By LUBEGA EMMANUEL
A woman’s scream pierces through the quiet night in one of the neighbourhoods in a Kampala surburb. All of a sudden there is silence,one might think they just had a bad dream. Only for residents to wake up the following morning and to their shock, a dead woman’s body lies in a pool of blood in her bedroom. Her husband is nowhere to be seen. Two days later his body is found hanging from one of the trees in a bush just a few kilometres from his in-laws home. But a note found in his pocket reveals that he took his life because he suspected that his in-laws were planning to marry off his wife to a rich man who is reportedly ready to pay the dowry that he has for long failed to deliver.
This is just one of the many sad incidents that raises the debate about the numerous issues related to domestic violence where in most cases women are the primary victims while children suffer the consequences. The issues can be reflected upon from cultural, legislative to judicial perspectives. Surely, in modern social order, it is the government that has to step in and slavage the situation. Unfortunately this has not been the case.
As women advocacy groups and civil society prepare for another week of activism against domestic violence in the last week of November beginning the 25th, it emerges that Uganda which is a signatory to various international conventions regarding the fight against this vice, there is apparently no law that protects women from domestic violence.
Uganda ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 1985. In addition, under Article 33 section 3.2 of the 1995 Uganda Constitution, women are accorded "full and equal dignity of the person with men" and prohibits "laws, cultures, customs or traditions" that undermine their welfare, dignity or status. However, like in the above incident cultural issues to do with dowry and bride price appear to be one of the reasons that cause women to suffer domestic violence. Some of the men who pay it have been heard to brag that they have bought the woman, she one of his property. A woman especially in the African setting is still looked down upon as a sexual object whose role in society should be to bring up children and manage household chores and anything that goes wrong is blamed on the woman including misbehavior by the children. Even among the so called civilized families, it is the woman to pay the house-help’s wages. This is the irony. How can we expect women to bring up a better society if we despise them and deny them the opportunity to when legislators and the judiciary ignore their plight by failing to pass into law or implement those passed that are aimed at protecting the woman? There is rhetoric that when you empower a woman you empower a society and of course the opposite is what we experience.
It is in this light that some organisations, among them Amnesty International have indicated that there are certain customary laws and practices concerning land ownership, marital customs and child custody norms that conflict with CEDAW and women's constitutional rights. For example, marital rape is not recognized under the Penal Code, since consent to marriage is interpreted as consent to sexual activity under customary law. The organization argues that “domestic violence including marital rape may only be dealt with under the lesser criminal charge of assault which carries with it a lower maximum sentence of up to five years imprisonment and does not deal with other forms of domestic violence, including sexual and psychological violence”.
Several bills have been drafted to address the issue of domestic violence but to reasons associated with male dominance of the parliament, they have always been trashed or delayed in what the women folk consider to be deliberate move to perpetuate their suffering. The domestic relations bill was tabled in December 2003, but was shelved in 2005 after it came under attack from both legal and parliamentary affairs committee members and the public.
In 2006, President Yoweri Museveni was quoted declaring that the bill as"'….not urgently needed'" and debate was halted. However, following a mission to Uganda in March 2008 by the African Women Leaders Project (AWLP), an 18-month initiative by the Club of Madrid to support women leaders in four African nations including Uganda, President Museveni reportedly made a public call for its "speedy passage"
Even the domestic violence law enacted in 2010 largely remains misunderstood ven by the judiciary and it is taking the effort of civil society and development partners to educate members of the justice, law and order sector JLOS right from the police, state prosecutors, magistrates, judges and the prisons about how to implement this law.
Statistics from the Uganda Demographic and Health Survey of 2006, over two thirds of women were described as vulnerable to domestic violence. Most of them were harassed by their partners when they beat, pushed, dragging, forced them to sex, arm twisted, threatened, insulted and choked. Although this trend has gone down after the passing of the law in 2010 in urban areas, rural women continue to suffer more violence. In the same vein, uneducated women suffer more violence than their educated counterparts. But one will be shocked to learn that up to six out of ten women agree that male partners are justified to beat them.
However, one encouraging development among the poorest communities in Uganda in Apac district is when men in the area declared that they will never beat their women and anyone who does so will be punished by community members. This was after a Bernard Van Leer funded project managed by Private Sector Foundation Uganda PSFU took them through a sensitization program that explained to them why domestic violence a major cause of poverty among them.
If I am to outline the consequences of domestic violence so as to influence legislators and the JLOS segments to support in the fight against domestic violence, they would include all forms of child abuse that compel children to go to the streets, engage in child labour and prostitution, get defiled and infected with sexually transmitted diseases including HIV/AIDS, early marriages and teenage pregnancies and malnutrition. Furthermore, alcoholism and drug abuse among both men and women are partly as a result of domestic violence when they attempt to get rid of the stress they suffer. This culminates into crime and social violence as many are unable to hold their anger nor tolerate them. The many youth and adults we witness engaging in riots find this as an opportunity to vent their anger on to innocent members of the society alongside destroying their property.
Even among those believed to be civilized and educated members of society, acts of corruption on their part point at ‘poor upbringing’ which is largely as a result of domestic violence even if it was at psychological level. It is for this reason that they are insensitive to what pain they cause others when they steal funds intended for service delivery programs among them health, education and infrastructures like the recent case of the Mukono- Katosi road.
Instead of discussing and passing the many bills and laws to fight corruption, child abuse and general crime, let the country invest more in protecting society against domestic violence and everything will fall into place. As for some cultures that disfavor women, they should be abandoned all together.
The author is an MA student at the Department of Journalism and Communication
- Log in to post comments
