POLITICS: In Chavez case, women again silenced for the ‘struggle’

The nation’s still reeling from revelations about the late Cesar Chavez, the much-lauded Mexican-American civil rights hero and leader of the United Farm Workers.

His routine and long-term pedophilic sexual assaults of girls as young as 13 and 15 are now known and deemed credible.

Of course, these facts have only come out more than 30 years after his death in 1993. However, even his co-leader, the equally respected Dolores Huerta, has confirmed that Chavez raped her — but for the sake of the struggle, she chose to keep quiet.

Like men, women have been expected to cover up men’s sexual crimes for the sake of the Dream, the Cause, the Party, or the Family.

Some do so to protect their own ambitions — or simply to keep a job in order to feed their children. Many women do so in order to remain employed.

Women have even been expected to cover up their own rapes — for gain, out of shame, or fear.

Huerta has only just now, in her nineties, and long after Cesar Chavez died, admitted that he raped her–and preyed upon underage girls and young women over the course of his life.

Sadly, this is not unusual in the context of political movements, including those that purport to fight for the poor and downtrodden.

We knew that Daniel Ortega, the Left-wing revolutionary leader of Nicaragua, had been sexually forcing himself on his stepdaughter, Zoilamerica Narvaez Murillo, from the time she was 9 years old. When Zoilamerica went public with these charges, her mother sided with her husband (typical in incest families) and exiled her daughter from the family and from the country.

We also knew that many American feminists defended President Bill Clinton when numerous women credibly accused him of sexual assaults. They did so for many reasons, including their loyalty to the Democratic Party and for the sake of keeping abortion legal.

Women, like men, are often complicit in enabling male sexual crimes. I wrote about this in my book, Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman. Many women choose loyalty to the Family or to the Movement over and above loyalty to vulnerable young girls.

There is one other, rather new, protected class of men in the West — namely the Pakistani grooming gangs in the UK, who for nearly two decades got away with kidnapping, grooming, drugging, raping, and trafficking the most vulnerable girls in multiple British cities.

Police, social workers, lawyers, judges, and the general public (including the johns) turned a blind eye to this human-rights atrocity.

When I was interviewing prostituted women for my work about how routine and murderous the violence against such girls and women really is — I was doing the research for my book Requiem for a Female Serial Killer — every poor soul told me the same thing: That this is what men do — at least the johns who pay them for sex.

What are We the People prepared to do about this eternal epidemic?

Ridding humanity of male sexual violence is something that has never been accomplished or even undertaken. Denying the facts is much easier.

Denialists claim Hamas did not gang-rape Israeli civilians on October 7; or that rape as a weapon of war has not really been perpetrated in Rwanda, Sudan, the former Yugoslavia, and for that matter, in every war zone on earth. No, this father has not been raping his daughter. The girl is a crazy liar.

There are some heroes among us who have the courage to speak out, but most people cannot afford to be heroes.They simply want to survive, get by, live to see another day.

But the abuse of power, mainly by men, can only be stopped this way: first, by rescuing those who cannot rescue themselves; and second, if and when men and women take a collective stand.

Until both men and women are prepared to risk everything for the sake of protecting the victims of sexual violence, nothing can change.

Phyllis Chesler is an emerita professor of psychology and the author of 20 books. She is currently finishing a book titled: The Complete and Utter Palestinization of American Feminism.

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