Sweat is running down Patricia Clark’s face as she shouts at a crowd of hundreds of Liberians through a megaphone. ”The law says, if you jump on a woman without her consent, that is rape. You will go to prison for 10 years. If you rape a child, you will get life. You die in prison; they bury you; they will chain you in your grave.”
The lawyer tucks her megaphone under one arm and brandishes a newspaper announcing the first life sentence passed on a man who raped a child. The crowd erupts in cheers.
This is Westpoint, one of the poorest districts in Monrovia, the war-shattered capital of Liberia. Flies swarm around fish drying in the sun; the narrow alleyways between the tin-roofed shacks run with sewage in the heavy West African rains. The country has been without water or electricity for more than 15 years but, in the more affluent districts, generators have begun to light up private homes. From the air, they look like clusters of fireflies. But, in Westpoint, rapists and murderers stalk the dark labyrinth of streets at night. Even the police are afraid to venture here.
The rape last week of a 14-year-old, mentally retarded girl finally tipped the balance. A group of mothers stormed the offices of the Association of Female Lawyers of Liberia, a pressure group that drafted a recent law strengthening the penalties for rape and making gang rape and the rape of a child under 18 specific crimes for the first time. Although the perpetrator paid the girl’s family $150 to keep quiet, her neighbours demanded that lawyers like Clark take up the case and come to their community to publicise the new law.
The case is just part of a new wave of activism sweeping the country.
Selling water by the side of the road, 36-year-old Patience Blah says proudly: ”The women of Liberia are fighting back. We are fighting against those who want to hurt us.” Like nearly 40% of Liberian women, she was attacked during the 14year long civil war that ended in 2003.
But Blah says the election of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Africa’s first female president, has given her new confidence.
In January, Johnson-Sirleaf made a point of referring to her own attempted rape in prison during her inaugural speech in an effort to break the stigma associated with attack. ”I am a woman president, and one of the things I said unequivocally is that the rape law that was passed last year will be strictly enforced.” And that message has gone out to everybody.
But it’s going to be an uphill struggle. The country’s police force has only 10 vehicles, and not all of them work. There are more than 100 000 former fighters in the country, who were headed by drug-taking teenagers with names like General Fuck-Me-Quick. The courts are backed up with cases and the prisons are bursting.
But there have been some victories. Johnson-Sirleaf says the biggest success so far has been to put in trained financial management and thereby reduce the level of misuse, misallocation and corruption in government. The proof is in the budget. Government revenue has gone up by more than 30% in the few months since she took office, and the extra money is being spent on repairing the potholed roads and clearing away the mounds of rubbish that used to clog the pavements.
Now there is a new Supreme Court sworn in, headed by a woman. And hundreds of newly recruited police officers, also led by a woman. Even more importantly for the cash-strapped country, supported by money from the United Nations Population Fund, the government is prosecuting rape cases pro bono, so women don’t have to pay.