CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
The family is often equated with sanctuary-a place where individuals seek love, safety security, and shelter. However, this false idea is slowly fading. Evidence shows that it is also a place that imperils and breeds some of the most drastic forms of violence perpetrated against women and girls.
Domestic violence against women and girls continues to be global epidemic that kills, tortures and maims-physically, psychologically, sexually and economically. It is one of the most pervasive of human rights violence, denying women and girl’s equality, security, dignity self-worth, and the right to enjoy fundamental freedoms. Although violence against women is ubiquitous, cutting across boundaries of culture, class, education, income, ethnicity, and age, domestic violence is the most prevalent, yet relatively hidden and ignored form of violence against women and girls.
While reliable statistics are hard to come by, studies estimate that, from country to country, between 20 and 50 percent of women have experienced physical violence such as slapping, beating, arm twisting, stabbing, strangling, burning, kicking, and the like, at the hands of intimate partners of family members.
Violence in the domestic sphere is usually perpetrated by males who are, or who have been in positions of trust, intimacy, and power-husbands, boyfriends, fathers, father-in-law, step fathers, brothers, uncles, sons, or other relatives. The terms domestic violence “as used here in, includes violence against women and girls by an intimate partners, including a cohabiting partner, and by other family members, whether this violence occurs willing or beyond the confines of the home” (Mehrkhan, in WHO, 1996).
Violence against women is often a cycle of abuse that manifest itself in many forms throughout their lives. Even at the very beginning of her life, a girl may be the target of sex-selective abortion or female infanticide in cultures where son preferences are prevalent. During childhood, violence against girls may include enforced malnutrition, lack of access to medical care and education, incest, female genital mutilation, early marriages and forced prostitution, or bounded labour.
Some go on to suffer throughout their adult lives and old age-battered, raped and even murdered at the hands of intimate partners, as well as being inherited by her in-laws (WHO, 1996).
Most women who leave home as a result of incessant, assault, often return, studies have shown that quite apart from the stress and suffering arising from the violence itself many had experienced a number of problems seeking help the majority had initially turned to relatives and friends who, although they had provided support and sometimes temporary accommodation, often made it clear to the women that they did not want to be involved in the couples domestic problems (Borkowski, et al, 1983).
Due to the patriarchy system that pervades the society, women are seldom guaranteed a place in their family of orientation. Even though most societies proscribe domestic violence against women, the reality is that violations against women’s rights are often sanctioned under the garb of cultural practices and norms, although misinterpretation of religious tenets.
The conventional family structure, which also stems from patriarchy, also determines the tacit acceptance of wife abuse in most cultures. Here married women have few, if any rights. Thus, a man is seen as having the right to beat his wife, his children and other female members of his family (O’connell, 1994). Some cultures still excuse a man who kills his wife if he suspects her of adultery. Even rape in marriage is accepted, at least, tolerated in many family structures. This reflects the idea of the wife as the property of her husband (Kirby, et al, 1997).
When the violation of women’s right takes place within the home, as is often the case, the abuse is effectively condoned by the tacit silence and the passivity displayed by the state and law-enforcing machinery. In a number of cases, the police had been called. They were reported as having often taken the view that since it was a “domestic” matter, little could be done (Borkowshi, et al, 1983). As depicted by Ashley, Jack (in Hansard, 1973), domestic dispute “tends to be parroted as an incantation for inaction”.
When women contact local authority, social services, social workers had discouraged them from leaving their husband in the evident belief that they should try harder to keep the marriage together. Since there were few, it at all, refuges; those women who did attempt to leave had great difficulty finding accommodation where there was no risk of further assault (Borkowski, et al 1983).
In the divorce courts itself, court officials and judges quite often seemed curiously incurred to the violence. Some were skeptical about women’s allegations of violence even though all the cases were undefended and the evidence was not challenged by the respondent (Borkowski et al 1983). Despite the widespread existence of this problem-domestic violence-defendant police officers and court officials either deny the existence, prevalence, and seriousness of violence against married women or they treat as a private privilege of marital discipline, rooted in the view that women are the property of their husbands and that the state should not interfere. The police refuse to arrest violent husbands or give other needed aid and protection to plaintiff victims.
