What would happen if you had Samantha Power and Twyla Tharp tackle the same problem? Power, arguably one of the best experts on mass atrocities and a member of Obama’s National Security Council, would develop a rigorous statistical analysis that documents the issue and assesses inherent biases from quoted sources. Tharp, on the other hand, would deconstruct musical phrases while intertwining professional dancers’ inherent expression to interpret and re-present the problem in a series of contemporary movements that make a thought-provoking statement. Now, what if Power and Tharp were to work together to produce one final product?
Welcome to week two of my internship.
My fellow intern and I have been tasked with an exciting, albeit depressing, assignment to research the problem of sexual gender-based violence (SGBV) in Liberia. I am familiar with SGBV as it relates to Rwanda and Darfur as those are issues that I’ve tackled first hand in our contemporary ballets over the last two years. However, given my limited knowledge of Liberia, I had not realized the extent of the problem as it manifested there during the civil war and now in the post-conflict period.
As interns, our first step was to gain a sense of the size of the problem through statistical analysis. There is no shortage of shocking anecdotal and qualitative evidence, but searching for well-researched quantitative data was more challenging. According to the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL), 66% of girls between the ages of 10 – 19 years have been raped (2009). Medicins Sans Frontieres reports SGBV as the #1 or #2 monthly crime in Monrovia, however perpetrators are rarely tried or convicted. When expanding the analysis to include physical abuse against women as well as sexual violence, the statistics become even more unbelievable: 90.8% of respondents in Liberia’s 10 most populous counties have been subjected to at least one act of violence (World Health Organization, 2008).
From this landscape, we are asked the impossible question: “what works to prevent SGBV in Liberia?” The problem has been addressed by the Government of Liberia. High level coordination mechanisms and a national taskforce have been established. There is a SGBV Crimes Unit that has a 24-hour hotline, and it vertically prosecutes rape cases so that resolution is possible. However, such resources are confined to just one of Liberia’s fifteen counties, and there is no supporting quantitative evidence to show these efforts have diminished the widespread sexual violence throughout the country.
Like in Darfur and Rwanda, perpetrators have become skilled at understanding the power of rape as a tool of war. It destroys families and communities, destabilizing gender roles in a post-conflict environment. It is nearly outside my scope of imagination to understand what it is like to be a woman in any one of these countries. Even when I addressed the issue as a choreographer in our Darfur ballet, the dancers and I used analogies from our own lives in order to create the tension and fear embedded in the movement; simply imagining “reality” left our artistry disconnected from the enormity of the pain.
However, until this point, this has been the way I process information and communicate it back to people. Now, in the setting of this internship, I have the perfect learning ground to re-work how I connect data in my head and report it back in a coherent manner. And this leads me to the question at hand: how do two people with different approaches generate the same final product?
In writing this research paper for The Carter Center, my counterpart and I will need to find the answer to that question. Whereas I think nonlinearly – pulling from emotions and analogies – the other intern thinks logically and directly. She has been very patient with me as I sort out the legal terminology which is second nature for her, and I am grateful that I have the opportunity to observe how she assesses and synthesizes information. So, hopefully, when we put together our final thoughts on this difficult topic, we will have answered that initial question: what would happen if Samantha Power and Twyla Tharp tackle the same problem?
Nevertheless, I don’t think there’s a spot on the Security Council waiting for Twyla...
A video response to Rebecca Davis Dance Company’s “Darfur”:
http://www.youtube.com/rebeccadavisdance#p/c/015FE8EBA6D748B3/0/gprLqCFTrJg
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