Femicide: Campaign to end sexual, gender-based violence against women keeps pulsating

How a songstress, Mrs. Osinachi Nwachukwu, whose hit song, “Ekweme” left many churchgoers and crusade attendees momentarily enraptured passed on tragically on April 8 this year, still leaves millions of her fans in disbelief and deep pains till today.

At an Abuja-based hospital where the 42-year-old was rushed to when matters got out of hand, she was said to have been on life support for five days before she passed on. The source of her death is still shrouded in controversy.

However, while her husband and manager, Mr. Peter Nwachukwu, a pastor, said that his wife lost her fight with lung cancer, the days that followed revealed that his submission may be farther from the truth. As a matter of fact, friends and family members, including their first son alleged that she had died from injuries arising from sustained domestic abuse by her husband.

Mr. Nwachukwu is still battling in court to prove that his wife did not die of domestic violence, while the government attempts to unravel his wife’s actual source of death.

Last month, precisely October 12, 2022, Mrs. Bimbo Ogbonna, wife of popular auto dealer, Mr. Ikechukwu Ogbonna, better known as IVD allegedly died after a sustaining severe burns during a violent incident that occurred in their Lekki home.

In the union, which produced five children, Bimbo was alleged to have experienced violent domestic abuse over the years. Tired of stomaching the incessant assaults, she last month confronted her husband. The resultant duel led to their house being set ablaze. While her husband escaped with minor burns, she lost her life in the inferno.

The month before the Ekweme crooner met her waterloo, a pregnant woman, Mrs. Itunu Chicozie, in March allegedly died from repeated assaults from her husband, Bonus Emmanuel Chigozie, in their Okota home.

Their four-year union was reportedly an abusive one, and Itunu feared that she would have complications during childbirth due to constant physical abuse.

Daily, thousands of women that are victims of domestic violence and abusive marriages/relationships across the country are either being battered, maimed or even killed without making it to the news.

The situation is so pervasive that many watchers fear that the malaise is now of epidemic proportion, and silently consuming the lives of many promising women, some of whom cannot speak out for religious or cultural reasons. Alice Bassey, a victim of domestic violence is lucky to still be alive to tell her story.

Bassey who got married to the love of her life, started experiencing battery in the first eight month of her marriage, even with her first pregnancy. And as time went by, the situation got worse.

She recalled: “My husband started assaulting me barely eight months into our marriage. The situation got worse during the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, and I had nowhere to go to. Any little argument that crops up, he will pounce on me and try to strangle me. Till date, I still feel pain in my upper spine due to the pressure that he put on me while beating me up.

“Since I had nowhere to go to, I only prayed for the assault to reduce because I already have two children.” While Nancy Adeyemi has constantly dealt with domestic violence in her three-year-old marriage, she was shocked to the marrow the first day that her husband chased her with a matched.

“He has chased me with cutlass twice when I was pregnant, and I have even slept outside my home with my one-year-old baby too. There is hardly an argument that would not lead to him physically assaulting me. I have scars all over my body, and that was why I made up my mind to leave the marriage. But the bigger problem is that I don’t have the financial capacity to sustain myself; I survive now on the goodwill of friends and family members, which I think I have stretched them enough.”

Data made available to The Guardian, by the Lagos State Domestic and Sexual Violence Agency (DSVA), showed that a total of 2, 543 cases of abuse were reported between January and September 2022.

Of this number, 2, 340 are women. While 1, 692 of the victims are married, 323 are single, 206 are co-habiting, and 322 are undecided.

Within the period that the report covered, Alimosho Local Council recorded the highest number of cases in each of the months. A total of 1,859 cases of domestic violence; 78 cases of threat to life; 38 cases of sexual harassment; 54 rape cases and 143 cases of Sexual and Gender Based Violence (SGBV).

A global 16-day campaign that is focused on the elimination of violence against women and girls, which kicked off on November 25, and will run till December 10, underscores the attention being given to SGBV across the world. The campaign, which coincides with the Human Rights Day, has as its theme: “End Femicide.”

Many are very petrified with the recurrence of domestic violence despite efforts that are geared towards ending the menace. One of them is the Founder of Dorothy Njemanze Foundation (an outfit that is providing victims and survivors of sexual and gender based violence with support), Dorothy Njemanze.

According to her, one of the reasons that more women are staying put in violent relationships is because they are unaware of the legal provisions and procedures that they could set themselves free.

“Since they do not know their responsibilities and rights, they don’t take the right actions. So, their actions and inaction do not align with the need for redress, or the need to end the violence that they are exposed to. Many people also tend to want to settle such cases as family matters, instead of taking it to the appropriate authorities so that there will be more appropriate sanctions, which will minimise the chances of a recurrence,” she noted.

Njemanze continued: “In Nigeria, one problem that we have is the fact that patriarchal institutions, inclusive of the family institutions deny a lot of women of their rights as human beings, and that is a very big problem. The manifestations of toxicity in marriages are diverse in nature, and there is no particular pathway that it follows. People who grew up watching their mothers endure battery expect no less from their wives. People who also grew up watching, or hearing how their fathers raped their mothers expect no less from their wives. They want their wives to endure rape as much as they come. Also, people who grew up watching their mothers thrown out frequently from the house by their fathers expect no less from their wives.