While the family court was enacted to given practical advice to battered wives-who do not have lawyers to assist them-the court personnel infact deny women access to court. Each agency sends women to the other. Neither the policy nor the court enforces the law, plaintiffs are left remediless. The result is increased fear, injury, or even death at the hands of their violent husbands (Hirschm 1981).
Studies have shown that battered wives tend to withdraw their complaints perhaps because there are few alternatives for them to start a new. A Washington, D.C. study indicated that of 7500 wives who tried to bring changes against their abusive husbands, only 200 succeeded (Edmiston 1976). This is due largely to economic reasons. Gelles (1976), found that women with few resources, for example, no job, or little education, is less likely to seek help, and children of very young ages are instrumental in dissuading their mothers to take action. One mother I knew suffered a broken arm, numerous bruises, and other injuries that remained with her assaultive husband until he began to batter their two-year old daughter. At that point, she left him, went home to her own parents only to return to her beloved batterer several months later (Hirsch, 1981).
Observing the conventional family structure in Nigeria, we seem to have more varieties of family types than ever before. We see more people co-habiting, divorcing, re-marrying as well as different types of extended families and a whole range of nuclear families some more isolated than others, (Kirby, et al, 1997). This structural variation has been linked, inter alia, to problems of domestic violence, within families. The Nigeria “patriarchal family characterized by kinship network is gradually being supplanted by an isolated nuclear family” (Ogege in Jike Led, 2002). This alteration in structure according to Ogege, has inevitably striped the institution of its traditional functions of care, concern and the like. Since family members now work away from home, the family and the interactions within it have become less observable. Since social control and observability are positively correlated, what happens within the family unit is private and thus, less subject to accountability to others (Laslett, 1973). This has resulted in the invisibility of battered women whose unseen and often unacknowledged abuse is compounded by low self-esteem where women often blame themselves for their suffering (Kirby, et al, 1997).
For (Cheal 1991), this has its root in the social isolation experienced by many women living in private families. Separation of family life from public life and the role that women are expected to play as ‘blinding agent’ in maintaining family integrity (Liljestron, 1982) both reinforce cultural beliefs that family problems are private troubles and that women have the primary duty of resolving them (Cheal, 1991). Since there is no one to interfere with the violence, there is a great tendency for violence to occur as the negative sanctions of their unavailable. The near passivity of neighbours also reinforces the widespread conception of family as a private institution.
Under the Nigerian common law, a “husband and wife are considered to the legally one person. It was the husband, however, who had the power. At marriage, women were related to civic death since they lost their individual legal and property rights.
It is pertinent to note that under our patriarchal system, it was the man-father “who owned the daughter and who sold her to another man” (Hoebel, 1966). Although bride price did not necessarily give a husband and his kinsmen; a right to do harm to his wife, payment for a woman, and patriarchy in general, became fertile soil for the abuse of women, who were not, of course, given the same privileges (Hirsch, 1981).
Most religious traditions are basically patriarchal in nature and establish the husband as superior and master to his wife (Hirsch, 1981). The Christian faith is a case in point. The patriarchal power is reinforced in the Old Testament. God becomes angry with both Adam and Eve for having eaten of the forbidden fruit but says to Eve:
…your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you (Genesis 3:16).
The Christian church did not relieve wives of the ‘iron fist of their husband. According to Saint Paul:
Wives be subject to your husbands as to the Lord for the husband is the head of the wife (Ephesians 5:22-23) in some societies, a woman was forbidden to strike her husband but her husband had the right to hit her (Hirsch, 1981) San Barnerdin, during the Renaissance, write about the guidelines for beating ones wife:
“And I say unto you, men, never beat your wives, while they are great with child for there in would lay great peril. I say not that you should never beat them; but chose your time (cited in Hirsch 1981).