STOP NORMALISING GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE

 
Sir,

In Eswatini when a man brutally kills another there is a general acceptance that he is a murderer but when a man brutally kills a woman, social rhetoric emphasises that he is a normal person. The killing of a man and the killing of a woman, by a man, are considered two different kinds of crime.

Why do we consider it ‘normal behaviour’ for men to violate women and abnormal for a man
to violate another man?

We know that this is wrong, we know it can be changed and we know that it should be changed. The truth is that we all know there’s no suddenness in what is happening right now.

There’s no outbreak of some virus induced hunger in some men to destroy women. What is happening in our society is that our daughters are reaping what we planted in the minds of our sons.

The lack of comprehending a woman’s pain makes men believe that a woman’s mental strength is some kind of mental block that stops her from using ‘common sense.’ They also believe that a
woman only feels pain up to a certain level and beyond that, she feels nothing.

Hurt

That is why they feel the need to intensify the hurt to the point where simply killing someone is not enough; they need to violate their very essence, so that they will ‘listen’, because a man who is not listened to is believed to be weak and therefore resorts to violence.
We need to stop normalising gender-based violence. The fact that it happens so consistently does not make it a norm.

Women abuse is not normal. A man wanting sex as payment for spending money on a woman is not normal.
A man wanting to violate a woman in order to ‘teach her a lesson’ is not normal.

Believing that you own another human being is not normal. We need to
change society’s definition of ‘norm’ and channel the minds of young boys the same way we do to our young girls.

 Simelane M

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