Abuse

            It is commonly accepted in Cameroon that women do not share equality with men. There is a particularly common trend of violence against women. In fact, I have heard on multiple occasions that, “Beating is a way for the husband to show he loves his wife,” or that, “if he does not beat her, it means he doesn’t love her.” I have talked with men who say a man must slap his wife around a bit, because he must. It doesn’t have to be a real beating, but just a light slap, it is necessary, it is his right, it shows that he cares, if she misbehaves she must be punished, etc. Sometimes they say these things jokingly, or with a smile on their face, but it is clear that some sort of physical punishment is part of most marriages.

            Today, when I went into work at the health center, there was a woman with a large bandage on the back of her head. The nurses began undressing the wound to clean it. It was a large scar, fresh, with multiple stitches, spanning two or three inches along her scalp. It had happened a couple days before. When I first saw it, I assumed it was from some accident, something at the farm, who knew. However, it quickly became apparent from the nurses’ discussion, that it was the woman’s husband who had done this to her. I was horrified. I stared at the red gash on her head and tried to imagine someone inflicting that type of pain on his wife. I became so sad. So utterly sad and angry. Sad that a person could do this to another human being simply because that human was a woman, his wife, and he thought he had the right to do such a thing. Sad that society views this as normal, acceptable; sad that society allows this to happen and does not hold this man accountable; sad that society views women as inferior to men, without the right to protection, without the right to their own bodies, without the right not to be beaten. My grief was clear on my face, and the nurses began consoling me, telling me it was all right, it was normal. This only made it worse to me. I told them that it was certainly not all right, that someone being beaten like this simply because she was seen as lesser, simply because it was thought that a husband had a right to do this, was in no way all right. I said it shouldn’t be normal, and that’s what is so horrible about it. It won’t happen again, they told me. How can you know that? I asked. Because that, of all things, was a lie. It would likely happen to this woman again, if her husband could do this once, it would likely happen to millions of other women. It would likely happen to the two nurses once they married, it would likely happen to the 2 year old baby in my lap when she grew up. It really was too painful to bear. That in many societies, and particularly in this one, women are treated with so little respect. That a human is treated with so little respect. That someone thinks they have the power or right or ability to inflict harm to another living person. That because she is your wife, and she is not your equal, you can abuse her.

It’s true that I don’t know the full circumstances to what happened. One of the male doctors tried to explain to me that we didn’t know the full story, that the husband could’ve been drunk, that it could’ve been “a reflex,” that the woman could have started it. I tried to explain, that all those possibilities were true, but that it didn’t matter. That there was nothing that made this event acceptable. Maybe the wife had done something wrong—maybe she cheated, maybe she hit him first, maybe she did nothing—but none of those things made it acceptable for him to hurt her that way. Nothing she could have done could have warranted that treatment. No matter what had happened, or how, it was wrong of him to beat her, wrong of him to crack her scalp open.

Overall, witnessing that type of abuse filled me with sadness and even a slight despair. How can you stop something like that when it is so widely accepted in a culture? When people say things like, “It shows that he loves you”? When it is so systematic and engrained? I did receive slight hope when the doctor informed me we had to pretend it was not so bad, because the wife was now saying she wanted to leave her husband. While the first part of his statement was all messed up, it gave me hope to see that she understood it was wrong, unacceptable, that she did not deserve to be treated that way. It has also strengthened my resolve to restart the “men as partners” trainings that had been cancelled due to scheduling conflicts. I will be trying to reform the group in the next few weeks so I can try to combat some of the inequality between the sexes or the abuse that occurs in relationships.