Anthony Boutros

Until last year, rapists in Lebanon could be exonerated if they married their victims. A number of women’s rights groups successfully fought for the repeal of controversial government penal code 522, which allowed rapists to escape justice by marrying their victims.

It was “definitely a win,” says Lebanese-American student Anthony Boutros, but he cautions that because of the complexity of the penal code (statutes similar to 522 remain on the books), and the dominating role of religious doctrines in the nation, the repeal is viewed by some activists as only a “partial success.”

“Religious bodies have the power over what we call ‘personal status laws’ in Lebanon,” says the junior sociology, international studies, and public health major. “So, everything from birth to marriage to divorce and death—anything that relates to your personal life—is governed by religious courts and religious bodies, and the government does not exercise its constitutional power to provide civil alternatives.”

Boutros refers to Lebanon as a “weak state,” and with research funding from three different Hopkins grants—the Aronson International Experience Grant; the Undergraduate Islamic Studies Research Grant; and the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Summer Grant—he visited the country last summer to interview leaders of more than a dozen gender justice groups about how they operate in this political environment.

As he began field work, Boutros says he was struck by “the innovative and diverse strategies that civil society organizations are employing to make a push for progress.” He began cataloging these approaches and the structures they are trying to overcome. One activist Boutros interviewed spent two years creating a civil society political party to compete against sectarian parties in elections. Another activist was working to increase gender justice within the sectarian parties. In addition, an academic activist was working through a business school to create sexual harassment laws and rules, not within the government, but in the bylaws for corporations.

“That way, employees who experience sexual harassment can sue their company, based not on the law of the land, but the laws of the company,” Boutros says. “There really is an incredible range of strategies at work. Lebanon’s imposing structures can make it seem hopeless to accomplish any kind of change, but civil society organizations are trying to make a dent.”

Through the lens of prison uprisings, Bridget Carolan ’20 studies how society’s most powerless women can ignite political change. She is in Ireland this semester, visiting jails including Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin, above.

In the summer of 1974, some 200 inmates at New York State’s Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for Women staged an uprising and took over parts of the prison. Known as the August Rebellion, it was in response to the inhumane treatment of an inmate who had initiated a lawsuit against the facility. Nearly six years later, and on the other side of the Atlantic, inmates at the Armagh Women’s Facility in Armagh, Northern Ireland, began refusing to bathe or work, and a few went on a hunger strike. This was during the Irish Troubles, and the women were protesting their loss of certain rights after having been reclassified from political prisoners to common criminals.

Junior political science and international studies major Bridget Carolan has a deep interest in incarceration policy and sees “a lot of parallels” between these two events. Her ongoing research project has her learning all she can about these actions with the larger goal, she says, of examining “how the most powerless women in society can ignite lasting political change” while incarcerated.

Both of these uprisings at women’s prisons were overshadowed by larger events at men’s facilities, such as 1971’s Attica Prison Riot in New York State’s Attica Correctional Facility, where 43 people were killed. “There is very little press coverage of the August Rebellion,” Carolan says. “They took over areas of the prison and took hostages, but there were no casualties on either side.” The Armagh actions, meanwhile, happened simultaneously with a much larger hunger strike at a men’s prison in Northern Ireland where nine strikers died. There were no fatalities among the women strikers.

In the United States, it appears women inmates used litigation more effectively than men. Indeed, after their uprising, the Bedford inmates won a class action suit that instituted better guidelines for when and how inmates are sent to solitary confinement or mental health facilities. Carolan anticipates spending years studying this topic with the ultimate goal of visiting where the uprisings took place and interviewing some of the surviving participants.

If the struggles of incarcerated women are often missing from the history books, they are getting some play in our living rooms through the Netflix hit Orange Is the New Black, a women-behind-bars series that just completed its sixth season. Carolan says this is a good thing: “Even with the problems that can come with popular media portrayals of prisons, it gets people thinking about what it’s like to be a prisoner and how it’s nearly impossible to hold your captors to any sort of standards when you are completely at their mercy.”