As details emerge in the case of International Monetary Fund chief and alleged attacker Dominique Strauss-Kahn, my eye is on how his wrecked political clout is getting all the attention. The brutal assault of a hotel housekeeper that Manhattan District Attorney Artie McConnell described yesterday to a judge, who subsequently ordered that the IMF's managing director be held without bail at the Rikers Island jail complex? Not so much.
The IMF leader was (I think it's safe to use the past tense here because it's doubtful he'll re-emerge in politics, regardless of the outcome of this apparently damning case) a very likely French presidential candidate. In fact, he was widely seen as the Socialist Party's best hope for unseating French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Within hours of the story breaking, comments about a "Sarkozy setup" flooded the comments sections of online news reports, and soon emerged as their own articles.
As this story develops, it's all about Strauss-Kahn, instead of the woman (whose name is rightly protected) who accuses him of brutally attacking her. At her workplace. This woman, who was cleaning a $3,000-per-night hotel suite, is a human being. She deserves compassion as the global punditocracy conjectures about what's going happen to the IMF without that French "rockstar" at its helm.
My work focuses on the trafficking and exploitation of immigrant domestic workers, many of whom worked for Diplomats and employees of the World Bank and IMF. Of course, I'm reading the news coverage with interest. Over the past days, I have been watching how HER story is covered, in light of her occupation, ethnicity (reporters say that she's an African immigrant), and status as a crime victim. Usually, housekeepers are treated as silent, anonymous machines of the household, hotel, or office building, if they're noticed at all. But surely a vicious attack would shed light on the fact that this is a real person... right?
While I mostly work with household workers in private homes, the life of a hotel chambermaid is very similar. Being a housekeeper at a hotel (or anywhere else) doesn't exactly put you on equal footing with the wealthy and powerful when you are in "their" space. So when you're stuck in a bedroom (or private household) with them, what are your defenses?
Statistics about the frequency of sexual assault of hotel maids are difficult to find, but here's what I know about New York City's household workers, from a 2006
report by the Data Center and Domestic Workers United: "Thirty-three percent of workers experience verbal or physical abuse or have been made to feel uncomfortable by their employers. One-third of workers who face abuse identify race and immigration status as factors for their employers' actions." What we do know about the conditions of hotel housekeepers is that immigrants comprise the majority of that workforce, as do women of color, and that their workplace is dangerous on its own, let alone with the additional risk of sexual assault. Rushing to keep up with demand, hotel housekeepers have an injury rate 40 percent higher than workers in the overall service sector.
I have many other questions too. The two that come to mind immediately are:
1- Do Europeans and North Americans just assume that being subjected to sexual aggression is a given if you're a woman working as a maid in a wealthy man's home or hotel suite?
2- Why would anyone assume that a working-class woman would lie about a sexual assault to get money from a settlement?
I can't fathom why anyone would believe these things, but here we are in the comments section in Vanity Fair, the New York Times, and ABC News where every fourth word is "setup" and where the maid's getting very little empathy. I don't think the people writing these comments or news stories are malicious. It's just a symptom of the way household workers are treated in the United States and around the world. They are servants, and therefore -- for hotel guests and the people who can afford to have them clean their homes -- barely human.
Strauss-Kahn's lawyer Benjamin Brafman
said that he represents "good people who have gone astray... that doesn't mean their lives should be destroyed." The themes of many of the reports and commentaries I have read center around the feeling that it would be a tragedy for this politician's career, and his removal would put the global economy at risk.
Because this "just" involves a hotel housekeeper, there's not a lot of conjecture about the tragedy she'll face as she tries to put her own life back together. Even if the reason that reporters aren't covering her story with humanity is that they want to respect our legal system's promise of "innocent until proven guilty," they're missing the broader point: this storyline isn't uncommon. No one is talking about the countless other household and hotel workers who have endured sexual harassment and assault at the hands of wealthy (or even middle-class) men around the world.
Why? Perhaps because it's supposed to be a fact of life that poor women's bodies are collateral damage of war, prizes for global accomplishment, or simply a means to an end. Women who are household workers or "servants" are even more vulnerable to dehumanizing sexual assault than others because their relationships are inherently unequal to their employers. We don't have scientific studies of the relative risks, but we have hundreds of testimonies of household workers who have been trafficked, exploited, and assaulted, and our common sense that tells us there are many more out there.
