in the Congo (where Uganda has been found guilty of breaching international law by the International Court of Justice," has started a cross-boarder shipping business. He told us, smiling all the while of how after dropping goods off that his friend would re-load the truck with timber. He said his friend said that he didn't have to pay taxes when he brought the timber across the boarder. When I pointed out that, that was illegal, he responded that his friend had told him it required special contacts in the government. He also added that his friend had to bribe both the Congolese police and one of the ethnic (well he said rebel but I know better) groups in the area, the Lendu, with weapons and beers in order to keep his operation running. The Lendu have been engaged in a bloody ethnic conflict with the Hema for several years which has resulted in a large number of Lendu and Hema settling in a refugee camp in western Uganda as well as countless fatalities and is contributing to the overall instability in the Eastern DRC. I couldn't handle how light-heartedly this man had told us about his friend being involved in an operation which is contributing to so much suffering, not to mention a symptom of the mineral and resource exploitation which continues to contribute to Congo's ever growing poverty. I listened silently for the rest of the car ride as this Ugandan man and one of my colleagues continued to chuckle over issues such as gender inequality.
These stories are very different and yet are so intertwined in how the world has begun to perceive violence. Rather than being something unjustifiable and something that needs to be stopped, it is recounted as something simply to laugh about. It's really not funny.
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