Special Places in Hell

My daughter is talking on the phone. I do not like overhearning anything, but now there is one sentence that sticks into my mind: "It is not easy to be a young woman."

Short, well-formed sentences stick.

Another short statement I have in my mind now is by Nicholas Nassim Taleb: "We are social animals; hell is other people."

Those two sentences combined should result in what Madeleine Albright has said: "There´s a special place in hell for women who don´t help each other."

Finnish teenage school children go to work to learn to know normal Finnish working life. For a couple of weeks time they look around in a workplace and do some petty tasks. Children, their parents and the school look together for companies and organizations to go to.

A couple of years ago there was a case in court in Helsinki. Schoolgirls that had been working in a fashion shop, had become victims of sexual harassment by their middle-aged-elderly employer.

If you know anything about sex, children and crimes you know at least three things: young girls do not want to be touched by old men - and for them ´old´ means two or three years older than they themselves; adult men insist that they are the girls who tempt and seduce them and so the poor old man becomes a victim of them; girls carry the consequences in their mind and in their body for all their life, unless they get appropriate help and therapy, which they may never get, because they feel guilty and hide what has happened. Parents may never know anything about the thing and if they know, they might not believe their own child. Some of the parents avoided this trap and the case got into court.

Why am I telling this to you? It is because of the third sentence that has stick to my mind, because of the words Madeleine Albright has said in Stockholm 24.8.2004: "There´s a special place in hell for women who don´t help each other."

That special fashion shop in the centre of Helsinki is by no means run by child labour. There is regular staff there. Adult women. Do you think it probable that people who have for years worked in the same place do not know what is taking place around them? Do you think they are blind? Do you think they do not understand what they see and hear?

My mind got mixed up and vomited when I read about what had taken place in that special fashion shop. Those adult ladies did not intervene in what was happening.

I have just found a book with the title Helvetissä on erityinen paikka naisille jotka eivät auta toisiaan, the exact Finnish translation of the Madeleine Albright sentence. The book has been written by Liza Marklund and Lotta Snickare (ISBN:951-1-20640-0) The original is in Swedish, Det finns en särskild plats i helvetet för kvinnor som inte hjälper varandra.

If you want to buy that book in Finnish, you had better hurry up. It was published in 2006 and it is already on sale. It means that in a while you won´t get it anywhere.

In Finnish we have a word surkuhupainen meaning that something is at the same time funny and sad, tragicomic. Some of the stories in the book sound like that.

Liza Marklund and Lotta Snickare use examples of our normal, everyday life to reveal how life is made difficult not only for young women, but for all women. This does not mean that men, or anybody else, would always do that on purpose. It just means that the existing social power structures make the unequality producing processes so automatic that it is difficult to detect them. We all are victims of those automatically functioning structures. It is not until we learn to see how things happen that we can change anything. We are lucky to have people like Marklund and Snickare, whose expertise we can make use of.

You´ll enjoy reading the text. But beware - your world will be changed! I do not mean any aggressive change. You´ll just learn new ways of seeing differently many tiny-looking everyday incidents of the normal life, at work and at home, and that will change your whole world. This kind of teeny-weeny learning can beat paths into new worlds.

If I were a novelist or a detective, I would try to find out, which were the reasons for the adults - women and possible men - to not inform anybody about their employer´s doings. Had they themselves gone through similar experiences? Was sex included in their job interview? Did they want life to pay the young girls measure for measure?

Maybe you know Paolo Freire and his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. What we need to learn from Freire is that those who have been oppressed and treated badly, do the same when they get enough power to do that. Those who have been beaten, beat others. Those who have been slaves, take slaves for themselves. Unfortunately there is still hereditary slavery in Africa to prove that, too.

Referring to Freire must not lead to the conclusion that we should be content with what we have. Changing circumstances is not easy, but it is not impossible either. To change anything, we need to understand first what power is and how it works. Marklund and Snickare´s book is an eye-opener. They are the tiny and teeny-weeny little things by means of which our world is constructed and kept functioning with. Change them and you will have changed a lot.

I hope the book will be translated into English as well! So far, www.amazon.com does not recognize the authors.

Let´s keep our eyes open - and dare see!