Taking a brief break from blogging about humanitarian aid work, here…
I’m sure that many of you were horrified by the account of Ms. Lara Logan, Chief Foreign Correspondent for CBS, being attacked and sexually assaulted in Tahrir Square, now almost three weeks ago. For those who don’t know, Ms. Logan was no newcomer to dangerous and volatile places. This was not her first, nor at first glance, necessarily the most troubling place she’d deployed to in the line of duty. Yet on February 11, things did go horribly wrong for her there. (Here’s the story)
The cacophony of ill-informed opinion on the incident both in mass and social media was truly astounding, and ranged from mildly idiotic noise to full-on over-the-top sexism and racism. I won’t drive traffic to any of those blogs or twitter accounts. Here are a few that I felt treated the issue well.
Then a few days after that, Somali pirates captured and then killed four Americans (Jean and Scott Adam, Phyllis Macay and Bob Riggle) traveling around the world by yacht. These four were not new to sailing and had to have known something about the possibility of being attacked by pirates in the greater Horn of Africa / Red Sea vicinity. (Here’s the story)
Not long after, I found myself embroiled in lively skype and email conversations with @shotgunshack, @itsjina and a few others over how we saw the similarities and differences between the two events. Surely it would be equally inappropriate to blame the victims in either case. Both involved the taking of some level of risk. It seemed there was some similarity. Yet my own initial reaction on hearing of the attack on Lara Logan was moral outrage. While my reaction on hearing of the four Americans being killed by pirates was essentially, “those dumbasses should have known better.”
Fully aware that I now tread on ground that is highly emotional and (perhaps therefore) at times unstable, I’ll share with you for posterity my own thinking on how those two events compare and contrast:
It seems to me that the primary issue is how we perceive, assess, and respond to “risks” and “threats.” Indeed, much of the discussion in the blogosphere around Lara Logans’ situation seemed to center on what “risk”, in particular means. Drawing on what I’ve learned in some of the security and risk management training that I’ve been subjected to at different times, it seems that even outside of the discussion of collective action turning violent and then sexual, the natures of the threats of rape and of abduction/death by pirates are fundamentally different.
The threat of rape, it seems, is almost always there but diffuse and inspecific. Rape can happen in a darkened alley, in a persons’ own living room, on a subway, totally out in the open… And it seems that what escalates the threat of rape into actual commission of the act (especially in a so-called “mob” environment) comes down to some tough-to-pin down, ethereal elements of context and opportunity. Someone can walk through the same stairwell every day with no problem, but then one day something changes – and rape happens.
What I imagine this meant for Lara is that when she first went into Tahrir Square she was not more at-risk of being raped than normal. The facts about her – woman, attractive, etc. – as so many others have argued, were immaterial. I can’t say for sure, but I suspect that attractive Western women move unmolested through that same space all the time. Equally immaterial were the facts of who did the assaulting. I don’t imagine there are any statistics on this, but I’d be willing to bet that the vast majority of Egyptian men (and more broadly, Muslim men, for that matter) go through their entire lives without ever assaulting anyone.
What was important is that in that place at that time the context changed. Ms. Logan was either unaware or unable to get away. She was caught in an terrible “perfect storm” and her being assaulted was the result.
Unlike the threat of rape which seems to condense and evaporate, often unpredictably, from what I understand the threat of piracy near the Horn of Africa is highly specific and constant. Everyone knows the pirates are there and that they prey on everything from privately owned sailing yachts to ocean-going freighters. I’ll bet someone smarter than me could even calculate the risk numerically (maybe Texas In Africa already has…): “Sail a boat between the ports of Aden and Mocha and you run a 72% chance of being attacked by pirates…”
And to me, that is a much more important difference than who went for work versus who was on vacation, who was attractive or not, who was male or female. Lara went into her situation with no reason to assume that things would go as they ended up going. From what I understand, from a security/risk perspective, it truly was random. She did not take more risk than normal (she’s been in more volatile places), and she didn’t do anything particularly wrong from a security perspective. She was quite simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
[Personal note: Many of us have jobs which involve going into dangerous places, and while glamorizing it (being an “adrenaline junkie”) is famously problematic, so is refusing to act. Your job is what it is and you do it. As an aid worker, I personally reject outright the notion that Lara Logan should have stayed home, or that she was somehow unsuitable for danger zone reporting because she is female.]
Whereas the yachters knew that they very specifically ran the risk of being attacked in that place at that time. They made an informed decision, took their chances and paid the price.
Did anyone deserve what they got? Of course not. No one – no one – deserves to be raped or killed. In a better world neither event would have happened. My assessment of what happened in Tahrir Square is now more nuanced than before: It was a terrible event, but at the end of the day Ms. Logan couldn’t have known better. However my assessment of what happened in the Indian Ocean between Oman and Somalia is still pretty much the same: Jean and Scott Adam, Phyllis Macay and Bob Riggle didn’t deserve to die. But they absolutely should have known better.
