A few weeks ago, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testified with the United States Senate in order to inform the public about Brett Kavanaugh’s actions in high school. She broke hearts and related to a lot of people nationally, and I’m sure internationally, with the sharing of her story of assault. Living in the US, I’m highly judgmental of the situation and have been drowned in news coverage as well as social media discussion on the topic.
With little to no control over the nominee at this point, there were many arguments circulating. Some were that Kavanaugh shouldn’t even be in the running, other had arguments about when a woman’s accusation could be taken seriously, and others argued about politics and blamed the respective parties for trying to take each other down.
I wondered how other countries are seeing this debacle and newly appointed Supreme Court Justice. My first thought, although ignorant and prideful, would have been that other countries are just dealing with the same issues but in different ways so no one would be judging the US for accusations against high members of society. The answer is a little unclear, because it’s not cut and dry, but the most important country to be taking notes from this entire situation might be the United States themselves, more so than anyone else.
We need to do this, and looking back into history, we could have done it better a lot. The US takes pride in being a melting pot, while rejecting immigrants in modern politics. We pride ourselves on breaking off from Great Britain and forming our own army, expanding and taking control, while not giving appreciation to those we took the land from. During Roosevelt’s presidency we prided ourselves on flaunting our military power yet not using it, but have inserted ourselves into just about every middle eastern conflict in recent history. More recently, maybe in the same light as immigration issues, we compare ourselves to other countries and say ‘women are just better off here’. Saying this we ignore the fact that women are paid roughly 79 cents to the mans dollar, 10 million women are the victims of domestic violence every year, and women are more likely than men to be in poverty.
In searching for other people’s points of views, from foreign countries specifically, I found a Washington Post Article that did just this. The comment that surprised me most, again out of ignorance, was that from a lawyer from Ghana. Nana Agyei Baffour Awuah said, “People would have asked for him to be rejected, and I can imagine that it would have been a cross-party consensus,” shedding a little light on the fact that even a third world country can have higher standards for government officials. In countries like China and France people mentioned their apologies to Ford but also mentioned things along the lines of needing a public, full investigation, and the parties needing to stop their battles against one another and needing to concentrate on bettering the country. Banu Altunbas, a Turkish humanitarian, mentioned it would be hard to compare Turkey and the US because of the different cultures and contexts; which was my main concern.
Regardless of point of view or opinions on the largely publicized issue, there was still no in depth investigation. Dr. Ford and the other women who accused Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, and Kavanaugh himself were not interviewed by the FBI; so no real conclusion can be drawn about the situation because there is unfortunately no hard evidence. It’s also worth mentioning that no matter what countries, or if they even, take notes from this predicament it’s possible that women will never be on the same pedestal as men. For centuries upon centuries men have been given opportunities and advantages that women have not been given, so even if equality is given, we may be looking over the historical disadvantages.
The United States most importantly needs to use this as a time to reflect, although other countries could too. I say this with crossed fingers, but we can’t be like this forever, right? Women hopefully one day won’t be second class citizens...
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