Unfortunately, Dushanbe was not my last experience with the Tajik cops. As I stayed in Dushanbe to deal with some stolen items and recover from an extra gnarly bout of diarrhea, Detti continued onward by bicycle alone. I planned to hitchhike to catch up with her in Kulob in a few days, 180 km away.
On her second night camping alone, she sent me a message “a strange man is squatting next to my tent.” It sounded like a pretty typical occurrence in Central Asia, as strange men would squat by our tent quite often, and usually were just curious about where we’re from, what our salaries are, and what the fuck we’re doing sleeping outside “where there are wolves and bears”. After some time, the strange man left and Detti settled down to go to sleep, only to find him returning an hour and a half later with a large flashlight in hand. She politely asked what he wanted, but it was terrifyingly obvious even though he couldn’t speak English to reply. With the look of an animal about to pounce on its prey, he unzipped the tent door and began to aggressively grope her all over, face, legs, breasts, and made the universal sex symbol with his finger and thumb in a circle and the other finger going through it. She screamed and he raised up his flashlight, threatening to hit her. Finally, after several panicked minutes of pushing him out of the tent and fruitless efforts to talk him out of raping her, she pointed at her (fake) wedding ring while yelling in Russian “I have a husband, my husband, my husband!” The man immediately got up and left. She called me right away, but as I was 100 km away, all I could do was advise her to pack up everything, find a friendly looking family, and ask to stay with them.
When I reunited with Detti, she wanted to go to the police. Sexual assault (and, more generally, complete negligence of the fact that women are humans) is a huge problem in Tajikistan and she wanted to shine some light on this ignored fact. We were pretty confident that the Tajik population had never heard anything about sexual assault before, and we also knew that, as tourism is a main source of income for the country, the government really cares about the opinions of tourists. The president (dictator, really) has labelled 2018 the “year of tourism”, so, maybe Detti would actually be listened to. She wanted the public to understand that what this man did is wrong, and the police could help us with that.
The police in Kulob seemed to be much more organized than in Dushanbe, and immediately put us in a car to drive to the site. In the car with three cops, two of them seemed to understand her story after the first recount, but the third simply couldn’t figure out how on Earth a married woman was camping on her own (we told them that we’re married). He had clearly never even considered the possibility that a man would allow his wife to be outside at night without him. The conversation went like this, in Russian,
“She was alone?”
Yes.
“You mean, alone?”
Yes, she was alone.
“All alone? Only her in the tent?”
Yes, she was alone.
“You weren’t there?”
No, I was in Dushanbe. She was alone in the tent.
“So, she was alone? You’re sure?”
Yes, she was 100% alone. I was in Dushanbe, sick, and she was camping alone in Dunghara. She was alone. I was in Dushanbe. She was alone.
“Alone?”
Yes. She was camping alone. I was not there. She was alone.
“Why weren’t you there?”
I was in Dushanbe because I had horrible diarrhea and had a theft to deal with at the police station there.
“You let your wife sleep alone outside?”
Yes. She is a human. She can survive on her own. She is self-sufficient.
“Why weren’t you with her?”
I was in Dushanbe, sick.
“So, let me get this straight, she was alone?”
YES.
And it went on like that for a while, then he’d talk to the other cops in Tajik for some time, and turn back to me to confirm that she really was alone. When we finally got to her camp site after riding in the sweaty 100°F car for an hour, we met what seemed like the entire Danghara police department there. Detti described what she remembered of the man, but, in such a dark and traumatizing situation, it’s hard to have a clear memory of his appearance. Especially when you’re in a new place where everyone appears similar to you. The police did an amazing job, though, and within half an hour had gotten a confession out of one of the guys working in a nearby field. He has a wife and three kids, dropped out of school in second grade, and apparently his line of thinking was “well, she wouldn’t be camping alone if she didn’t want to fuck me, she would be married and taking care of her kids.”
We went back to police station to sign the report, but, of course, this took the next 6 hours. For a while, we sat there, congratulating the cops who found the guy, giving them our personal details for the report, and waiting for them to slowly type everything out.
Then, they asked what we wanted to happen to the perpetrator. A bit taken aback (isn’t that the judge’s job to decide?), we took a minute to consider, and responded that we want it to be in the news. We wanted his whole town to know that what he did is not acceptable, and we wanted the rest of the country to see that actions like this will be punished and to think about why it’s not okay. We didn’t want the guy to go to prison, because prison would only hurt his innocent family and make him more angry. His punishment will be living with the shame he put on his community.
Sure enough, a couple hours later, a camera crew from the national news station showed up. Detti told her story in English, I added a few lines in Russian, and the station presumably translated everything to Tajik and aired it the next day. We hope, that by spreading this story as far and wide around Tajikistan as we can, people will stop and think about why women should be able to make their own decisions, and that just because a woman appears to be unmarried doesn’t give men the right to abuse her.
The camera crew left and we stayed in the station several more hours as they got a local translator to come in and take Detti’s statement directly from her, wait a while, take my statement, and wait some more. We were given an opportunity to talk to the perpetrator, via the translator, and asked him some questions to try to gain a better understanding of what was going through his mind.
“Why did you do this?”
I didn’t know she was married, when I saw the ring I left.
“So what if she’s married or not. Do you think it’s ok to rape an unmarried woman?”
I don’t know.
“Do you love your wife?”
Yes.
“How would you feel if somebody did that to her?”
Bad. But I didn’t know this woman was married.
“What about your daughter? She’s not married. What if someone assaulted her?”
She’s 5.
“And if she’s not married when she’s 31?”
[no answer]
“What did you tell your wife when you came home that night?”
I stayed in my shack on the field, didn’t go home.
“Detti was screaming NO GO AWAY, why did you continue?”
[no answer]
After such a stressful event, combined with the utter lack of hygiene and nutrition in Tajikistan and lack of sleep, Detti was feeling very sick. She woke up several times throughout the night, shaking, with torrential diarrhea, and feeling feverishly weak. At 7 am, the cops came knocking on our door to take us out to breakfast. The smell of the expired hot dogs for breakfast made Detti instantly gag, dry heave several times as there was nothing left in her stomach, and she went to lay down in the car while the cops finished their breakfast. It was clear that she needed to be in a hospital, but she wanted to go back to Kulob and go to the hospital there, closer to where we had left all of our belongings and simply to escape from Danghara and the terrible feelings associated with it.
The cop promised that he would take us to Kulob as soon as breakfast was over, but instead took us back to the police station, where we were told we’d have to wait another 2 hours (8 hours in Tajik time). Detti was clearly not in a state to wait 8 hours at the police station, so, angrily, I begged the cops to release and just take us back to Kulob, demanding that they stop treating us like prisoners. In order to let us go, Detti had to sign a statement saying that she forgives the man. They never told us what would happen next, but, at that moment, she was more intent on getting to a hospital than worrying about the police. We hope that our time was well spent and that this story will spread around Tajikistan and open minds to the idea that women are independent humans.
We spent the next night in the Kulob hospital, where we were given a VIP room with an ensuite toilet and shower (though, of course, there was no running water that day), and the head doctor even took our bikes and gear from the hotel to the hospital in his personal van. The doctors treated us like royalty, gave Detti 3 IVs and medication to help her recover, and it was by far the most comfortable accommodation we had in all of Tajikistan.
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