New Feminist Book Breaks the Silence on Male Torture of Women

Abandon hope all ye who enter here

Dante

Ordinary people do not know that everything
is possible.

David Rousset – L’univers concentrationnaire, 1946

Years ago at school, my course mates and I were assigned to read two novels by the feminist writer Dacia Maraini. In the first, she recounted her rape. In class discussions, two boys said, “We don’t want to read that” (my mum later commented, “Rejoice over the fact they didn’t masturbate to it”), to which I retorted, “We don’t want to live that.” In the second book, the reader discovers in the end why the main character is deaf and mute: she was a victim of incestuous rape as a girl.

This literal and symbolic silencing of women is what Linda MacDonald and Jeanne Sarson explore in the book Women Unsilenced: Our Refusal to Let Torturer-Traffickers Win. Two public health nurses in Nova Scotia, Canada, their lives change forever when Jeanne received a phone call by a woman named Sara.

Sara is tortured by her close family and by anyone else her family invites or sells her to. Sara says she is “terrified by her decision to live,” as if puzzled by the realization that she’s not obeying her victimizers till the very end. As Linda and Jeanne begin a healing journey with Sara, they discover a world few others are willing to look at because it’s our own — a world no one wants to read about.

…

This review was first published in July 2021 on 4w.pub, edited, as always by Dana Vitalosova. You can read the entire article in the link below. You will notice there is a mistake in the citations on the website, the correct version should read as above.

https://4w.pub/book-review-women-unsilenced-our-refusal-to-let-torturers-traffickers-win/

You can also listen to these interviews with the authoresses of the book, Jeanne Sarson and Linda MacDonald, for the FiLiA podcast:

#155 Women Unsilenced: Feminists speak out against torture
#191 Discussion about the book Women Unsilenced: Our Refusal To Let Torturer-Traffickers Win