liens - GID

cedes to the reforms of the law in some American states to make it
gender neutral. There is certainly a need to make sexual violence more
gender neutral, given the evidence that women also sexually abuse men,
and men do abuse men. Various Ghanaian media reports confirm that
male abuse is more common that has been thought. Only too recently
BBC carried a story about Zimbabwean women’s rape of men, though
ostensively for ritual purposes. See Steve Vickers’ report:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-15876968 - accessed 29 th
November, 2011. 1 Varga (2001) is right in demanding that sexual and
reproductive health research and programs in Sub-Saharan Africa not
ignore boys and young men.
Given the pervasiveness of sexual violence, it seems legitimate to ask
what women themselves have done and still do about the situation. In
recent times with the emergence of the feminist activism a number of
NGOs have taken up the course of women, and have succeeded in
conscientising policy makers and the public to issues that militate
against women’s interests. There is abundant discussion of these interventions.
However what remains missing is what women in the past
women did about their harassment. The silence seems to suggest that
women have always been helpless. The literature comments on women’s
acceptance that men – husbands and boyfriends - are justified in exercising
violence on their women. Glover et al. (2003: 35) found that 73%
of adolescent respondents agreed that under certain circumstances it
would be acceptable for a husband to beat his wife, and 58% thought
there could be justification in a man beating his girlfriend, if she was
flirtatious towards other men. More recent studies seem to support this.
See for example, the Ghana Multiple Cluster Survey (MICS) 2006 revealed
that 47 per cent of women between 15 to 49 years of age believed
that a husband is justified in beating his wife. 2
This sexual under-privileging of women may be norm; however it cannot
be doubted that in some instances women also defended themselves,
especially where women’s associations were found and women
1
It is claimed that the ‘... Zimbabwean police believe there is a nationwide syndicate
of women raping men, possibly to use their semen for use in rituals that claim to
make people wealthy’. Three women were to be tried in court over the allegation.
The victims are alleged given what seems like an aphrodisiac to put them in the
mood for intercourse.
2
See http://www.myjoyonline.com/news/200806/17367.asp. Accessed 18th June,
2008.
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