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An end to terror
THE petition was presented to
Parliament yesterday.
Dozens of Papua New Guinean women worked tirelessly to make that
possible and thousands more signed a petition that sought relief
from the tsunami of violence that has engulfed them.
The gallery at the House was filled with women in black wearing
white ribbons, who sat as a silent reminder of the litany of
broken promises made to them and to their predecessors over the
past 30 years.
It was a moving endorsement of every PNG woman’s right to claim
the freedom from violence and the equality guaranteed by the
Constitution.
But what will it achieve?
We can but hope that the dramatic wave of anger and disgust that
has swept over the nation in the past week or two will force
Parliament to take action.
If that means drafting legislation that would ban polygamy, for
example – then our elected members must support such a Bill.
If it means that the Government must fund refuges for our women
and children, they should bite the bullet and ensure their
erection throughout our provinces.
Then the Government must put aside recurrent funding in the
forthcoming Budget.
There is no time left for back-sliding or for passing the buck
to provincial governments.
Violence against women is a plague that infects each and every
province.
It provides the very definition of a “national issue,” one that
is the responsibility of the National Government.
The people are tired of promises, tired of the mauswara that has
been the lot of PNG women for decades.
Note that we referred to “the people” and not to “the women”,
for there are many PNG men who share the horror of violence
against women and want to see it end now.
Defeating the kind of mindless violence that transfixed PNG last
week will not be easy.
Many PNG men still share a deeply rooted certainty – wives are
possessions.
These men believe that women are and should be dependent
entirely upon men for their existence and their upkeep.
A woman’s role in this primitive concept of “family” is to
provide sex, food and care for the children.
They will be expected to work ceaselessly and without thanks to
fulfill those responsibilities.
Periodically, often on a nightly basis, they will fall victim to
brutish attacks by their husbands or elder brothers and they
will have no right to even attempt to protect themselves.
Their relatives will be all too often aware that their beautiful
teenage girl or young adult now married to the next village is
the target of the most vicious bashings and assaults.
But traditional custom demands that they should not interfere.
Custom is used by these men to justify behaviour unknown in the
animal kingdom.
Worse, there is nothing to legally stop them from inflicting the
same terror upon a whole succession of wives.
That is a matter that Parliament can and should address without
delay.
To suggest that polygamy is in some way a positive ingredient of
modern PNG life is a deception and a fallacy; it is nothing more
than a public affirmation of the supposed might of the man and
the ultimate subservience of the woman.
If PNG wishes to take its place as a respected nation among the
other democratic nations of the world, then marital and domestic
violence must be eliminated.
The death sentence was handed down last week to men who
decapitated a woman supposedly because they regarded her as a
sorcerer.
It seems to us that any “husband” who pours boiling water over
his wife, kicks her into insensibility, burns her badly and will
not let her out of the house and then rips his own unborn child
from within his wife’s womb deserves exactly the same fate.
And what of the hundreds of women who flee the violence of their
husbands in the hope of finding refuge?
In other societies, there is a wide range of possibilities –
church-run halfway houses, council-managed facilities that will
also look after children and ancillary services that can provide
care and counsel.
The Government must address this issue, not on a piecemeal
basis, but as part of a national plan to ease the regular agony
of what may well be the majority of our women.
The nation demands action.
 
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