Featured Post: #Rape is About Power, Not Dress Style by SAMIRA SAWLANI (@samirasawlani)

One would think that a youth affairs minister in any country would be an individual who could be held up as an example to all those youngsters that he or she serves.

According to a Daily Monitor article, Minister Kibuule (a Ugandan Minister) suggests that when a rape is reported, the police should assess how the victim was dressed.

Should it be found that she was wearing miniskirts, tight jeans, bikinis or other ‘indecent’ items, the aggressor should be freed. This trend of ‘victim blaming’ has become a sickness which seems to have taken over the world.

For many years civil society organisations, the media and survivors of rape have spoken out about the treatment by authorities and the police, of women who report a rape.

Rose, (name changed), is 32. Weeks before she was due to get married, she boarded a taxi home at 9pm. as she alighted and began the two-minute walk to her house, three men followed her and began making inappropriate remarks.

One put his hand on her mouth and pulled her into the bush on the side of the road. What followed was a harrowing ordeal where she was pushed to the ground, the first man forcing himself upon her, his weight making it impossible for her to move while his hand covered her mouth.

Poem on #Rape: For Her by Fatou Wurie (@theFatoublog)

FOR HER

This poem is for the girl who like a missing tooth was invisibly visible, 

Left on the sidewalk to cascade heated tears so hard it made sun skip shine for the day. 

This poem is for the girl who is too thick, so slick, to thin, to smart, to pretty, too un-pretty too colored, too black, too white, too brown, too woman all too soon. 

This poem is for the girl whose front tooth like the future that lies between the past and present stood gaped and half full. 

This poem is for the girl whose color was too dark like the marmite spread her mama would saturate on white bread, 

Her mahogany skin not wanted

Shunned in the nicest way possible 

Exotic but not normal Tolerated but not honored

Accepted but not loved

This poem is for her bleached dreams. 

- 

These words are for the girl whose body was too supple and refined

a girl’s soul cased in a woman’s body 

as he rubbed himself on her insiders 

softly at first, leisurely as he pleasured him self-only.

Kneaded her tits like bread-dough,

divided her legs like the second coming of Moses between red waters for his pleasure-only.