Of course it isn't uncommon that famous/wealthy men who assault women usually dominate the news. What will Strauss-Kahn do next? Even when their conduct is deemed improper without being illegal, there's a lot of hand-wringing over how prominent men such as former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, former New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, and former Sen. John Edwards, will suffer for their indiscretions.
Poor guys.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn apologised to his country for a sexual encounter with a hotel maid which he said was a "moral error" he would regret all his life, and vowed to stay out of the Socialist Party's 2012 election campaign in France.
In his first interview since a New York sex assault case derailed his IMF career and wrecked his chances of running for president, Strauss-Kahn said he was angry with himself for what he called an ill-judged but consensual liaison that had let down his country and hurt his family.
"It was a moral error, and I am not proud of it," Strauss-Kahn said in an interview on TF1's primetime Sunday evening TV news programme, watched by millions.
"I regret it, infinitely, and I don't think I am finished with regretting it."
Sounding repentant but also defensive over the rush to judge him as a criminal for a private act he said involved no violence, the former International Monetary Fund head said he had "lost everything" over the incident.
Once seen as the left's best chance of winning power in the April 2012 election, Strauss-Kahn returned to France on September 4 after a New York prosecutor dropped attempted rape charges related to his nine-minute encounter with a Sofitel hotel maid.
Dressed in a dark suit and sober midnight-blue tie, with a tightly buttoned shirt and neatly combed hair, his appearance on Sunday was a far cry from the dishevelled, unshaven prisoner paraded before cameras in handcuffs after his mid-May arrest.
He was also a different man from the poised, erudite IMF chief and ex-finance minister who has addressed the world from hundreds of high-profile podiums over the years.
Dry-mouthed, nervous and clearly uncomfortable, he joined a string of powerful men from former US president Bill Clinton to ex-congressman Anthony Weiner to publicly apologise for a sexual wrongdoing. He told TF1 interviewer Claire Chazal, a friend of his wife Anne Sinclair, that he was a changed man.
'Heavy price'
"I have paid heavily for it. I am still paying for it. I have seen the pain I have caused around me and I have reflected deeply," Strauss-Kahn told Chazal, who also seemed ill-at-ease, keeping her arms tightly crossed throughout the interview.
The attempted rape charges were dropped late in August after doubts arose over the hotel maid's credibility.
Strauss-Kahn's lawyers had said from the start that the brusque encounter with the Guinean maid in his luxury suite was sexual but consensual and non-violent.
Strauss-Kahn, 62, added on Sunday that it had not involved any payment.
Rather than gloss over the scandal and focus on restoring his credibility as a world economic authority, as many had expected, he spent most of the interview expressing his regret and defending his innocence, speaking only briefly about the euro zone crisis.
"What happened was not only an inappropriate liaison but more than that, an error vis-a-vis my wife, my children, my friends and the French people," he said.
Strauss-Kahn took a strongly defensive tone at times, holding up a copy of the prosecutor's report and stressing that it ruled out signs of force during the encounter, which saw him seek oral sex from the maid moments after she entered his room.
Known in France by his initials DSK, Strauss-Kahn told TF1 he would take time to reflect on what to do with his career.
"I wanted to be a candidate (for the election). I thought I could be useful. All that is behind me," he said. "I don't think it's my role to get involved in the (Socialist) primary."
"I am going first of all to rest, spend time with my loved ones, take time to think. But my whole life has been dedicated to trying to be useful for the public good and we will see."
Fading persona
Strauss-Kahn's arrest set off a wave of muck-raking of his extramarital dalliance and sparked soul-searching in France over a tradition of hushing up sexual escapades by politicians and other public figures.
A group of feminists gathered outside TF1 before the interview, brandishing signs reading "What's seduction for you?" and "DSK, sexual deviant, King of the chimps".
Strauss-Kahn's political allies have cheered his release but the Socialist Party has moved on and is holding its primary selection contest without him. Party leaders have sounded lukewarm over him taking a role in their 2012 campaign.
An Ifop opinion poll in Sunday's Journal du Dimanche newspaper found that 53 per cent of those surveyed want Strauss-Kahn to retire from politics.
Other polls have found that two-thirds of French want him to stay out of the left's campaign and not hold a position in a future left-wing government.
Strauss-Kahn still faces a civil case in New York over the hotel incident, and has been questioned in France over a separate sexual assault accusation dating back to 2003 by a woman 30 years his junior.
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