IT’S NOT OKAY!
A friend posted that question on Facebook. I looked at it and wondered, ‘have we ever asked ourselves this question and understood it? Dug dip down to its core and uprooted it for study and examination purposes?’
“Why is it OK to beat your woman/wife?”
I know the notion of why should we even ask such questions when some one is dying from a beating so terrible, and another filing for divorce because the man couldn’t control himself. Why should we waste our brain power thinking about such things even, abuse is abuse and should be condemned and those who do it should die at the stake.
OHH! I am for more than just condemning and staking. I am for hanging by the boobs or balls, while lashing them – Roman soldiers to Jesus style.
But, we need to first understand what the root cause is before we will raid ourselves of human resource. I think we need to find long lasting solutions to the root causes. And NO I am not making up excuses, none whatsoever!
I am talking about things like
- People’s backgrounds. We all grew/grow up seeing different things. Our first examples on how to relate to another person were not the same. Others had the best while others the worst. They can’t even blame their parents because that is what they also grew up seeing. Now it has become a vicious circle of broken ribs and bruised faces in homes, broken esteems and self love. This is all because people know no other way.
- Then there is mental health problems. This is a big one. Our African society doesn’t believe in such things. If you dare mention that you are losing control of your own thoughts and hearing things; you are demon processed, your aunties from the village are calling you back to work on the family ‘airs’ – witchcraft. As a christian I believe many of these are true, but also believe that people need to be paid attention to and offered the help they need when this happens, not discarded to their vices. Because that leads to many with the fear of being discarded, pretending that all is well in public and unleashing their rage at home where hell breaks loose.
- Insecurity is another one. The fear that the loved(wife or husband) one might leave or that they are cheating. Or any other reasons African tradition society permitted as reasons for beating another. These are insecurities that need to be checked. No one has permission to your body other than your self, and at most times if you are harming yourself you are also restricted from it.
- Society! ‘You have to beat(discipline) her to show her that you love her’ Discipline?! This is the worst one. And the way society applauds such a man who does so, a huh! I know a man in my village who got rewarded with a goat for ‘disciplining’ his wife by his parents in law. The anger!
- Religion. I can’t even explain the hypocrisy of men of ‘God’, who interpret the Bible and Quran for others to keep them slaved to their own interpretation of the two books in the different structures of religion.
- Then the people who stay after being beaten. ‘What do you be thinking? That your abuser will change? That you will work at changing them, are you God?’ People who stay in domestic violent marriages are the main enforcer of this evil deed. They display the wrong example to themselves, their children, their friends and relatives ”Even so and so stayed, so I will stay too. After all he is my husband.” God have mercy on you all, for dragging the rest of us in this mud – Gas-lighting effects just.
Gas-lighting is a tactic of behavior in which a person or entity, in order to gain more power, makes a victim question their reality. It is a common technique of abusers, dictators, narcissists, and cult leaders. It is done slowly, so the victim doesn’t realize how much they’ve been brainwashed. In the movie Gaslight (1944), a man manipulates his wife to the point where she thinks she is losing her mind.
All the mentioned can be undone and it requires a strong generation of men and women who are not one sided but looking at both sides and aiming to find solutions. We have a lot of unlearning and learn to do.
So I call upon all the millennials who are disruptive, to disrupt domestic violence and make the future better with great examples.
Patricia, true this practice is real. I have a lady friend in such a relationship. At least the ladies talk. Now there is the other option where men are suffering silently. Because of pride and society norms men are also in abusive relationships. Which ever category one is, it is key that this vice should be stopped.
For it to stop we need to talk more about it, starting condemning and punishing those who do it. We need to get to the source and uproot it out of our society