ONE of the more distressing aspects of the outcry against violence in our nation has been the air of surprise and discovery assumed by certain leaders.
Some of these leaders are rumoured to be among the burgeoning league of wife bashers and family abusers.
Yet publicly, they are wide-eyed, innocent and apparently stunned at the “revelations” of brutality that have been common knowledge for the past 50 years.
The National calls for an end to that kind of double standard.
We want a determination to address this issue, a total commitment on the part of the Parliament to fight family and other forms of violence with all the strength, funding and expertise MPs can command.
All we have heard from our leaders so far is totally unacceptable and an indictment of the perceived superiority of the Melanesian male.
That petition presented to Parliament will now gather dust on some backroom shelf unless the media and the public continue to focus on the issues involved.
It is almost as though the recently elected parliamentarians have looked around the Chamber and seeing but one woman member in their midst, decided that the petition and all the hopes it enshrines is just another female mauswara, another samtimg bilong ol meri.
It isn’t; it won’t go away and the sooner the gentleman ensconced in comfort at Waigani recognise that fact, the easier their life will be.
In London at the beginning of the 20th century, a brave and forthright woman fought for the emancipation of all British women so that they might be freely able to vote.
Until that time, the vote was restricted only to men.
Don’t imagine that the struggle for emancipation of women in “highly civilised Britain” was achieved over cups of tea in polite drawing rooms.
At its peak, the leader of the campaign, Emmeline Pankhurst, marched on the British Parliament with 300 women.
That day – Nov 18, 1910 – became known as Black Friday; 115 of the group were arrested and police used force against them.
By the following April, Emily as she was known, was arrested and jailed for inciting people to place explosives outside the prime minister’s house.
But it was the beginning of Pankhurst’s drive that may be of greatest interest to PNG women today.
She took up the battle for emancipation, which was ultimately successful, in 1903, and formed the Women’s Political and Social Union.
That group became the leader of a movement that had the silent support of women throughout the nation.
The National believes that the answer to women’s concerns in PNG, not only the horror of family and clan violence, but the host of other issues faced by our women, can be best addressed by a co-ordinated and unified movement, one that speaks with one voice for all women in PNG.
There are too many excuses.
“Women are always back-stabbing each other.”
“Women cannot work together for a common goal.”
“Women leaders are those with failed or problematic marriages.”
None of these justifications for treating women as second class citizens is true.
Nor is that other insidious suggestion that educated women cannot work with or for rural or uneducated women.
Take that short list of statements about women and reverse the gender.
Men are equally notorious for back-stabbing, whether in the workplace, on the sports field or even within religious groups.
Men regularly show an inability to work towards one goal, often blindly refusing to see that another man’s point of view may be better than their own.
And mainly as a result of men’s arrogant hunger for power and control even within their own families, many marriages are on the rocks, with desperate women fighting to escape from marital nightmares.
The fact that men appear to be able to work together is mainly because the majority of men believes in male superiority and never questions what they perceive as the male right to ultimate power and authority.
We can only hope that the present Parliament and its members will take a long hard look at the issue of violence in the community – and act before it’s too late.