This might be a controversial thing to point out, but I also think there is a fundamental difference in the purpose for which both of these parties found themselves in dangerous situations.
Journalists often put themselves at risk in order to report breaking news. This is for a “greater good”, namely, sharing important news with people around the world and making us aware of horrible atrocities (or rare good news). There is a selfless element to reporting, similar to those who put themselves on the line as peacekeepers or relief workers, that justifies people putting themselves in risky situations.
This is not the same for daredevils who put themselves in these situations by choice. I’m not sure under what circumstances the group of yachters found it necessary to sail off the Horn of Africa, but they chose to put themselves in that situation in a selfish rather than a selfless way. (Or maybe I’m totally wrong and they had a good reason to be there, I’m not sure.) To expand on that, I saw one of Owen’s tweets the other day that said “Are we sure we want to rescue Brits who were making money in despotic regimes? Don’t we want to discourage that in future?” – good point. This is like when people travel to countries that are on the diplomatic “don’t go there” list, get in trouble, then need a helicopter to bail them out. We would be more ok with it if they were there to serve a greater purpose, but you just really wanted to go backpacking in afghanistan? Not ok.
Anyway, as I said, possibly a controversial viewpoint and I’m sure there are many specific cases where the lines are more blurry than this. But in general, I see it as a very big distinction between the two events you mentioned in this post.
/long comment!
Regarding the sailors; possibly they might still be alive if the US had not been so gung ho (reportedly they were shot by the pirates during the firefight). Would have been better to let a Somali taxi driver have a whip around;
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/piracy/8133313/Paul-and-Rachel-Chandler-London-cab-driver-brokered-release.html
I wouldn’t analyse Brits in Libya too much; we were in the same boat in Bahrain, on reflection. I knew what was going on there, even back then.
As for journalists getting into trouble; these days, it seems some journalists try and make news, rather than report it.
Some do though undergo genuine deprivation for their art; see Sean Langan’s work, for instance.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3559933/Sean-Langan-was-tested-to-the-limits-but-he-came-out-smiling.html
As for Ms Logan; the “R” word has been bandied about, but she was not Raped. I;m not sure who said first she had been raped; initially it was “sexual assault”. Her injuries amount to being pinched a lot (not bitten as initially reported) and poked with a stick. Oh, and she was called an Israeli spy.
She was roughed up, assaulted, but I see no sexual motivation. Journalists get roughed up all the time in trouble spots; when reporters go to Iraq, Afghanistan, London, they’re there wearing full flak jacket and helmet. The reporting was generally hopeless; to see descriptions of 100,000_ people shoulder to shoulder, as some sort of family picnic-cum rave was clearly ridiculous. I have no idea what was said to spark off the mob; there were other female western journalists there who reported no problems. Maybe they stayed out of trouble.
She was as naive as the 4 sailors out in the Indian Ocean. Or, if I was really cynical, she wanted to create news, which I know is an outrageous comment.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-12510289
Interestingly, some expats in Libya reported being holed up in their Tripoli apartment, while various government thugs turned up. First time, one of the guys opened the door; he got punched and robbed. After that, one of the ladies staying answered everytime, and they were left alone.
I agree with you that the yachters did not deserve to die just because they were foolhardy. But I have heard govt security people get a bit fed up when holiday-makers get themselves into trouble requiring intervention by armed forces. This kind of intervention can be pretty expensive so they’d feel a bit better rescuing a kidnapped journalist than a leisure-seeker. Ref also Australian govt complaining about cost of rescuing solo yachtsmen who get into trouble trying to race through the southern ocean.
However, lack of sympathy for the Adams et al may also involve a certain amount of the politics of envy. Do rich people who get themselves into fatal trouble doing things only rich people can afford to do deserve our whole-hearted sympathy?
Fantastic blog. I only wish there was as much international outrage when local women were raped. I’ve written about the lack of outrage over this on my own blog http://wp.me/p105uH-7G
I’m just going to stay on the fence and hope that there was a better world where women didn’t have an extra risk attached to them exclusively for the fact that they have vaginas, and where all irresponsible tourists got off with just a scare.
oops, I think I just jumped off the fence there, but if you ask my mom I’m darn sure she’ll tell you that I do not need to be an aid worker, or at least, that I have absolutely no need to go into conflict countries, and more to the point, that as a mother my responsibility lies with my children, and my desire to calm the adrenaline junkie in me is selfish and irresponsible…. so here’s to a world where we all get off with just a warning…
I had even less sympathy for the sailors. Not only were they gambling with their own lives but they were gambling with the lives of whatever soldiers may have been sent in to rescue them; and they were playing with international relations; and they were doing this just for some adventure.
I read this post and was reminded to feel sorrow for their deaths – thanks.