I’m very, very committed to human rights.
But there is a way to approach them. If you want to stop forced marriages, you can’t just walk into a village and say “Hey, y’all are wrong! Do things my way, it’s better” and expect that to work. You look in and see why forced marriages are working. Who is supporting them- is it the religious leaders? Is it families who like the dowries they bring? Then you look at who is against them, because there will be people who are against any given cultural practice. How does this practice function? I promise you, it’s more complicated than “They are woman-hating Muslims.”
Then you start looking about what you can do about it. Can the groups who locally oppose them be better organized? Can you create incentives against forced marriages? For example, if you could bring in pink-collar jobs, you would give people incentives to keep their girls in school rather than marrying them off young. If you can expose the local Islamic leadership to Islamic authorities that speak against forced marriage, maybe you can convince them that forced marriage is an un-Islamic practice. If you support the local women’s group’s income generating activities, maybe they can develop the capacity to care for women disowned by their families.
You gotta work within a culture, in their own context, with respect to the fact that people generally do what they do for a reason.
The hardest thing I dealt with in Cameroon was when a 16 year old Muslim girl- a student of mine- came up to me and asked me my advice. She was a lesbian. She admitted her only sexual thoughts were about women. In a country with some very strange ideas about homosexuality, where the names of suspected homosexuals are regularly printed in newspapers to single them out for harassment.
She had seen a marabou, a priest and a traditional healer. Nobody could change how she was, so she came to me. WTF was I supposed to tell her. “Gay is okay, here is your rainbow flag!” Obviously not. I did the best I could, explaining that in my culture we consider it to be normal, and that lesbians can get married, have kids, etc. (major concerns of hers in a culture where family is everything.) I told her I couldn’t give her much advice about Cameroon, because obviously it’s different. I advised her that she might want to try to get out of the village and into a larger city with a gay scene- I had certainly met other lesbians in Cameroon. I talked about the gay civil rights movement in America, and my hope that one day…probably decades from now…that coud reach Africa. But in the end I all I could really say was “Good luck. You’re gonna have to be strong to live the life you have.”
I still don’t know if I did the right thing. I heard she went into the city and got involved in a cult. The cities are hard places on young women alone. Anyway. It’s easy to sit on your couch and know the truths of the world, but out there where things are different there are not clear answers.