Victims through the ages
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The Year of Violence on Women is approaching its end; and without trying to make an evaluation, I am making an effort to present a bird’s-eye view of discrimination against women including the aspect of violence. Violence on women is a universal issue. Although the extent and nature may differ, there is violence on women throughout the world. That is because the world is predominantly patrilineal and, whatever the level of development, the decision maker is the male majority.
It can be said with certainty that the world has been ruled by males, with some exceptions of dynastic rulers where there was no male descendant, until the middle of the 20th century. The first female head of government was seen in Israel in the second half of the 20th century, followed by India, Sri Lanka, the UK, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Germany and many more states towards the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries. In some countries, women have simultaneously been elected both as head of state and head of government.
Occurrences of women being head of government are seen more often in the developing countries than in the developed ones. However, there have been some effective women heads of government in the developed countries too. Britain’s government was headed for over a decade by the iron lady, Margaret Thatcher. Germany has now had a powerful head of government. But most of Western Europe and the US have had no female head of government. The US had almost elected a woman president in the last election.
There are various kinds of violence in society. The most obvious and visible kind is physical violence where the victim gets physically hurt. This is often done to maintain dominance by the violator as a person, as a class, as a religion, as a race, or as a sex. Such violence may be repeated with regularity to maintain the superiority of the violator, or else the victim can rebel. A more damaging kind of violence is mental or psychological violence. This type of violence also occurs on the basis of class, religion, race, sex or personal vendetta. A more subtle kind of violence is segregation in terms of treatment to people on the basis of religion, race, sex, class and so on. This applies more often to official policies of the state or society at large. A discriminatory pay structure between races, sexes or classes is one example.
Violence has always taken place towards the weak. In this sense, women have been victims of violence from the earliest period of recorded history. Women are called the weaker sex. The whole socio-cultural fabric in each society is built around this myth that women are weaker than men. They conceive the baby, nurture it in the womb for 10 months and nurse the baby for a longer period by breast feeding. While these attributes are gifts of nature, men have exploited women on that ground by calling them their weakness. Marriage has made women the weaker sex. In most societies, the bride is expected to be a virgin. There is no such requirement for men. If there is conception out of premarital sex, the girl is the victim. (This has decreased in Westernised societies, but not completely gone away. In traditional societies, this is not at all acceptable.)
The most direct form of physical violence on women is rape. This is found in both developed and traditional societies in greater or lesser degrees. While physical torture is the same universally, psychological torment is more acute in traditional societies. In a traditional society, women who have been raped are considered to be morally depraved and not acceptable in respectable families. There have been cases where the wife has been raped in front of the husband. In such cases also, the husband has rejected his wife because she has slept with another man! This is a greater violence than the physical act of rape because the rejection factor has social sanction. Society does not punish the husband for his action.
Another common form of physical violence is wife beating. Wife beating is very widespread in traditional societies. Although the extent may be lesser, it is also seen in developed societies. In traditional societies, what is worse is that wife beating is not treated with a rigorous sense of justice because of two factors. First, such cases are very rarely reported because the wife is too timid to report against her husband for various reasons. And second, even when the case is reported, the state does not feel it is its duty to give justice to the victim. In fact, there is complete impunity. Impunity is rising because of two reasons. First, a majority of decision makers are male and often the victim is female. Secondly, during the past few years, there has been a high degree of political influence in defence of violators of the law. So law breakers are rarely punished.
In the context of Nepal, laws are made; but in most of the cases, they are not enforced with rigour. Traditionally, women were conceived to be inferior to men, and they did not have access to many areas of social functions. Laws were distinctively discriminatory. However, after the dawn of democracy, the state has accepted women as being equal to men; and many discriminatory laws have been amended accordingly. But still, there are some discriminatory segments where improvement is wanting. For example, property inheritance laws are still discriminatory against women. Similarly, motherhood is not regarded as a basis of granting citizenship to children. Similarly, a man is allowed to remarry in case the wife is infertile; but there is no law allowing a woman to remarry if the husband is infertile.
The present constitution (if you can call it that) has given 33 percent representation to women, but their share of positions of exercising actual governmental power is less than that. To conclude, there is a long way to go before the level of women’s empowerment reaches a level when we could make and accept a woman as head of government in Nepal.
knsad66@yahoo.com
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