GBV: The other pandemic

Since the beginning of this year’s 16 days of activism against Gender-Based Violence (GBV) on November 25, there has been no shortage of drama around issues of GBV in the country. First, the infamous Maryam Sanda’s conviction for murdering her husband, Bilyaminu Bello, was upheld by an appeal court. This means she is one appeal […]

Since the beginning of this year’s 16 days of activism against Gender-Based Violence (GBV) on November 25, there has been no shortage of drama around issues of GBV in the country.

First, the infamous Maryam Sanda’s conviction for murdering her husband, Bilyaminu Bello, was upheld by an appeal court. This means she is one appeal away from a date with the hangman. If that happens, it would be the completion of a vicious circle for the children in that marriage, one of them born after the unfortunate murder of his father.

The other incident of note, of course, was the social media furore over the viral video of Ifeyinwa Angbo, with a battered face and broken spirit, confessing to being beaten and abused by her husband, Pius Angbo, for half a dozen years. A breaking point was reached and the woman, a medical doctor, dragged her husband to the court of public opinion.

For some reason, this story fascinated the Benue State governor, Samuel Ortom, who promptly intervened, and made a public spectacle of reconciling the couple, but not before the court of public opinion does what the court of public opinion does best—serve its own brand of justice by blaming both the alleged abuser and his victim.

These judges, people going about their daily businesses, suddenly found themselves invited to sit in judgement over a case they know next to nothing about.  They blamed the victim for being educated and enduring six years of abuse. They blamed her for crying out. Some even asked her to confess what she did to cause the beatings. But these were in the minority. Others summarily condemned the husband. They were not interested in his defence or excuse. The fact that he could batter his wife like that was cause enough to nail him to the cross.

It would be hasty to question the sincerity of the reconciliation because as the saying goes, don’t ask what caused a quarrel between husband and wife, only make peace and leave them be.

While Ortom was doing what most fatherly figures in these parts of the world would do, which is reconciling bickering couples, it would be wise to remember that often, women have been forced, in the name of reconciliation, to continue living with habitual abusers and that in some cases it has resulted in loss of lives.

According to Islamic Relief, intimate partners commit 38 per cent of murders of women. That figure translates to 137 women every day.

Gender-based violence is a menace. It affects at least one in three women in the world. It is so prevalent that the World Bank describes it as a global pandemic. In a year that has seen COVID-19 force most of the world into lockdown, we have seen an increase in GBV with couples locked in at home.

The irony is that only 10 per cent of the world’s population has been affected by COVID-19, the global pandemic, according to the World Health Organisation. While 35 per cent of women globally has experienced either physical or sexual violence from their partners, while 7 per cent of women has been sexually assaulted by someone other than a partner.  Based on this data, it makes sense that the World Bank has described GBV as a pandemic.

In Ifenyiwa’s viral video, one moment that touched me the most was the instance her son wanders into the shot and says, “Sorry, mommy.” That voice, full of innocence, was the voice of the silent victims of GBV. Those who suffer as much the  impact of this violence as the partners being abused. It resonated because my 2007 radio play, A Bull Man’s Story, which won that year’s BBC African Performance Playwriting Competition, detailing the changes in the life of a child who watched his family descend into the abyss of domestic violence.

What inspired me to write that story was something that happened somewhere in Sokoto, sometime in the early to mid-2000s. It involved a man and his wife, who had disagreements, as couples tend to do, and when the tensions became unbearable, the wife left and returned to her parents’. Pissed beyond measures, the husband followed her, hid behind a tree and waited. When he saw her walking by, he jumped on her, armed with a stick and struck her in the face several times. She cried for help. The husband bolted but he had already permanently maimed her after knocking out several of her teeth.

That story was reported on the BBC Hausa Service that time and the savagery of that incident stayed with me.

Sadly not all stories like this make the news and many women have drowned in the volatile sea of domestic violence. There was once an unfortunate woman in a rural town in Plateau State, who for nearly 10 years was lost in the system, forgotten in prison while awaiting trial.

She never enjoyed a happy marriage. Her husband was a perennial drunk and took to beating her each time he didn’t have money and needed some to drink, or every time he was drunk—this means all the time.

On a fated day, she happened to be walking by with an umbrella when he, busy at a drinking place, spotted her. He accosted her and demanded money from her. She refused. He started beating her on the street. As the story goes, in an attempt to defend herself, she struck him on the head with her umbrella. The man, wasted already, slumped and died, in the full glare of witnesses. The woman was taken away, put in prison awaiting trial for nearly 10 years before a team of lawyers on a legal aid mission discovered her.

It would take a book or certainly a far longer piece to analyse the cultural and systemic enablers of GBV. Some of these ideas and thoughts are so ingrained in our psyche and manifest often in the kind of questions we ask victims of domestic violence: What did you do to him? Did you say sorry? Don’t you know he beats you because he loves you? And for the male victims, there is nothing because the stigma that keeps female victims from speaking is multiplied in the male victims.

What will people say?

That is the question that has kept many women hostage in abusive relationships that sometimes cost them their lives. The cycle is real and it tightens every day around the victims, whether they are petty traders or rural farmers, medical doctors or university professors.

The first way to break this vicious cycle is to admit one needs help, to cry out to save one’s life is infinitely better than to die in silence. While many victims have found help at various non-profit organisations, our approach to resolving cases of GBV needs to be reviewed to decisively tackle abusers rather than enabling them. And one of the options is the creation of a Police Special Victim’s Unit to investigate cases of GBV. It is a pandemic, after all, it should be treated as one.