Gender based violence against men in Zambia compound of Choma,Southern province

Abstract

While it is true that most gender-based violence occur against women, it is not true that women are the only victims and that men are the only perpetrators. Women are perpetrators of this violence against men just as men are. The difference however is that the rate at which women perpetrate this violence is low as compared to that of men. It is the bias in research that has led to the framing of gender-based violence as solely perpetrated by men against women portraying the latter as only victims. This study was set to explore gender-based violence against men from the lenses of the perpetrators (women) and the victims (men) of this violence in Zambia compound of Choma in the Southern province of Zambia. The study was focused on the causes and types of this violence. This was a qualitative based research, taking an exploratory descriptive design. The sample was composed of fifty-nine (59) married women and twenty-one (21) married men respectively, making a total sample of eighty (80) respondents. Purposive sampling was used to recruit participants to the study. Data was analysed qualitatively as it was codified and categorised according to themes as they appeared in the data collection procedure. Themes and patterns were identified from the focus group discussions and in-depth interviews to generate descriptions of the phenomenon under study. The objectives of this study were: to establish the motives wives have for their violence against their husbands, to describe the ways wives exhibit violence against their husbands and to assess the characteristics associated with violent wives. The study was therefore poised to answer three questions emanating from the above objectives: (i) what causes the violence of women towards men? (ii) What are the types of violence that women use on men? (iii) What are the characteristics of women who are violent to their husbands? The study findings revealed that women are violent towards men and this was confirmed by both men and women recruited to this study. The study revealed that women had a number of reasons for becoming violent towards men including the following: poor financial support, infidelity, beer drinking, non-involvement in household chores, suspicions and jealousy, husband‟s late coming and dependence of husbands on their wives (lacking source of income). The types of violence that women used were grouped into physical i.e. fighting, beating, burning and breaking household goods; and psychological i.e. denial of sex, insults and yelling and use of juju. According to this study, relatively all women regardless of their socio-economic status were violent to their husbands, though the degree of violence differed to some extent. Highly educated women were relatively less violent and so were older women. While men and women agreed that women were violent, there was a slight difference in reasons why that happened. For example, what women termed „poor financial support‟; men blamed it on women and termed it „materialism‟. Neither women nor men cited reasons that would implicate them as perpetrators of this violence. The key features of female violence as established by this research are that it was always out of provocation and that it was purely taken as a corrective measure. Gender- based violence against men is real and this was confirmed by both women as its perpetrators and men as its victims.