Violence in the home
Victims of domestic abuse are not always the innocent party. In fact, they may be the reason why they are battered. Oyunga Pala explains himself...
Two incidents happened recently, seemingly unrelated but very telling. A friend's entire prized liquor collection encountered the wrath of a woman scorned. His apartment was splattered with broken bottles, his wall stained with expensive liquor. Two weeks earlier I caught a clip on television about a female battering incident. The woman talking out of a hospital bed didn't look a pretty sight but you could tell she was putting up a little show for the cameras as well. Hours after the incident, and you still have bloodstains? Rather dramatic. I was thinking, if my friend had walked in on his paranoid woman smashing his apartment and taken a bottle to the head, would he have made the news? Not in a million years. A man getting battered is never news, unless the man is like six feet plus and he was beaten to pulp by a woman half his size and no prizes for guessing who gets the book rights.
I do not condone violence, especially not among amateurs but I won't belabour you with any Freudian psychology because frankly by the time I got around to the Oedipus complex I concluded that I wasn't Freud's target audience. All the same, I asked myself why a man for whatever reason would beat up his wife. It's a difficult one to comprehend. You don't beat up your friends or siblings when you have a difference, so why are there so many wife battering incidents? My take was that this issue zeros down to two primary constants; a very insecure man and an overly intimidated woman. The bottom line is that both parties suffer from extremely low levels of self-esteem, which makes them powerless hence violence is all about power.
Everyone hankers for power because power has its rewards, key among them being respect and control. When a man censures his wife for serving cold dinner, it's his roundabout way of saying, I am the man in here, and you are my property. He feels the need to reassert himself in the home because perhaps that is the only place where he can do it. Outside of the house, he is a nobody, a worker, an employee, a servant. He is told what time to go to work, what time to take a break and when he can leave. He can't even choose what to wear to work and when the pay comes, it is not what he deserved but rather what the boss thought he deserved. It is frustrating
and the pressure gets to many men because the nature of capitalism is such. You either are a ruler or a subject, an employer or an employee. So when the man comes back to the house, he needs reassurance that he is still in power because in the outside world, he is a speck of dirt. It is all about transfer of pressure. Your employer pays you a measly salary, works you to the bone, and treats you like crap and you take it out on your wife.
A man slaps his wife over some really petty incident like a suspect phone call, kicks her every time his premier side team loses and you ask yourself why the woman continues to stomach abuse. Abusive traits do not form out of the blue. There are always warning signs. Even the river Nyando sends out its signals, but people refuse to read the signs, or stupidly ignore them. Maybe we enjoy the suffering. We love to play victims. It's only when disaster strikes, he hit you too hard this time and you need stitches that we are suddenly made aware of our hopelessness. Now you realise you can't take it anymore and the sob stories will make a
statue weep. But my question is, the river had started to show signs of bursting it's banks months before, why didn't you leave then? You listen to the answer to that question and you realise that just like a seasonal river that bursts its banks and sweeps away property, most people have no control of the circumstances that occur in their lives. When something goes wrong, they do not react or respond accordingly, they simply sit back and hope things will turn out right. Those who turn to hope in the face of predicament are the powerless ones, the frustrated workers, the battered wives, and the trampled citizens.
It is not always easy to walk away because many times the alternative doesn't count for much so we learn to cultivate tolerance and patience for some level of abuse. It is a foolish approach, because the perpetrators always exploit your state of hopelessness. Today it will be one pothole and as you sit and hope, it becomes piece of tarmac and potholes everywhere. If your husband is going to kick you to an unconscious state, he needs your permission. It starts with a raised voice before you know it, you think a slap on the face is deserving punishment for not running his bath. When a man physically abuses a woman it is because she has given him the authority to do it.
As any rich man will tell you, every woman has a price. It may be a Mercedes limo, a house by the beach and shopping trips to Harrods but as soon as she signs below the dotted line, her backside is sold. It is a straightforward employer employee relationship. If I offer you peanuts and you take it, it means you deserve it. Granted you will rant and rave but never in the face of the hand that feeds you. So many women, like millions of frustrated workers continue to hope for change and they will run to mirage after mirage in their endless search for that oasis in the desert.
But there are two sides to every story. Do you realise that there are just as many abused men as they are abused women? The cases will never make the headlines because there isn't a male equivalent of FIDA. Women organisations are constantly raising our awareness about the high percentage of violence against women, which is not very accurate. Men are prone to violence in the home just as much as women ar. The only difference being men aren't allowed to complain. You don't go around telling your buddies that your wife slapped or threw a glass at you. Beer bottles will be smashed on guys' heads and drinks splashed on their
faces, but no one will ever fault the woman. In most instances, the assumption is that, the man must have done something terribly wrong to elicit that reaction. However, not one person ever questions the woman's crime. If a man hits a woman, he is violent and a beast. If a woman hits a man, it serves him right. Why was he looking at the other woman anyway? Kind of reminds me of the Bobbit case. Emotional distress was the cause the jury said. Absolute nonsense. Think of it in the reverse. Is there any jury in this world that would have acquitted Bobbit if he had attempted an FGM procedure on his wife on the grounds of infidelity?
Killing a woman is a taboo, that's why they are the preferred victims in horror movies. Killing a man is war or entertainment. Every soldier will tell you that the biggest casualties in any war are men but the media will always go for the preferred report that reads, the innocent lives of women and children were lost. The implication is that men deserve death women and children do not. So following in that precedent, it is okay to slap a man, pour a drink on his face, smash a Johnnie Walker Blue label on his wall. Women are emotional creatures who need to be handled with care lest they break something that you consider precious. Question: Why don't jilted male lovers go to their ex's house and attempt to smash it up? Answer: Guys generally do not
take soaps very seriously.
In an attempt to get to the root of domestic violence, we need to look beyond gender to the society because that is where the rot started. If our desire is to realise change in our homes, we have to first realise change in ourselves. Only when we are able to change within can we affect that which is without. It is you the individual who has the power to bring change. Don't ever delegate that responsibility to FIDA or the NARC government. You are not powerless.
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