December 8, 2017

By Ahsley Harrell

...I spent three weeks in the country, (click here) dodging unwanted advances and hearing stories of frequent, unpunished sexual assaults. It was the most threatening environment for women that I had ever navigated. If somehow you still don’t recognize the sweeping scale of sexual assault, if you think women across the world don’t need to fight for each other with everything we have, try visiting Lesotho, where holding a man accountable for sexual violence is almost impossible.

In my work as a guidebook author, Lesotho certainly isn’t the only place I’ve dealt with sexual aggression. In Bali, men asked me to pose for photos and grabbed me close. In the Dominican Republic, I couldn’t stroll in the capital without being hissed at. In San Jose, Costa Rica, a man approached me in a residential neighborhood, smacked my butt and ran.

I shrugged it all off, preferring to think of these men as worthless outliers. In retrospect — and especially after what I discovered in Lesotho — this was wildly optimistic.

The epidemic of sexual violence against women in this nation of 2.2 million people is arguably the worst in the world, but it is rarely reported. The problem, women’s rights advocates say, begins in childhood. Girls are taught to be compliant, to quietly endure suffering and to serve men....