Bearing Witness

The Women in the World Summit brought together people, mostly women, to share the stories, tragic and triumphant, of the status or plight of women around the world. There were over 30 panel conversations that covered topics such as violence against women in India, to the girls kidnapped by Boko Haram, to human trafficking around the globe, to victims of rape and slaughter by ISIS, to the crisis of campus rape in America.

The triumphant stories are easy to celebrate and talk about — the young homeless girl who found her place in the world through poetry thanks to the Get Lit program, for example.

But how do you process that which is incomprehensible and unbearable? Before I attempt to make sense of any of this, my first job is simply to bear witness to the unbearable.

Friday morning, UN Ambassador Samantha Power said, “Once you see what is on the ground you kind of lose your alibis.” The point of the summit was to witness what is on the ground. If you want to hold on to your alibis for not taking action, read no further.

The event began dramatically with a presentation called The Woman I’m Here For. Each host stood to share the words of a woman who was unable to attend. Among them:
Lakshmi: an Indian girl who suffered an acid attack and now works to end those attacks and Mary, age 15, a girl from Sierra Leone whose mother died of Ebola. She is left to raise her very young siblings.

In the panel, Girls As Weapons of War, we met Saida Munye, a woman whose daughter left her family in Sweden to follow a man with whom she had fallen in love, a man who is an ISIS terrorist. Her account, through tears, of her solitary, unsuccessful journey, through Turkey to the border of Syria to try to bring her daughter home was devastating.

The Sons We Share brought to us Robi Damelin and Bushra Awad, Israeli and Palestinian mothers who lost their sons to violence. They shared their sons’ lives and deaths. On the screen behind them were giant images of their sons’ faces — beautiful, smiling faces — faces that looked so much like my own sons and, truly, like one another. Their faces haunt me.

Obiageli Ezekwesili pleaded with us not to forget the Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram.

Actress Freida Pinto asked us to remember Nirbhaya, “fearless one,” a pseudonym for the young woman who was brutally gang raped on a bus in India and left for dead.

Vian Dakheel Saeed desperately, tearfully told of the ongoing rape and slaughter of the Yazidi people in Northern Iraq, by ISIS. She implored us to close our eyes and picture our daughters being torn from our arms to be raped and murdered, and asked us not to open them until we had figured out how to help them.

Yeonmi Park, a young North Korean woman, told her story of fleeing. as a young girl, from oppression in North Korea into the arms of rape and sexual trafficking in China. The details of her journey were brutal and traumatic. She could not be as fragile as she looked upon that stage and survived what she survived. Her final words to us were “For the first time I belong to myself. I belonged to my state. I belonged to the men who bought me. Now I belong to myself.”

What makes these words so hard to bear is that although Yeonmi is in safety and recovering, too many girls and women are not.

Each woman in that theater represented hundreds, thousands or millions who are still in peril.

The first step is to bear witness.

Now I have no alibi for inaction.

Now I must decide where I can act most effectively for change and hope that each one of us there will do the same.