Power, Suffering, and the Struggle for Dignity. Alicia Ely Yamin
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including extending obligations of nonstate (that is, private) actors.67 Moreover, in most countries there are national laws against domestic violence, at least against women if not children; and in some there are criminal prosecutions of perpetrators, and NGOs and agencies dedicated to helping survivors.
An enormous gap remains, however, between what the laws say and the pervasiveness of these forms of torture and abuse in practice.68 Just as with other forms of torture and inhuman treatment, the health impacts of intimate partner violence (IPV) are pervasive and irrefutable. Physical impacts of IPV include high rates of arthritis, chronic neck or back pain, chronic pelvic pain, stomach ulcers, hypertension, and frequent headaches.69 Some of the mental health effects include higher rates of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), suicidal ideation, and substance abuse.70
Perhaps even worse, women and children who suffer from domestic violence too often believe they deserve the torture to which they are continually subjected. For example, in a global survey conducted in 2005, approximately two-thirds of women who had been subjected to domestic violence believed that it was appropriate for their husbands to hit or beat them for reasons that included not completing housework, disobeying their husband, refusing sex, and actual or suspected infidelity. A husband’s most common justification was suspecting a wife of being unfaithful.71 Further, women who are subject to abuse have little or no control over household resources, and little education.72 Therefore, their opportunity structures severely limit their ability to exert agency.
In the case of domestic violence against children, it is often not that the torture shatters an already formed world or a fully constructed sense of identity; rather, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse prevents them from forming a sense of themselves as full human beings in the first place. Sometimes such abuse relates to condemning or castigating a child’s expression of sexuality or gender identity as he or she is just beginning to have a sense of how that fits into his or her personhood. As I have stressed, we human beings construct the meaning of our lives every day through the small interactions we have with the people around us.73 When people or society mirror a confining or contemptible picture of themselves, it ends up, as British sociologist Steven Lukes notes, “imprisoning them in a ‘false, distorted and reduced mode of being.’”74
This process of internalizing domination is what leads so many girls—and members of sexual minorities and other marginalized groups—to see themselves as less than full human beings, with no claim to equal dignity. These are often the girls who then tend to believe they “deserve” to be beaten or neglected or abused in other ways as women; these are the members of sexual minorities who end up living under a cloak of shame and self-loathing. Recognizing this process of internalized domination, and its enormous health consequences, demands that our rights frameworks not only provide protection from abuse and access to entitlements, but also rethink the resources necessary to overcome internalized barriers and thereby create new opportunity structures for people to claim their dignity.
Changing laws and institutional practices is an important part of changing the common script through which we create our material and social realities as is ensuring equal access to endowments such as education and employment. But part of applying an empowering human rights framework to health and promoting a human rights culture must also entail changing the mirror that is held up to our private worlds, as those mirrors also create narratives for our lives and the conditions for developing our identities. Transforming our societies so that everyone can be accorded dignity requires actively working through both education systems and campaigns targeting popular culture to change how we see and relate to one another within those “small places”—close to and within our homes—“where human rights begin.”
Concluding Reflections
The Quijano case as it developed was just the tip of an iceberg, which allowed me, together with Mexican colleagues, to bring a case in which we documented how PJF agents were involved in repeated instances of torture and other abuses of fundamental human rights. Yet, rather than being investigated or prosecuted, the perpetrators were transferred around the country, and even sometimes sent to serve on UN peacekeeping missions. The case created a scandal when the revelations were made public to a U.S. congressional committee holding hearings on the possibility of the signing of NAFTA and to the UN Committee Against Torture, which subsequently issued a scathing finding.75 Other outrages also surfaced around the same time with respect to the PJF. Eventually, the then–attorney general of the country, Ignacio Morales Lechuga, stepped down and was replaced by the then-director of the National Human Rights Commission, Jorge Carpizo MacGregor. The PJF agents named in the report were suspended or fired, if not fully investigated or sanctioned for the abuses they had committed. In terms of broader reform, the National Human Rights Commission instituted a policy of tracking all agents allegedly involved in human rights abuses, which it continues to do to this day.76 Of course, torture and abuse by the PJF did not stop there; indeed, over the years with increasing drug-related activity in Mexico, it may have increased. But that is the constant challenge of human rights work, and it does not mean that holding some officials to account and changing policies is meaningless. Far from it; it shows us that incremental changes are possible—and, as I argue throughout this book, these incremental advances can trigger further changes and open different spaces that lead to new struggles, often with different sets of actors, but also can lead to greater transformation.
During the years I lived in Mexico, Rosa slowly began to piece together fragments of her broken world. She and her husband moved out of Mexico City to a resort community. They opened a business renting jet skis and diving equipment to tourists. She got pregnant and had a child. Nothing would ever be the same again, but she managed to reestablish a kind of equilibrium. If someone met her in later years, it might not even occur to them that Rosa had not always been this woman who engaged in easy pleasantries with her tourist clients, that there was a time when she had been a very different woman, with different dreams for her life. If anything, understanding what had happened to her family as an injustice and having it recognized and acknowledged publicly as a flagrant violation of fundamental human rights enabled Rosa to make meaning out of the horror, and in turn to move on.
I got to know another family who was denied even that level of emotional closure. My husband and I lived in Mixcoac—a working-class neighborhood of Mexico City, a block away from the Lucha Libre, the professional wrestling ring. It turned out to be the perfect neighborhood for a human rights lawyer. When PJF agents sat outside our door day and night, knocked out the streetlights and wiretapped the corner pay phone as well as our house phone (this was before cell phones), we acquired a certain status among the neighbors, all of whom had their own problems with the universally hated Mexican police. There were no washing machines at the time, and Gabriela came to Mixcoac to do our laundry once a week with her three-year-old daughter, Josefina, in tow.
Gabriela and her sister, Patricia, had had a tough life, growing up in an impoverished household often without enough food. Becoming domestic workers is often the only option for girls who grow up in the circumstances of Patricia and Gabriela. Armies of young girls across Latin America—and much of the rest of the world—work in conditions with almost no labor protections in practice. If they are fortunate enough not to be abused physically or emotionally, they can easily still end up being oppressed by their own insignificance in cruelly indifferent societies, as happened to Gabriela.
As we got to know each other, Gabriela increasingly confided in me about her abusive husband. Sometimes she would ask for a little extra money if she had to pay for a place for her and her daughter to sleep away from him for a night or two, and sometimes the results of an “argument” would be visible on her body. I urged her to move out on more than one occasion, but the reality was Gabriela could not afford to leave; she had no other options.
One week Gabriela failed to show up for work. Patricia called that night; she wanted to know if her sister had shown up. Patricia was worried. She said Gabriela had called her the day before saying that she was scared for her life; her husband had beaten her terribly and threatened to kill her. This was not the first time he had made such threats, and I tried to reassure her that Gabriela had likely taken Josefina away for a few days.
But