Nasze ciała to pole bitwy - NYT

Portrait of Ricsy (not her real name), 19, outside her home in Choloma, Honduras, one of the most dangerous cities for women in the world, on April 11, 2019. Her sister, who was beautiful and tall and had long hair, was found dead among the sugar cane when Ricsy was a child. She saw her body on TV, her pants pulled down. She’s not sure how old she was when her stepfather began raping her. “I remember he got there when I was five, and then I turned eight, I turned nine, 10, 11, 13. I was 13 and then I had the baby,” she says. She told her mom about the abuse, and said she would commit suicide if it continued, but her mom didn’t believe her. It was only after Ricsy became pregnant with her son that her mother took her claims seriously, but the stepfather stayed in the house for two more years – he would beat up her mother, too, and Ricsy isn’t sure what he did for work, but she knows that he used drugs and “that’s all he did, and when he didn’t have any money for his vices then he would go out and hurt people.” Abortion wasn’t an option. Legally it was off the table, and Ricsy grew up hearing abortion was wrong. “I went to church and the pastor had said if we had an abortion, it’s like we are killing someone,” Ricsy says. When Ricsy was 15, her stepfather was murdered. That brought relief, but not resolution. “Sometimes I just look at my children and tears just come running down my face,” she says. “Mostly when I see the boy.” When she looks at her now six-year-old son, Ricsy says, “I just look at him and I just remember everything that I have gone through.” A few months ago, Ricsy was raped by a stranger on her way to work at a shopping mall just a few blocks from her home, grabbed as she passed her son’s elementary school. Her boy keeps asking why she doesn’t walk him to school as much as she used to, and why she cries when they pass the building. She doesn’t have an answer. She goes to church for solace, and the pastor knows something is wrong – he is the only person, Ricsy says, “who asked me why I am not the same happy person I used to be.” She tells him she’s just busy because, she says, “I feel ashamed.” Besides, she can guess what he'll say. "The first thing he would say, he would say, let’s pray for that person so God may put his hand on him,” Ricsy says. She isn’t sure she has it in her to pray for the man who raped her. For now, she gets through the days with her son and her three-year-old daughter. On the days she feels strong enough to take her son to school, “We hold hands, and we sing worship songs,” she says. On one of their walks, “He asked me, ‘Did you pray today?’ And I said yes. And I asked him, did you pray today?’ And he said yes. He said, ‘I prayed for all the sadness to leave your heart.’” Ricsy isn’t sure that she will ever escape this sadness, so deep that she sometimes finds herself curled in a ball underneath her son’s bed. But she may escape Honduras. In her 19 years, Ricsy hasn’t been safe at home and she hasn’t been safe on the street; she can’t walk through the market without a sense of hypervigilance, like someone is following her. Ricsy was a sick kid, which meant she was forced to drop out of school at 7, and now as an adult she cannot read or write. She’s poor, and so leaving would mean walking, and that brings its own perils. But whatever hazards lurk along the way feel less daunting than life in Choloma. “My mom said the journey was very dangerous,” Ricsy says. “And I told her, ‘I know mom, but I can no longer continue to live here.’” Violence against women is endemic in Central America, and in Honduras, it has a particularly high cost: Emergency contraception is outlawed, and so rape survivors can't prevent pregnancy; abortion is criminalized in all cases, and women who end pregnancies can face close to a decade in prison. The patriarchal culture that fuels violence, advocates say, is the same one that upholds some of the most extreme restrictions on reproductive rights in the world. All of this creates a climate in which many women see no option but to flee, risking their lives to travel to the United States.