WUNRN
Violence against women still is universal,
and while it has many roots, especially in cultural tradition and customs, it
is gender inequality that lies at the cross-cultural heart of violent
practices. Violence against women is deeply embedded in human history and its
universal perpetration through social and cultural norms serves the main
purpose of reinforcing male-dominated power structures.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights calls for “equal and inalienable rights”
for all people, “without distinction of any kind.” It requests the right
to security of person, the right not to be held in slavery or subjected to
inhuman treatment, the right to equal protection before the law, and the right
to equality in marriage. But weak excuses such as that of cultural relativism
coupled with discriminatory social
norms and practices, the under-representation of women in decision making
structures and processes, a lack of resources to fight for women’s rights and,
above all, the absence of societal and/or political will provide strong
impediments to giving women the same Human Rights that men enjoy.
Some of the violence traditions
that women have to face are life-threatening. There are for example customs
such sati, which
forces many Hindu women to immolate themselves on top of the funeral pyres
created for their deceased husbands (there’s no sati for males of course), or
women in some African countries being subjected to violent exorcism rites or
even being killed after being accused of witchcraft. Many of these culturally
sanctioned crimes are financially motivated, eliminating the wife as the inheritress
of her husband’s estate and having it being transferred instead to the couple’s
sons or the father’s family.
A different way of abusing
women’s Human Rights takes place in many African countries, including
Widow cleansing dates back
centuries and is practiced for example in countries like
It is also rooted in the belief
that a woman is haunted by spirits after her husband dies or that she is
thought to be unholy and “disturbed” if she now is unmarried and abstains from
sex.” Another traditional belief holds that a widow who has not been cleansed
can cause the whole community to be haunted. In many instances a widow must
undergo the ritual before she can be inherited. Because this practice is
obligatory, it should be considered a form of gender-based discrimination that
results in sexual abuse.
Given the widely spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa, the deadly implication
nowadays of wife inheritance and widow cleansing is the degree to which the
custom can transmit HIV.
A widow who is HIV-negative faces the risk of contracting the virus from the
man who inherits her. In other cases, a widow who has contracted HIV from her
late husband – who may have died from an AIDS-related illness – will transmit
the disease to her inheritor when she is forced to have sex with him. In the
context of polygamous practices, this can set off a chain of events in which
the man transmits the virus to his other wives, who may in turn infect others
if they are widowed and inherited, and so on.
Notably, in
A widow cleanser in
Even women who are aware of the
risk of HIV infection may submit to cleansing rituals because of community
pressure. One woman from
Another Malawian woman, Paulina
Bubala, who is now the leader of a community group for people living with HIV/AIDS, first participated in an alternative rite but
was ultimately forced to undergo a widow-cleansing ritual. For the first step
of the cleansing rite, Paulina and her co-wife “covered themselves in mud for
three days. Then they each bathed, stripped naked with their dead husband’s
nephew and rubbed their bodies against his. Weeks later, the village headman
told them this cleansing ritual would not suffice. Even the stools they sat on
would be considered unclean, he warned, unless they had sex with the nephew.
“We felt humiliated,” she said, “but there was nothing we could do to resist,
because we wanted to be clean in the land of the headman.”
Both ironically and sadly it’s
the growing prevalence of HIV/AIDS that has begun to have an impact on the
practice of widow cleansing, with men becoming concerned about losing their own
lives (despite such attitudes still displayed by such widow cleansers as the
one mentioned above). The problem though is that these reflections are not a
result of a male dominated society’s concern about the welfare of its women, an
therefore the question arises: what will happen to ‘uncleansed’ widows,
especially those infected by HIV through the previous sexual practices of their
late husbands? Will they be treated as outcasts because they are regarded as
unclean, haunted and a threat to their communities – in which case they might
be worse off than having been submitted to widow cleansing?
It is unlikely that the HIV
enforced withdrawal by men from widow cleansing will lead to changes in male
attitudes towards women. And it therefore doesn’t matter whether it is
witchcraft persecution or the whether the motivation for sati, widow cleansing
or other life endangering and a woman’s dignity degrading practices are forced
upon a woman or voluntary undertaken by her: no virtuosity of semantics or
cultural self-defence can justify or condone such acts of nihilism and
debasement. Any cultural tradition that sanctifies the death or humiliation of
a human being is totally unacceptable.