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Fredrick Qaphelani Mabikwa Successful Solutions
THIS past week saw the end of the “16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence”. According to the 2010/11 Zimbabwe Demographic Health Survey (ZDHS), gender-based violence is still a challenge.

The report states that one in four women reported that they had experienced sexual violence and in nine out of 10 of the cases, the perpetrator is the woman’s current or former husband, partner or boyfriend.

One in three women aged 15 to 49 years have experienced physical violence since the age 15.

Musasa Project recorded 454 cases of gender-based violence in August alone at its Harare office. These are reported cases, how many go unreported?

Many reasons have been forwarded on why men beat their wives or partners. In a lay research I recently conducted, just discussing with fellow men why they beat their wives, I was shocked to discover that some men still do so in the name of tradition.

This is not for the simple men, but even highly educated professionals still beat their wives in the name of upholding certain traditions and values.

A local reseacher, writing in 1989 stated that the traditional position in Shona or Ndebele cultures is that wife beating is an appropriate way of correcting a woman’s behaviour.

Some men still believe in some traditional sayings like “kurwa ishamu dzerudo” (fights oil the marriage). The husband beats the wife to show his love for her as he feels it is part of his marital obligation as a husband. This notion is so engraved in some men to the extent that those who don’t beat their wives are not seen as “real men”.

It is believed that a “real man” must regularly beat his wife and children to instill discipline in the family.

A colleague of mine (a degreed professional) once said he had gone for three months without beating his wife and feared she would lose respect for him.

I asked how he would get a good reason to beat her up if at all he has to beat her and he responded saying a man cannot fail to find a reason to beat his wife.

He said if a good reason doesn’t avail itself, one could beat her for serving you a meal that is too hot. I was shocked and told him that I had never beaten my wife in my 20 years of marriage.

He told me that “chances were very high that my wife didn’t respect me and she did as she pleased in the house”.

My colleague further said it is this “Englishness” (not beating the wife) that had destroyed many marriages. This is a professional who thinks that those men who don’t beat their wives are trying to adopt Western culture.

For him an “African” man should beat his wife for no apparent reason but just to assert his authority.

The issue of running family scripts also comes in. Another man I spoke to said his grandfather had four wives and beat at least two of them every week.

His father also had two wives and he beat them every week. Because his polygamous grandfather and father did it, he is obliged to keep the family script running by doing the same.

To him, this wife beating is inherited, it is passed down in the family, from one generation to another. There is need for all sectors of the community to educate our fellow men about the need to break bad family scripts. You cannot inherit bad manners just because your grandfather and your father did so.

In some cultures young men are even instructed to make sure that they beat their wife soon after marriage so that she knows from the offset that he is in charge and will beat her if she misbehaves.

Beating is part of the induction into the new marriage. The beating is done to “stabilise” the marriage and is seen as an initiation of the wife into the marriage.

So for some cultures, the beating is still seen as normal as long as the man doesn’t use fists and dangerous weapons. The belief is that, for the marriage to run smoothly, the beatings are not meant to be frequent so as to make them a culture, but they are also not supposed to be too spaced, lest the wife forgets “who is in charge”.

With some traditions the man beats his wife because he feels ownership of the woman and the children. He owns his wife because he paid lobola for her and he cannot afford to have her misbehave because she has a price tag.

In other traditions, especially in rural set ups, when the man goes out for a drink and comes back late at night, his arrival is announced by the wailing of the wife being beaten.

As he gets to his homestead, he must assert his authority by attacking the wife to remind her that he is back and is still in charge, even in his drunkenness.

Alcohol does not cause wife beating – this is a myth. The beating is preconceived, even when the man is sober, the wife is still battered.

Wife beating is an unnecessary drain on health services and is a drain on police and court time. It can end in serious injury and death.

It is a bad example for children and spoils family life. It is important for men to realise that things have changed. We cannot continue to live in the dark ages, sticking to traditions that have been overtaken by events. Today, wife battering is a crime like any other assault. The days when it was a matter for the family and community are slowly leaving us.

Wife beating is now dealt with by police and the legal system. While it is natural that settlement of domestic violence should start at family level, it has however become apparent that the family conflict resolution processes are just “pain killers”, the beatings are not healed and they have not guaranteed that men stop the beatings.

The men are always brought into family “courts”, they temporarily apologise to the wife and family and go back to their old ways.

The family is slowly becoming powerless in helping the battered woman, hence the need for women to be empowered to take the legal way.