Men Too Need Protection from Gender Base Violence
- Category: Gender
- Date 06-12-2009
- 530 views
‘A man whose wife produces a boy should prepare for a beating in not-so-long a future. He should therefore subject his son to severe punishments early enough so that by the time the boy is big enough to defeat his father in a fight, the old man has already counterbalanced his son’s thrashing by the earlier whips.’
This joke, though crazy, was a school-time slogan for the boys The Comrade attained education with. We believed that a boy-child would always grow up to teach his father ‘how to behave’ through a beating.
This was not totally unfounded. In our home villages, men routinely battered their wives for big, small and no mistakes at all. If the suffering woman bore one or more sons, however, she did not run out of the home to escape the regular beatings. She mutely weathered the whip, confidently observing her son’s growth in age and stature. By the time the boy entered adolescence, the mother would abandon all timidity and begin to answer back to her tyrannical husband. Not knowing the source of his wife’s boldness, the man would set upon her with a whip, annoying the son in the process.
The boy would command him to “stop beating my mother” but the fierce man would shout back, “I won’t stop. She is my wife. If you know you are also a man, marry your own wife, and beat her as you like.”
He would land another blow to reaffirm his power. This would rouse the boy to jump in on the mother’s side to subdue the violent head of the family. A new era would set in henceforth; the more the man attempted to reclaim his primacy, the more the beatings he earned. Yes, we all had seen a man whose son had beaten to pulp.
Males face gender based violence indeed. Parents are more willing to administer punishments, more severely to their sons than to their daughters. Similarly, children can irately tackle their fathers, not mothers. The family setting teaches boys to face or cause violence more than their female counterparts and this actual abuse.
As grownups, men tend to suffer silently. They are unwilling to seek care and support in order to be seen as manly. A friend told The Comrade that women hate men who come across as weak and seeking sympathy.
Wars are fought by men, but war is not a leisure sport. It is a way of matching to your graveyard, open-eyed. In war, because men are the ultimate targets; military combat means shooting as many men as possible. Women may be raped and displaced but not often directly targeted with shots. The uproar is deafening if a woman is killed, even accidentally. One wishes men would be caned and sodomised but left alive. Even a non-combatant who is killed or injured in the process can easily be labelled as a warrior. A world that is genuine about stopping gender based violence must stop war in all its forms and causes.
Furthermore, men face a lot of emotional violence. Women and girls prefer to be competed for, and a young man can spend colossal amounts of hard-earned money to meet a girl’s demands with a promise of marriage. Later on, however, another man may show up and is more attractive fiscally and geologically. The girl will discard the initial man without compensation for the financial, cyclic, and emotional investment he has put into the relationship.
He may as well die because society will laugh at him if he complains and fellow men will say he has become a cry-baby! There was a grisly scene in Kampala a while ago when the former head of the Ugandan army, James Kazini was found dead in a young woman’s house. She said she murdered him but many think she only hired out her house to the assassins. Whatever happened, men did not call a men’s upraising as it would have been if the deceased was a woman. And people believe gender based violence is violence against women and children. How false!
By Venansio Ahabwe
Source: Peering Eye, Sunday Citizen