‘Harem Flogging’ in Sudan Sept 2013 from Anne Enke on Vimeo.

This video of a young woman named Harem being flogged in Sudan was sent to me yesterday. Facebook had taken the video down, due to protests by the men who engage in and support the flogging of 40,000 women a year in Sudan that is too violent.

The hypocrisy of administering this brutal punishment to women in Sudan, and then demanding that it be removed from the global public view on Facebook or YouTube confirms what weak men these guys are in real life. They may wear the blue uniform of Sudan’s public order police, seeking to administer Shariah laws throughout the country, but they are afraid to stand before the world in valour for their beliefs.

The flogging of women in Sudan is misogyny or hatred of women at its worst. At AOC we are committed to exposing the deep and growing hatred of women in Sudan, administered under the ultra fundamentalist umbrella of Islam. This issue is on the front burner again this week, as Amira Osman prepares to return to court in Khartoum on Thursday September 19.

‘Halima Flogging’ September 2013

It’s unclear if the maker of the flogging film is friend or foe to Halima. The thug flogger knows that he is being filmed. As in our earlier flogging video, the men are laughing and the flogger asks “Are you taking this?” The amateur filmmaker answers yes, and the thug with a whip says “Name it Halima’s Flogging”.

My contacts believe that the bystanders belong to the police or are court employees because of the angle of the video showing they are within the courtyard where flogging is performed.

The thug officer who performed Halima’s Flogging repeatedly orders her to “Cover your legs, cover your hair, let us move on.” You see the officer whip Halima’s head, which must be covered and is exactly why Amira Osman is in court on September 19.

Amira refuses to cover her head and would rather be flogged than accept this demand from a growingly fundamentalist regime in Sudan, one that seeks to make women invisible. Amira is due in court about 2am East Coast time, and my friends will be calling me to wake me up with the details, where I will broadcast them on AOC, Twitter and Facebook.

Article 152 in the revised Sudanese criminal code of 1991 defined only in a very vague manner what is considered to be offensive and immoral as a disruption to the public order. In the case of women wearing indecent or offensive clothing, it’s not defined who will decide what warrants a woman’s arrest. The police officer? The judge? Ordinary men on the street? No other aspect of the Public Order Regime has altered the daily lives of Sudanese women like Article 152 of the Criminal Act of 1991 that says:

“(1) Whoever commits, in a public place, an act, or conducts himself in an indecent manner, or a manner contrary to public morality, or wears an indecent, or immoral dress, which causes annoyance to public feelings, shall be punished, with whipping, not exceeding forty lashes, or with fine, or with both; (2) The act shall be deemed contrary to public morality, if it is so considered in the religion of the doer, or the custom of the country where the act occurs.”

The Hisba or Hesba system in which any man in Khartoum can have any woman arrested and whipped for just about any reason is not part of the Sudanese constitution. Rather, the constitution acknowledges Sharia laws as a reference. While the Sudanese government doesn’t organize or employ the Hisba men enforcing what they consider to be Islam’s laws, it doesn’t discourage their behavior either.

Within this context, misogyny against women runs rampant in Sudan, making it a very unsafe place to be a woman. Any man can have a woman arrested and whipped for just about any reason. As Sudanese lawyer and women’s rights activist Lana Mhgoub wrote yesterday about her own flogging:

The method of arresting (women in Sudan) is very humiliating… . He could be having a rough day or her just decided to harass that woman.

I’m working with women’s rights activists in Sudan to tell more stories about the brutal treatment of women under Article 152. We are asking for pictures of the flogged women without showing their faces or using their names. We are asking for pictures of their scars, pictures of their clothes and the words of their stories.

I have also reached out to a prominent Muslim woman filmmaker to join our cause of stopping the public flogging of 40,000 women a year in Sudan. We must record this growing brutality against women in documentary form. ~ Anne