I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when discussions about
domestic violence pops up. Everyone in the room is against it. The men would
never lift a hand to their better halves. And the women would not stand for
such treatment, if he dared lay a hand on them.
The knee jerk reaction is to look closer into your drink
because you know, or have heard, how so-and-so is the “heavy weight champion of
his home”, the sound of his car makes everyone in his house break into a cold
sweat. As for her, she has been married coming to 20 years and her fondest
memories are not from her relationship. There is the aberration – because we
are a patriarchal society, the man on who violence is meted out by his wife.
But to see them in public and the way she dots on him you wouldn’t know his
torment.
And what about the violence meted out on the children, justified by the old say “Spare the rod and spoil the child”? Children are living in terror, to be seen and not heard. We bark at them, quick to reach for something to hit them with at the slightest provocation. This is done for the convenience of the parents or the teachers. It is much easier if the kids are “well behaved” than dealing with their unique individualities...
Several things happen to kids brought up like this. Violence
is seen as normal recourse to imparting discipline on their own kids, because
it was done to them and to their spouses because they saw their parents dishing
it out.
Or on the other side of the pendulum the parents who have
come out of such violence, determine not to do it to their own kids and go so
overboard as to not impart any disciplinary control, apart from violence, on
their own kids with detrimental outcomes.
Meting out physical violence doesn’t take much intelligence.
On the hierarchy of power, physical violence is at the lowest rung. The
perpetrator can ensure compliance, but this is given grudgingly, the victim can
often do his thing once the beater looks the other way.
It’s an inefficient way of enforcing ones will. Isn’t it
funny – or not, how the victim keeps getting beaten for the same thing over and
over again?
I have seen figures which show that at least half of Ugandan
women in a relationship have ever experienced domestic violence and about that
number live in fear of their current partner or most recent partner. A
horrendous statistic but I shudder to think that it may even be understated. As
these kind of crimes often go unreported.
It’s hard to say whether domestic violence is on the rise or
not.
One way I think, to help reduce domestic violence is to make
more widely known the wider definition of it, beyond beating of family members.
We need to acknowledge the domestic violence that is not
physical.
He swears he has never touched his wife. And he is true to
his word. But the mental torture he puts her through – dismissing her as a
person, rubbishing her professional achievements, criticizing her running of
the house, putting her down among family and friends, he might as well have
been using her as a punching bag. And the other way around.
By publicising the wider definition to include psychological and emotional violence, physical violence, the extreme form of domestic violence may be reduced. And we can get to working on reducing the other forms.
Hopefully the violator would begin to suffer some cognitive
speed bumps before he gets to physical abuse and maybe stop before then. But
even for the victims, they would recognize the other signs of domestic violence
that precede physical abuse and hopefully have a better reaction time to events
or walk away altogether. Easier said than done of course.
The #MeToo movement, where women are coming out years after
the fact to report powerful men’s patterns of abuse shows why this is
important. Ignorance of what constitutes domestic violence today will not
redeem one 20-, ten or even five years down the road.
It’s a complex subject. Or is it? If we lived by the golden
rule “Do unto others as you would like done to you” would we even be having
this discussion?
