we are alone

How often are debtors arrested across the country? No one can say. No national statistics are kept, and the practice is largely unnoticed outside legal circles. “My suspicion is the debt collection industry does not want the world to know these arrests are happening, because the practice would be widely condemned,” said Robert Hobbs, deputy director of the National Consumer Law Center in Boston.

Debt collectors defend the practice, saying phone calls, letters and legal actions aren’t always enough to get people to pay.

“Admittedly, it’s a harsh sanction,” said Steven Rosso, a partner in the Como Law Firm of St. Paul, which does collections work. “But sometimes, it’s the only sanction we have.”

Taxpayers foot the bill for arresting and jailing debtors. In many cases, Minnesota judges set bail at the amount owed.

In Minnesota, judges have issued arrest warrants for people who owe as little as $85 — less than half the cost of housing an inmate overnight. Debtors targeted for arrest owed a median of $3,512 in 2009, up from $2,201 five years ago.

Those jailed for debts may be the least able to pay.

In this regard, John Swinton, who worked at The New York Times and The New York Sun and in various writing gigs from the 1860s to the eve of the 20th century, reminds us that it’s always been about selling copies, that this business of news is just that. Swinton, on a night of drinking with his colleagues in 1880, was asked to make a toast to the “independent press.” He stood up and famously answered: “There is no such thing, at this date of the world’s history, in America, as an independent press. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dares to write your honest opinions, and if you did, you know beforehand that it would never appear in print. I am paid weekly for keeping my honest opinion out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for similar things, and any of you who would be so foolish as to write honest opinions would be out on the streets looking for another job. The business of the journalist is to destroy the truth, to lie outright, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of mammon, and to sell his country and his race for his daily bread. You know it and I know it, and what folly is this toasting an independent press? We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes. We are the jumping jacks, they pull the strings and we dance. Our talents, our possibilities and our lives are all the property of other men. We are intellectual prostitutes.”

That’s really saying something coming from two centuries ago.

Jeanne is 27, with a round face that makes her look younger, but she struggles on to the stage. She finds walking difficult, ever since she was tied to a tree and gang raped for many weeks, had surgery to repair the damage, went home and was raped again. She became pregnant during one of the attacks and was forced to give birth in the company of the militias; the baby died. Jeanne finally escaped to the Panzi hospital in Bukavu, at the eastern edge of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She has had repeated operations on her desecrated lower body. She looks small, shy, defeated.

But then this woman, a victim of the biggest horror story of modern times, in one of Africa’s largest countries, steps up to the microphone and starts to speak.

“When you look at me, what do you see?” she asks, with the bold delivery of the born orator, the preacher, the leader. “Do you see me as an animal? Because you are letting animals treat me like one. You, the government, if it was your children, would you stop it? You, you white people: if this violence was happening in your country, would you end it?” She speaks with the kind of fury and focus rarely seen in western politics. Hundreds of other survivors of sexual violence in the audience cheer wildly.

Jeanne (who has requested her last name be withheld for her protection) is not the only speaker here at the opening of City of Joy, a centre for survivors of rape in Bukavu. There is the founder, the New York playwright, author of The Vagina Monologues and activist Eve Ensler. There is Obama’s ambassador for women and girls, a prominent congresswoman, someone from the UN. But it is Jeanne who steals the show. And this is the premise on which the centre is founded: that even the most traumatised and brutalised people need not be mere passive recipients of foreign aid, but can in fact become political leaders.

For more than a decade, eastern Congo has become infamous as the “rape capital of the world” and the “worst place on earth to be a woman”. The UN has confirmed these facts. Half a million women, perhaps many more, have been raped since 1998, and in particularly brutal ways. And one response has been the building of City of Joy, a haven where survivors of gender violence who have healed physically (not always straightforward) live for six months and are educated. It is the product of a shared vision that the women don’t just need help, they need power. “Eve asked us what we wanted,” says Jeanne, the orator. “And we said: shelter. A roof. A place where we can be safe. And a place where we can be powerful. That’s what we now have.” Jeanne, and women like her, hope to change Congo for good.

For 40 years, the French government has been fighting a secret war in Africa, hidden not only from its people, but from the world. It has led the French to slaughter democrats, install dictator after dictator – and to fund and fuel the most vicious genocide since the Nazis. Today, this war is so violent that thousands are fleeing across the border from the Central African Republic into Darfur – seeking sanctuary in the world’s most notorious killing fields…