Pretty Paper

Some fights are easy. There isn't a law, there needs to be a law. There needs to be recognition of a problem. There needs to be protection under some sort of authority. Some fights are more convoluted than that.

We had a great discussion during the HIV conference around gender based violence but like many things in Rwanda it left us with no clear solution. A lot of things on paper here look amazing. There are already laws in place to criminalize gender based violence. There are laws that give women (and men) the right to divorce an abusive spouse. The problem is implementation.

For example, it's awesome to have a law requiring all children to attend school until they reach a certain age. The problem comes in when you travel to the tiny, isolated village that does whatever it wants. The villagers decide to keep their daughters at home to do chores because they see educating girls as a waste of time.

A second example, a woman keeps getting beat by her husband. After talking to authorities many times, she is stuck. She technically has the right under the law to divorce her husband but the local authorities (many, many layers of bureaucracy) refuse to allow it. She eventually gets her leg cut off with a machete by her husband. Now even if she was granted a divorce, she would have no way to support her and her children.

The follow up is the real fight. The sticky business of changing behavior and perceptions. We got into an especially riveting debate about whether empowering women wouldn't just immediately make society biased against men. If only they saw the decades of slow progress that needs to happen before we can even entertain that idea. (You can start debating affirmative action at this point but I don't have it in me.)