MALAWI: Abuse of women and girls a national shame
Author: Womens UN Report Network
Date: January 22, 2006
Rights
Child
Children
People’s Rights
in Africa
divorce
marriage
marriage……..”Early marriage leads to early motherhood and problems with
health, education, and life expectancy.”
(b) Consent to marriage
Abuse
MALAWI: Abuse of women and girls a national
shame
JOHANNESBURG, 1 Feb 2006 (IRIN) – A recent study and
several well-publicised cases of gender violence have raised concern in Malawi,
with the president and aid agencies calling for urgent action to address the
problem.
A survey commissioned by the NGO, ActionAid, the UN Children’s
Fund (UNICEF) and humanitarian partners, covering over a thousand school-age
girls, found that more than half had experienced some form of sexual abuse in
schools in Malawi.
The information will enable the government and NGOs to
“understand the nature and extent of violence against girls in education, which
would in turn assist in addressing the [broader] problem of violence against
girls”.
Urgent measures to curb violence against girls both at home and
in schools were recommended.
A total of 1,496 respondents participated,
of whom 85.2 percent were attending school and 14.6 percent were not, in nine
districts across the country’s three regions.
Marriage, pregnancy and
sexual abuse by schoolboys and teachers were the main reasons girls put forward
for staying out of school.
Of the 1,493 pupils interviewed, 90.2 percent
were aged between 11 and 18 years and the rest 18 years or older. Just over 94
percent had never been married, while some 5 percent were married or
cohabitating.
Girls in schools were subjected to various forms of
violence by male teachers, including sexual abuse, forced relationships,
beatings and severe punishments, such as being stripped naked if they arrived
late at school.
According to the survey, 50 percent of the girls said
their private parts had been touched “without permission, by either their
teachers or fellow schoolboys”.
“The major perpetrators of these
incidents of violence were fellow pupils – they committed about 51.6 percent of
all incidents. Another major category [of abusers] was ‘friends’, which
accounted for 16 percent of all incidents committed,” the researchers
noted.
Only 2 percent of respondents reported the abuse to the police,
while 52.3 percent did not report the matter to any authority figure, such as a
school principle or guardian. The authors said “a considerable proportion of
girls in the study failed to report incidents of violence” because they were
embarrassed.
In his radio message to the nation on Sunday, President
Bingu wa Mutharika warned all who committed violence against girls and women
that his government would punish them.
Mutharika made the statement
following a growing number of media reports about the issue.
“Very young
girls are being raped; women are having their hands chopped off by their
husbands, with others having their body parts removed by the assailers. How
different are these kinds of people from animals?” asked Mutharika.
He
called on all human rights NGOs, religious groups and other organisations to
join government in dealing with the problem.
After visiting a woman who
was hospitalised when her husband chopped off both her arms, Minister of
Information Patricia Kaliati stressed, “When a woman says, ‘I do not want to
have sex with you’, it does not mean that you should beat her or force her. This
is her right. Government will not tolerate this kind of violence against
women.”
Minister of Gender, Women and Community Services Joyce Banda told
reporters at a press briefing last week that “government is considering changing
laws aimed at protecting women from abuse by their husbands. Adult men are
raping many children and they are given lenient punishments. We want this to
come to an end.”
UNICEF also highlighted the impact of the current food
shortage on the vulnerability of children. “The humanitarian situation in Malawi
remains very serious, due to a deadly combination of chronic poverty, bad
weather conditions, bad harvest, a high prevalence of HIV/AIDS and an outbreak
of cholera,” the agency said in a statement.
About 40 percent of the
population – a total of 4.9 million people – are in need of food assistance
until the end of March 2006. Of these, an estimated one million are children
younger than five years and pregnant women. According to UNICEF, “Forty-eight
percent of children under five years of age in Malawi are stunted; five percent
are wasted or severely malnourished; 22 percent are underweight or
malnourished.”
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