Of what use is marriage if it accelerates women's journey to the grave?

“If it were between countries, we would call it a war. If it were a disease, we’d call it an epidemic. If it were an oil spill, we’d call it a disaster. But it is happening to women, and it’s just an everyday affair. It is violence against women…There’s no secret enemy pulling the trigger, no unseen virus that leads to death. It is only men. Not all men, but far too many men”. These words were spoken by Michael Kaufman, founder of the White Ribbon Campaign, following what became known as the Montreal Massacre when a clique of misogynistic men killed 14 female students at the University of Montreal, Canada, in 1991.

Kaufman’s words are as relevant today as they were more than two decades ago when they were made, going by the spate of femicides in Kenya today. One may think that men have declared a genocidal war against women. Any man with a mother, sister, daughter, aunt or grandmother shudders at the prospect that these dear ones may be the next victims.

Rapist

At a workshop not too long ago, a speaker asked men how they would react on receiving the news that the mother had been raped! All the men swore that they would abandon everything, hunt down the rapist and extinguish him instantly. If every man reacted to every incident of violence against women (VAW) that way, the vice would be gone. If VAW does not generate such outrage in you, you are an accomplice.

The dynamics of intimate partner violence are captured in the report of a 2021 pilot study conducted by Kenyatta University’s Sexual and Gender-Based Violence team under the Women’s Economic Empowerment Hub sponsored by the Bill land Melinda Gates Foundation.

Done in Nairobi, the study notes that husbands and boyfriends combined accounted for 93.8 per cent of all the cases of violence. This suggests the need to target the household in order to tackle the vice from its root.

A whooping 84.4 per cent of survivors had been in marital relationships before the violence. Ninety per cent had suffered physical violence, intertwined with psychological, economic, sexual and social losses to self and dependents. There was a clear pattern of hegemonic power relations in which men controlled women’s lives, and believed that they had a right to do so, using violence.

Physical violence

The Kenya Demographic and Health Survey (KDHS) 2022, shows that “experience of violence among women increases with age”. For instance, while 20 per cent of women aged 15–19 had experienced physical violence since age 15, the percentage more than doubled to 42 per cent among those aged 45–49. The data also shows that married women were much more likely to have experienced violence than their unmarried counterparts. This simply means that marriage is a risk factor for women.

We must then ask the question: Of what use is marriage if it only accelerates women’s journey to the grave? Like the Kenyatta University study, the KDHS also shows that the majority perpetrators of physical violence against married women were their current husbands or other intimate partners (54 per cent).

The university study unveils the characteristics of survivors, which are important predictors of the kind of women likely to be abused. Majority (81.2 per cent) of the survivors were 26 to 45 years old. An overwhelming 75 per cent got married or started cohabiting when aged 18-25, an age at which individuals are in college or early career life hence, are still unstable economically.

Getting into a marital relationship at this age implies early assumption of family life, which translates into foregone opportunities in education and career development, as well as increased dependence on the husband, and likelihood of tolerating abuse for long periods.

Male partners

More than half (62.5 per cent) had attained primary and secondary levels of education. They were, therefore, young and with little professional training, translating into few chances of employment, hence dependence on male partners, which deluded the latter that they were indispensable.

Where the women had superior incomes to their partners, this also became a trigger of violence with the men seeking to assert their masculinity. 40.6 per cent of the survivors had withstood abuse for six to eight years before seeking help. Again 18.7 per cent had done so for more than ten years, majority only leaving when it was clear that their lives were in danger.

A recent story in the Daily Nation (December 1, 2023) captured the need for women to abandon abusive relationships rather than wait for it to become life threatening. The piece of advice was simple: do not stay in an abusive relationship. No such relationship is worth any woman’s life. And the call on men is also based on a simple premise. Being part of the problem; they must also be part of the solution. Now.

The writer is an international gender and development consultant and scholar. ([email protected])