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Nicholas Kristof has a recent op-ed titled, “Is Delhi so different from Steubenville?” which makes the case that sexual assault is an international and universal epidemic. He writes,

Gender violence is one of the world’s most common human rights abuses. Women worldwide ages 15 through 44 are more likely to die or be maimed because of male violence than because of cancer, malaria, war and traffic accidents combined. The World Health Organization has found that domestic and sexual violence affects 30 to 60 percent of women in most countries.

In some places, rape is endemic: in South Africa, a survey found that 37 percent of men reported that they had raped a woman. In others, rape is institutionalized as sex trafficking. Everywhere, rape often puts the victim on trial: in one poll, 68 percent of Indian judges said that “provocative attire” amounts to “an invitation to rape.”

Americans watched the events after the Delhi gang rape with a whiff of condescension at the barbarity there, but domestic violence and sex trafficking remain a vast problem across the United States.

He’s right–sexual assault is a global problem that is largely ignored or mishandled by leaders both here and abroad. Kristof is known for making sweeping statements backed up with gruesome details to paint a picture of women as victims. And while his white savior complex goes deep, I don’t fall in the full on anti-Kristof camp, because I do think his writing and work have pushed important and hard to face issues into the mainstream–even if the framing leaves something to be desired.

His global homogenization of women’s experiences is, I imagine, an attempt to register these tragedies as something that happens here as much as it happens elsewhere. Reminding us that sexual assault happens everywhere and that our reaction and treatment of it is not much better than the “less civilized 3rd world” is an important and necessary point to make. But it runs the risk of overshadowing specific differences between the cultural contexts within which sexual assault occurs.

As an American-born South Asian, graduate school educated feminist, I am well equipped with tools for effective cross-cultural comparison. We’ve learned from the mistakes of our Western feminist predecessors not to assume we understand the experience of women in different societies and to avoid universalizing our path to feminist enlightenment as the “liberated women” here to save our downtrodden third world sisters. I understand the importance of holding our words accountable in the face of hegemony, racism, colonization and cultural relativism. Read More »

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