Gender Based Violence

Gender Based Violence: The Tragedy of Nigerian Woman

Nduka Uzuakpundu

Culture, politics and government could still be a lot friendlier to women. Although women as veritable home-makers, and widely–acclaimed custodians and transmitters of culture, constitute more than 50 percent of the industrious labour force of most (developing) countries, there appears to be some form of ingrained, if unstinting, conspiracy by both politics and government, which has made it seem as though women – in what may appear as an uncritical acquiescence at group disempowerment – are the architects of their subordinate position in society; that they are there to serve, never to be heard. And it appears, still, that years of constitutional reforms – and international gatherings – well before the Beijing Conference in 1995 – aimed at advancing the cause of women, have been bootless. If women are still not under-represented in the positions of leadership – as cabinet members of government – they are far removed from such bodies as the legislature, where they could influence the enactment of laws to the making of a new society friendly to their tribe. And until the present situation changes, said Mrs Roli Raliat Daniju, Executive Director, Ajegunle Community Project (ACP), a Lagos-based non-governmental organisation, some of the ills that plagued women – no thanks to the male-dominance of society – would persist. One of such ills, which, she pointed out, the other day, was gender-based violence: a rampant phenomenon in Nigeria, and which cuts across every class, ethnic, religious or language barriers. Gender-based violence, Daniju told journalists in Lagos, “is violence inflicted on women because of inequalities between the male and female genders. Such violence includes female genital mutilation, domestic violence verbal and psychological abuse of women or girl children; violence against non-combatant women, and women in conflict situation, rape and sexual abuse, and social and legal discrimination against women and girl children.” The problem, as the Nigerian experience has shown, is an extremely serious one, to the extent of its persistence, despite its ban by Section 34 (1) of the 1999 Constitution, which guarantees the rights of all against torture and other in human or degrading treatment. World Health Organisation statistics show that 6,000girls and young women are subjected everyday to excision, circumcision, infibulations or even introcision. The prevalence rate could be 50 percent or more. The practice is said to be declining in large urban centres. Still, there is no basis for government’s ineptitude in the face active gender-based violence against women. Such inaction smell of bald treachery, especially when the state is a party to such international instruments as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, the Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discriminations Against Women (CEDAW), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACHPR), the Rome Statute, the International Conventions on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and, amongst others, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Although its gravity has been hidden for too long, for lack of proper monitoring system, the understandable reluctance of victims of gender-based violence to report their experience and the failure of women organisations in the past to speak out and organise against it, still remain a task for the womenfolk – and their allies amongst men, who are genuinely interested in bettering the lot of women. Hundreds of thousands of women are brutalised in their homes and on the streets each year. A similar number of girl children forcefully undergo female genital mutilation. A countless lot of women and girl children suffer verbal and psychological abuse. Daniju observed that in the past few years, women had been victims of violence in communal and ethno-religious conflicts such as those in Warri, in Delta State and Kaduna and Plateau States.

Matters have not been helped by a regime of laws, and socio-cultural practices that discriminate against women and the girl child and deny them equal access to education, credit, property and wealth. Besides, numerous girl children are coerced into marriage, often with men the age of their fathers. A lot of women in many parts of Nigeria, are under compulsion to keep bearing children even at the expense of their health, while those who cannot have children suffer various forms of oppression, humiliation and abuse. As Daniju pointed out: “Thousands of women have died from injuries sustained during female genital mutilation. Lack of access to proper medical attention during child-birth has caused the death of many others. Many have contracted disease from rape, and many girl children have suffered damage to their sexual and reproductive organs during childbirth at a too-early age. “Bad as these are, they are only the tip of an ice-berg. For, as Mrs Olusola Akai, Project Director at ACP noted, victims of gender-based violence could suffer a reduction in self-esteem, even to the extent of committing suicide. The consequences of this could be quite enduring, especially where there is a genuinely palpable absence of protection for the fairer sex. For a victim of rape, while the fear of contracting such diseases as HIV/AIDS, having unwanted pregnancy or miscarriage, are quite obvious, the psychological consequences of sexual violence, Akai said, “manifest . . . in a wide range of behavaiour, which often take a long time to unfold. The victim may experience fear of death, anger, guilt, depression; in some instances, interpersonal relationship may suffer.” Such a victim needs a special attention, either by a counsellor or social psychologist. Violence against women has subjected millions of Nigerian women to a life of oppression, exploitation and abuse – reducing them to second-class citizens in many respects. A lot of them merely live from day to day, and neither have control over their destiny, nor are able to explore and develop their personal and social potentials. This tragedy has been the result of violence against women not only in Nigeria, but in most African countries. In order to help the situation, the ACP contests for the minds of school children, who are nearing adulthood, with an eye to disabusing their minds of male superiority, the denigration by women via violence against them, and exhorting them to see, and press, the compelling beauty in building a society where women are treated humanely, if not equally as men – in the interest of peace and orderly progress of human development.

But, more than that, there is a processing need, predicated on an informed desire for social justice, to melt certain retrogressive and archaic cultural norms and expectations about the behaviour of women. And that includes, as Akai said, the culture that socialises women to be risibly obsequious and men to be aggressive. In addition, the role which society would seem, implicitly, to have given to both sexes often causes dominance of one over the other in sexual ties. The laws that govern peaceful co-existence do not, in most instances, applaud forcefully fixed, if unjust, inequalities amongst its prospective beneficiaries. It is the lingering disdain for such laws – as society insists on pushing the givens of cultural stereotypes – that have made most societies (in developing countries) less stable.

But because women have a special role to play as active stakeholders in national development, it is well advised that various aspects of archaic and retrogressive culture that have tended to hold women back from constructive outings in government and politics should – in consonance with the Beijing Platform for Action (BPFA) – be discarded. In effect, there is a need for a genuine campaign for women both at home and public life. Such a campaign should advocate the support of both rural and urban women, royal fathers -- whose words are more of peremptory directives – and an aggressive, but sustained lobby of elected deputies at the municipal legislature. At the local level, non-governmental organisations – including university women associations, ACP, CLEEN Foundation and Project Alert on Violence Against Women, which recently received a generous financial support from the European Union to carry out an extensive assignment on awareness about gender-based violence in Lagos State – need to team up towards making the campaign against gender-based violence a roaring success. *Nduka Uzuakpundu is a Lagos-based journalist.