Our women have rights, don’t silence them

VIOLENCE against women is a rising problem in our PNG society and which has been eating away significant amounts of much needed development funds for its mitigation.
PNG men must wake up to realise the significance of their womenfolk in this perspective.
By comparison, PNG has some of the highest rates of violence against women as well as the various natures of exerting this violence, in the Pacific and probably the world.
Exerting violence on women to the point of causing grievous body injuries and sometimes causing gruesome deaths paints a very bad picture of us to the world.
What is more disturbing is that our statistics on violence against women are some of the very determining factors in the reluctant growth of our tourism industry and of course have repercussions on  other sectors of our economy.
We are country of over 800 diversified cultural groups with varied traditional customs and different social structures. I believe the attitude towards women by some of our PNG men today is derived from their cultural background.
Even though the common approach is that development must be balanced against the environment which includes our traditional cultures and customs, I really think we could do the opposite for customs, for them to be balanced against development and the times.
Everything and everybody is susceptible to change one way or another. Of our various traditions, those that involve paying bride price for women can be slightly altered, with the emphasis that we are not putting value to the women to become our property, rather, it is a custom, just a custom that facilitates for the woman to leave her biological parents and lineage for her husband’s home.
That is because we cannot completely forego our customs. They are part of us and have been for generations. However, I believe these customs have the greatest bearing on the attitudes of most of our men towards our womenfolk in our society, today.
I think we should stop putting value to our women to become property. It just goes against the law of nature.
Women are human beings with rights and have the ability to balance and sustain nature. They are the most vulnerable in our society.
Even after our legislators passed some of the toughest laws to protect women against violence in 2013, our women are still being beaten up and murdered at every corner of PNG.

Alois Balar
Bainings, ENB