“Some of the enforcers of these violations are these women who were maltreated and so there’s the mentality of, ‘if I survived it, you too should be a good woman and survive it.’ ‘How much sacrifice are you willing to make to keep your family together?’ Keeping a family is not supposed to be something that endangers your life – it is supposed to be enjoyed. But the negative impact of horrible patriarchal practices is the fact that it puts many people in situations where they’re enduring their marriages, instead of enjoying the marriages.”

While stressing that women do have choices in toxic marriages, Njemanze expressed regrets that they are faced with stigmatization.

Said she: “The law now recognises a lot of practices that women have endured over time as violations to the rights of women, to the extent that they are defined penalties for perpetrators, or for people who perpetrate these crimes against women. So women do have choices.

“The support structures to activate the choices may be what we would battle with. There is the Violence Against Persons Prohibition Act (VAPP), and the Child Rights Act. These laws recognise the existence of a protection order. So, people don’t have to wait for criminal processes or suits to be filed against perpetrators,” she said.

The Executive Secretary of DSVA, Titilayo Vivour-Adeniyi, shares Njemanze’s views that several factors including patriarchy, gender inequality, others were at the heart of domestic/gender-based violence. The fact that one gender believes that it is superior to the other is not helping matters either.

“Zeroing in on domestic violence, we found out that some of those abused were victims of intimate partner violence. In other words, the abusers were themselves abused; they witnessed violence growing up, and so violence was normalised in their lives, and they believe that by being violent, they can have their ways in conflicts. And that is how they grew from this learnt behaviour from childhood into adulthood,” she said.

Vivour-Adeniyi continued: “There is also the issue of financial dependence. You find out that a good number of domestic violence survivors are financially dependent on the abuser, or are financially handicapped. They lack financial earnings, a development that keeps them in their abusive relationships. That is why it is important that we continue as a government to embark on drives that seek to empower women. Research has shown that women that are not financially empowered are more at risk of being victims, or survivors of domestic violence.

“Some domestic violence survivors still choose to remain in the relationships because of their children. That is why you still hear things like ‘I don’t want to leave because of the children,’ ‘I don’t want to raise the children in a broken home.’ But they always forget that a home that is filled with violence is not really a home, as research has shown that children who witness intimate partner violence, if they do not receive psychosocial support, are at a higher risk of being abusers themselves in future, or being attracted to people that will abuse them, and so the vicious cycle of abuse continues.

“That is why we place a high premium on ensuring that once a case is reported, survivors are able to access support, and where the children of survivors witnessed violence, it is imperative that they receive psychosocial support as well,” she said, adding, “we also have religious and cultural beliefs that have kept people in abusive relationships. Some people say things like, ‘my pastor, my imam will not accept this,’ ‘the Bible says this,’ ‘the Holy Qur’an says…’ and so the society somewhat blackmails survivors who speak up and speak out under the guise of religious and cultural terms. So, we find that this is a reoccurring factor, and that some survivors remain in abusive relationships because of societal and cultural factors.”

In 2007, the Lagos State government enacted the Protection Against Domestic Violence Law, which is aimed at protecting the rights of persons experiencing domestic abuse, and also availing them access help in the form of restraining orders.

Vivour-Adeniyi stressed that in the past one year, the DSVA has been able to secure over seven restraining orders against abusive spouses, even as the restraining order recorded 95 per cent compliance.

“It is important for people to know that there are different ways in which they can access justice when it comes to domestic violence. For survivors in Lagos, there is access to free medicals, free counselling, free legal services, as well as free authentic dispute resolution mechanisms that can be deployed. There is also empowerment in the form of grants, skills acquisition etc. The most important thing is that survivors need to know that the first step in getting their power back from their abuser is by speaking up, and when they speak up, they will have access to services that they are in dire need of.”

Shedding light on how African culture has constituted a let, rather than a hindrance to widespread abuses that women suffer, Njemanze noted: “We have a lot of cultural leaders that are paying lip service, and they are way more in number than the people who take action in line with the provisions of the law, to address sexual and gender-based violence, hold accountable, perpetrators, or support survivors.

The Founder, the Institute of Family Engineering and Development Africa, Praise Fowowe, who was one of the resource persons, said that the training became “necessary because of the increase in domestic violence in the state. Many women saw the red flags before tying the knot but ignored them. The fact that there is a gap in professional counselling is also a problem, which led us to create a curriculum that registrars can deploy for intending couples, and spot abusers to prevent them from getting married.”
  
Still, in search of a solution to the menace of domestic and sexual violence, the state government said it was partnering with the Italian Consulate.
   
Vivour-Adeniyi, disclosed this while on a working visit to the Consul General of Italy, in Lagos. She said, “The aim of the visit was also to improve the collaboration between the agency and the Consulate, especially in building the capacity of responder agencies in investigating sexual and gender-based violence.
  
“We decry the high rate of sexual and gender-based violence in recent times and securing the support and assistance of well-meaning individuals and organisations will help the DSVA in its efforts to eradicate the menace in Lagos State.”