Zimbabwe's government has used state-sponsored brutality to quash dissent, and women on the front lines of protest are paying a heavy personal price. In an unlit park in central Harare on the night of Zimbabwe's March parliamentary elections, more than a hundred women gathered to sing and pray for peace. In this increasingly authoritarian southern African nation even public prayer is deemed a threat to public security. Several dozen police brandishing batons quickly arrived in tan Land Cruisers and pushed the women into the cars. By the end of the evening 300 women, most ordinary mothers and grandmothers struggling to feed hungry families, were in jail and at least nine had been beaten so badly they required hospitalization.