Assisting Those Overseas

At 5 p.m. on a Saturday night, Rabeea Ahmed ’14 is working on her website when she receives an email from a sexual assault victim halfway around the world.

For Ahmed, the rest of the night will be spent in a back-and-forth that she describes as part counseling session and part suicide-prevention.

Born and raised in Pakistan, Ahmed has run a sexual assault support group for over four years, carrying her work over with her to Harvard.

Trying to exude a sense of calm to the woman on the receiving end of the email exchange, Ahmed retains her composure. Emotionally draining as it is, she says, she left her computer only when the woman on the other end wrote she was going to sleep.

“Sometimes, you have to stay up with them to prevent them from committing suicide or hurting themselves,” she says. “I have not lost anyone yet, but there is that danger, and I take that very seriously,” she says.

The Pakistani woman’s recollections of her sexual abuse were preventing her from sleeping the entire night, Ahmed says. The guilt and lack of support from her family pushed her to considering  suicide, the victim told Ahmed.

Ahmed says her service, 7,000 miles away, provided the victim her sole support system.

On April 11, Ahmed launched a website, speaknowsmileagain.wordpress.com, to help reach out to sexual abuse victims across Pakistan.

She says she drew inspiration from the website for the American organization, Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network.

“Many of the victims that I worked with have never found any site that was Pakistan specific and dealt with the social stigma specific to Pakistan,” she says. “When these victims go to rainn.org they do find help, but it’s not always something specific to their own circumstances.”

So Ahmed decided in the fall to create her own website, which today features posts from anonymous victims and professionals such as psychologists, as well as support resources and contact information.

WE DON’T BELIEVE YOU

“It’s normal.” “Don’t tell anyone.” “We don’t believe you.”

For young women in Pakistan, says Ahmed, these are the first words they hear when they reveal to their parents that they have been sexually abused.

To Ahmed’s surprise, abuse victims included young women and men within her own circle of friends from her native Islamabad—a fact she learned when they began approaching her for help.

“Even though I came from a middle-class background, over a third of my friends had gone through traumatic abuse, but they never talked about it because they were ashamed,” says Ahmed.

Her support groups with abuse victims began with her providing advice, guidance, and consolation to friends of hers who had been abused. Word spread about her service and, since 2007, she has been working with victims from across Islamabad over email.

Because these victims may get in trouble if their families find out that they are asking for help, Ahmed’s website encourages victims to create an alternate email address to minimize the chances of getting caught. It also encourages the victims to remain anonymous for the duration of their communication with members of the website.

Although sexual abuse is not uncommon in Pakistan, cases of assault are often covered up and the victim is often blamed, says Ahmed.

In situations where married women are sexually abused and choose to reveal their experience to their spouses, divorce often ensues rather than support, she says.

In extreme cases, Ahmed says, suicide can result from the victimization and psychological harm that befalls the victims, who is often left to deal with their trauma alone.

Ahmed says that even in the existing women shelters, there is little psychological support—one psychologist is often assigned to hundreds of victims in the shelters.

The shelters leave a cradle outside for women to leave unwanted newborns, says Ahmed.

Ahmed says that in Pakistan, where corruption charges surround the Justice Department and topics of sexual abuse are taboo, “one cannot give the victims false hope of justice.”

“For me the goal is to find a way to let their voice to be heard and to help them survive and heal,” she says.

Until recently, the rape laws in Pakistan required multiple witnesses for conviction, leaving many offenders unpunished.

Ahmed also says that there is a misconception that the lack of reporting of sexual abuse in Pakistan is related to religion.

“The shame associated with the abuse is more of a social and cultural issue that is widespread throughout Southeast Asia and is not limited to countries where the majority holds a specific religious belief,” she says.

TAKING THE INITIATIVE

Ahmed was first exposed to the subject when she was 14 and was selected to speak about sexual abuse with the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights at a conference.

“I asked the commissioner what the U.N. could do about the situation in Pakistan. The response I got was shocking because I was told that ‘It’s a matter of your government,’” says Ahmed.

Ahmed says she realized that the resources for victims in Pakistan were limited.

Ahmed began to hear a number of accounts of sexual abuse—including from her friends.

She soon entered into a dialogue with some of the victims, spawning her own sexual assault support group.

In the summer of her junior year of high school, Ahmed interned at Handicap International in Pakistan.

There, Ahmed had the chance to work with a cluster of organizations dealing with a refugee crisis in Pakistan.

But at the time, she says, these organizations placed little emphasis on fighting the trafficking of women. So Ahmed proposed that they make a separate working group for them—and they were convinced.

GROWING TRAFFIC

Since further development of the website and its resources require money, Ahmed has begun planning a fundraiser at Harvard that she hopes to launch in the fall of 2011.

Currently, Ahmed has Pakistani volunteers working to get her website advertised on primetime television in Pakistan, and she is trying to fundraise to pay for posters to advertise her website at Pakistani universities.

They are also helping her translate the website into Urdu.

A recent Facebook page has already received nearly 400 followers.

The increase in traffic to her website has attracted Ahmed’s friends and former support group members into helping her administer the website and answer emails from abuse victims.

Ahmed says she and her team work around the clock to ensure that no cry for help goes unanswered.

“I personally know of cases where people have emailed larger organizations where they were never replied to,” she says. “In my work, I don’t trade off quality for quantity.”

The classes she has taken while at Harvard, such as Science of Living Systems 17 and Computer Science 1, have helped her, she says, with understanding everything from psychological aspects of trauma to developing the coding for her website.

And as the publicity director for the Harvard Undergraduate Legal Committee, she says she has gained valuable experience as she now promotes her services and her website.

She says her connections at Harvard—including her roommate Karolina M. Dos Santos ’14—have also provided support.

“For every idea Rabeea [Ahmed] presents me, I try to troubleshoot possible problems that could arise and we work together on how to solve them,” says Dos Santos.

“I’m so proud of Rabeea because she is applying the knowledge she’s gained from the classroom to help hundreds of people.”