The cultural web that traps women in deadly relationships
Three months to November 12, 2024, Kenya had registered at least 97 cases of femicide in the year, leading to public outcry.
What you need to know:
- Kenya faces a femicide crisis with 97 cases reported in the first nine months of 2023.
- The violence follows a pattern where victims, mostly women in their 20s and 30s, are killed by intimate partners in private spaces.
- According to various theories, these killings are rooted in deeply normalised social and cultural practices that legitimise violence.
Three months to November 12, Kenya had registered at least 97 cases of femicide in the year, leading to public outcry and petitions to the government to unravel the causes and take decisive action. In response, the Directorate of Criminal Investigation established a “special team” to investigate the cases and “come up with swift and comprehensive preventive strategies to address sexual offences and murder incidents involving women”.
This column recently proposed the 6Ws as a useful way of understanding and addressing violence. This framework is applicable with regard to femicide.
In terms of what, we are dealing with physical battery and sexual violation ending up in death. The ‘where’ is the domestic and private context, usually the home or rented residence. Most of the cases also take place in urban areas. The ‘who’ are the men perpetrating the violence (predominantly intimate partners) and the women victims, mostly in their 20s and 30s. The intimate relationships explain the ease with which the victims are lured to their death beds.
Brutal
‘When’ points to the cover of darkness. ‘Which’ concerns theconsequences of violence, which are rather obvious. ‘Why’ deals with the motivation. From a superficial look, the murders seem to be motivated by misunderstandings between the parties, malice, retaliation or sadism, the last evident in the brutal manner in which they are executed. That the perpetrators flee the scenes indicate their knowledge of what they have done and attempts to escape justice. A number of theories could strengthen this analysis.
The culture of violence theory by John Galtung posits that in some cultures, violence is a normalised practice that is highly accepted, considered legitimate and even expected. People brought up in such cultures internalise and perpetuate violence as a practice through generations. In this realm, men apply violence as a matter of routine, informed by inequalities embedded in the relational ideology that violence is an expression and assertion of power.
In our case, the perpetrators feel that they even have the power to take away life. Important in this theory is that violence should not be seen as an individual trait but a collective norm informed by a wider social ethic. Thus, anyone brought up in the culture can potentially use violence even if they do not and have not. Should the opportunity arise, they would.
Galtung classifies violence as direct, structural or cultural. Investigations, apprehension of perpetrators and legal penalties, as being proposed, address the direct level. Legal, policy, administrative and economic reforms address the structural inequalities that trigger and explode into the direct violence. The cultural causes must be addressed through transformation of norms and values. This cannot be achieved in the short or medium term, and certainly not by government alone but by combined of all agents of socialisation.
The social exchange theory states that violence is informed by interactions where the perpetrator discerns a benefit or reward from exercising it. In other words, if the perpetrators deem the cost of violence to be higher than the benefit, they desist from it. The benefits do not have to be material but include satisfaction from settling scores through retaliation, preventing the lover from being with a rival, and expressing protest against infidelity and so on.
Impunity is relevant here. If people perceive that the likelihood of being held to account is low, they are emboldened to use violence. For instance, if perpetrators consider that the legal penalties are insignificant relative to the satisfaction from the offence, they proceed.
According to the investment theory, violence may be used as a means of gaining resources. For instance, one might kill the spouse with the scheme to get compensation from the insurer. The reward may also be simply satisfaction with success in killing the victim. If the likelihood of success is high again, perpetrators are propelled to go on with the violence.
Moral standards
Then there is the traumatic bonding theory, which demonstrates that a victim is psychologically and inextricably ensnared by the perpetrator through manipulative actions that make the latter even defend the former. The victim thus ignores the episodes of violence in the false hope that the perpetrator will eventually change, all in vain. This theory explains why women stick to abusive relationships, even when it is obvious that they are doomed.
One thread in the theories is the influence of socio-culture. This means that whatever we do, we must re-examine our social fabric. What are our values and moral standards? What behaviour do we cultivate? What is the latent and manifest curriculum of our agents of socialisation? What is our responsibility towards one another? In this matrix, short-term measures will only be palliative but certainly not preventative and curative.
The writer is a lecturer in Gender and development Studies at South eastern Kenya University ([email protected]).
