Someone forwarded this article to me. Its from The Chronicle Newspaper. I would like to know what you think about the way Traditional leaders in Malawi view domestic violence and the role of women. I am not trying to be feminist I'm just curious!

Wife Battery: A Necessity To Sustain Marriage?
BY GREGORY GONDWE

A husband knocks-off from a tiresome labourer’s work and reaches home
pregnant with expectations to be soothed with a hot bath and possibly a
cup of tea before supper, all provided by the wife.
But two hours since the arrival, there is still no sign of the wife and
the man’s temper reaches boiling point and so many things start making
cycles in his mind.

“Is she having an affair?” he quizzically thinks, “Or has she just
become big headed that she can’t respect me anymore?” he keeps
wondering.

In the husband’s mind, a conclusion is there.
He is in no compromising mood, whether the delay was due to a long
queue at a place she draws water from or whatever reasons she may give,
the bottom line is that she has made the marriage catch a disease.
Now the husband, who is the ‘head of the family,’ has also to be the
doctor and he starts preparing on how best he can administer medication
so that this disease is cured once and for all.

The moment the wife steps inside the house, the husband unbuckles his
belt and starts beating her with it.
This is one of the many forms of what is known as wife battery, which
is a gender-based act of violence.

It is meted out under the premise that a wife is inferior to a man, an
inferior sex that is supposed to dread under the husband’s wake in
conformity with her position in a family, which borders around
subordination and subjection.

The case like that one above is many of its kind that is happening
daily in the society.
Prompted by this, the Centre for Human Rights Rehabilitation (CHRR)
through its Community Safety and Empowerment Programme conducted a
Survey of Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices on community perspective
on Gender-Based Violence (GBV) in Malawi.

Women reported during the study that they were battered for petty
issues such as being suspected of having an affair with another man,
cooking late, jealousy and late coming from the market or water points.
Shockingly the survey discovered that most women view this as a normal
practice in marriage since the community has accepted it saying:
‘Mankhwala a Banja ndi Kumenya’ implying that battering is necessary to
sustain marriage.

These findings are in line with an assessment of Domestic Violence in
Mchinji district by the Women’s Voice conducted in 2002 in the
district’s all traditional areas.

The study reported that men in Mchinji justify wife battery as part of
cultural beliefs such as paying chimalo, (paying marriage dowry),
‘Kumenya ndi mankhwala a Banja’ and that man is head of the family.
The survey report says one chief in Dedza even admitted that some forms
of Gender-Based Violence is legitimate.

“Pali nkhaza zina zofunikira m’mabanja” the chief was quoted as saying
buttressing many people’s belief in the subordination and subjection of
women in marriage.

The cases of violence especially against women go unreported and the
study says information on domestic violence cases, which is the
commonest of GBV form in the country, is very scanty.
However, statistics from a study by Women in Law in Southern Africa
(WLSA) Malawi- show that 86% of gender violence reported involved
domestic violence.

The 2002 WILSA study conducted at providing baseline data on the extent
of wife battery in the country including knowledge, attitude and
practices on domestic violence discovered that out of 329 men, 28%
accepted of having beaten their wives while out of 402 women, 44%
accepted of having been beaten by their spouses.
58% of the women who admitted to have been battered by their husbands
mentioned beer drinking as influencing the beating.
Other reasons included unfaithfulness, denial of sex, jealousy,
misunderstanding of dowry and lack of knowledge on human rights and
gender issues.

Of the 794 respondents in the survey, 47% were men while 52% women.
The study also shows that some women who are victims of battering, are
at fault.
Out of 353 men, 92% did not believe that women are always at fault and
26% of 424 women believe that they play a role in the breeding of
battery in a family.
The findings of a 1999 GTZ study demonstrated that domestic violence is
the most pervasive form of violence against women in Malawi.
Wife battery is not the only form of Gender-Based Violence the country
has to contend with.

Sexually related abuses including jealousy, the survey found out, is
one big issue that results in family disputes and violence.
The women complained that they are shouted at or beaten when they come
late from drawing water or when the man finds bicycle tyre marks at the
house.
Reports reveal that it is mainly insecurity and lack of respect for the
person’s rights, which causes men to behave in such a way and it is
only the changing of men’s attitude that could help improve the
society’s battered image.

Then there is economic exploitation where a lot of respondents
complained about economic exploitation of spouses, which predominantly
exists in both matrilineal and patrilineal systems of marriage.
In most cases men usually do not accompany their spouses to the fields
during the farming season and regard their wives as servants who have
the duty of working for them in the fields but are not entitled to a
share of the farm produce.

The survey report cites its experiences in Chitipa, one of the eight
districts where the survey was conducted, where some men deliberately
marry more wives so that they work in the farm for them in order to
generate more income.

Property grabbing was also reported as a common form of GBV as it was
discovered that it commonly occurs when a man dies resulting in the
deceased’s relatives grabbing the property from the widow and children.
The study discovered that the practice was high in Karonga and Mangochi
due to ignorance of laws that relate to women and child rights.
“This coupled with the dowry culture in Karonga which is interpreted as
selling a woman, fuels much of the roots for property grabbing,” it
says.

In matrilineal district of Mangochi, the majority of victims of
property grabbing are men because the Chikamwini culture empowers the
wife to own property amassed by the couple.
While in Chitipa, the most commonly mentioned abuse emanating from
cultural practices is wife inheritance, a practice, which forces women
who have lost their husbands through death to remarry to relatives of
the deceased.

In the same district, divorce, rape and cases of wife detention are
very high due to the patrilineal system of marriage.
Wife detention is also a system where a wife is detained at her
father’s place when the husband has not paid the full dowry.
In Dedza and Salima, cases of Fisi are very high and there are two
types of Fisi that were reported during the study.
One type is practiced when girls have reached puberty and at this point
elders arrange for the girls to sleep with elderly people to remove
their virginity in what they call ‘Kuchotsa Mantha’ so that girls are
not afraid of sleeping with men.

The other fisi type is one that involves men who cannot bear children.
The husbands arrange for a wife to sleep with a friend or another man
so that she can conceive and the agreement is said to be airtight
secrecy between the fisi and the couple.

“All these practices predispose women to HIV/AIDS,” say the findings.
The Police records for the period of 1990-1999 show that the total
registered cases of sexual assault against women increased from 500 in
1990 to 12, 000 in 1999.
Between 1997 and 1999, media reports average three cases of violence
against women per day.
According to WLSA study, the reported cases of gender-based violence in
the media demonstrated that rape constituted 37%, incest 18%,
defilement 14%, murder and femicide 9%, wife battery 7%, abduction 3%,
infanticide 2%, suicide 1%, and prostitution 1%.
While between 1995 and 2000, statistics of cases of violence against
women handled by the Society for the Advancement of Women (SAW)
revealed that there were a total of 169 cases.
Of these 69 were of property grabbing, 28 were cases of domestic
violence.

Whatever survey can bring whatever statistics and whatever wrong a
spouse commits, it is out of question to believe that wife battery is a
necessary condiment to cement marriage