Sexist Marriage

Female MPs in Kenya stormed out of parliament when male MPs voted to amend the new marriage bill to allow men to take as many wives as they like without consulting existing spouses. 30 of Kenya's 69 female MPs (many of the other female MPs were at a New York conference) were in the 349-member chamber for the debate and all walked out in disgust over the matter.

MP Samuel Chepkong'a, who proposed the amendment, said that when a woman got married under customary law, she understood that the marriage was open to polygamy, so no consultation was necessary. "Any time a man comes home with a woman, that would be assumed to be a second or third wife," said Chepkong'a, who is the chairman of the Justice and Legal Affairs Committee, said, and adding, "Under customary law, women or wives you have married do not need to be told when you're coming home with a second or third wife. Any lady you bring home is your wife,"

MP Mohammed Junet agreed. "When you marry an African woman, she must know the second one is on the way and a third wife… this is Africa."

  Parliamentary majority leader Aden Duale argued that polygamy is justified for Muslim and Christians alike,“I want my Christian brothers to read the Old Testament -- King David and King Solomon never consulted anybody to marry a second wife,”

But female MPs argued that such a decision would affect the whole family, including the financial position of other spouses.

"It behoves you to be man enough to agree that your wife and family should know,"
Soipan Tuya, the women's representative explained.

They also argued that marriage should be based on love, and not have a financial cost placed upon it. Women are not allowed to marry more than one man in Kenya.

What is the motivation among male MPs to push amendments to the family law and give men the liberty to marry as many wives as they wish? What exactly is the value of taking up extra wives without regard to the feelings of the first spouse? What would the male MPs have to say if their own wives suggested a situation where they would also wish to bring in an extra husband or two? Why adopt such archaic laws in this day and age?

  Plans to ban the payment of bride prices were dropped. Proposals to ensure equal property and inheritance rights were also watered down - a woman will be entitled to 30% of matrimonial property after death or divorce. A proposal to recognise co-habiting couples, known in Kenya as "come-we-stay" relationships, after six months, but this too was dropped. It would have allowed a woman to seek maintenance for herself and any children of the union had the man left. A breach-of-promise clause in which a partner who had promised marriage but then backed out of the wedding could face financial damages was also dropped, as male MPs argued it could have been used to extort cash.

George Nyakundi, a legal officer at the Centre for Rights Education and Awareness says that the Bill will have a negative ripple effect on the family set up and is a recipe to domestic squabbles.

 "This Bill allows men to marry any number of women without consent yet they will still receive the same income as they did with one wife so then how will he provide for the whole family?" Wambui questioned. 

Three MPs have termed amendments to the Marriage Bill as a sign that the Legislature is insensitive and ignorant to the plight of women and marginalized groups in the country.

Nominated MP Isaac Mwaura and nominated Senator Godlive Mboke criticised their fellow parliamentarians for failing to understand the impact of the laws they were passing particularly on the life of the people living with disability. Mwaura cited an amendment to Clause 12 of the Bill which MPs voted to take away the freedom of a person with a mental condition to consent to marriage but failed to define how a state of mental condition can be determined. According to Mwaura, who was nominated to the National Assembly to champion the welfare of persons with special interests; MPs failed to comprehend the difference between mental illness (as defined under the Mental Health Act) and mental and psycho-social disability (this includes people who are the users and survivors of psychiatry, people who have bi-polar among others).

He said of his fellow politicians, "There are some people in this Parliament who call themselves gate-keepers that you can't tell them anything, they are know-it-all yet they are the most ignorant people I have ever met."

FGM and owning women

Despite international campaigns, the United Nations says millions of girls in Africa remain at risk of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). Activists say FGM violates a girl's human rights and puts her at risk for serious health complications, including problems during childbirth. In Liberia, there is no law against it and FGM is still common practice. Speaking out against female circumcision can be dangerous in Liberia. In 2012, an activist's home was burned down after she spoke on the topic before the United Nations in New York. A local journalist got death threats after she published an article on FGM. Vah Tamba, a government social worker at the Margibi County Gender office, frequently receives threats related to his work.

"Sometimes we are threatened not to visit a community. Sometimes they want to harm us. They even want to kill us. It is our work. We have to move forward. We will continue to campaign until there is a change in the practice,” said Tamba. However, he said that rather than banning FGM, the government is focusing on providing jobs skills training for women involved in the practice to give them another way to earn a living. The idea, he said, is to "distract them" from FGM. For the cutters, or "koko mekong", who can earn 2,500 Kenyan shillings (£18) for each girl, it is a livelihood. "The cutters ask me: 'If we leave doing this thing, what will we eat?'" Margaret says. "Tell the government to give us what to eat. If it's just workshops then it will be no use. The circumcisers will not leave their career simply because they're being told to leave it."

Nonetheless, the job of persuasion is slow and dangerous. Activists working on women's rights in Liberia said it is going to take time and dialogue to get these communities to change their way.  A clumsy colonial efforts to ban the practice in Kenya saw it become a cultural cornerstone of the Mau Mau uprising against British rule. The "cut" has been outlawed in Kenya since 2001. A second set of laws passed in 2011 made it illegal to promote or to facilitate what used to be known as female circumcision, and stiffened penalties.  Despite this, a public health survey in 2009 found that 27% of women had been subject to FGM. Among some ethnic groups – such as the Somalis (98%) and Masai (73%) – that figure is much higher.  But the ban has driven it underground.

Changing the law is easier than changing practice. Reformers are accused of criminalising traditional culture.

Underpinning the practice is a sharply divergent vision of the roles of sons and daughters. In Kenya, a dowry is paid by the groom's family. As a result, girls are seen as a valuable asset to their families, if they can be offered for marriage in the "right" condition.
"The daughters are seen as cattle to be sold," said Kipteroi, who added that a bride price would be typically counted in livestock, worth perhaps as much as 30 cows. "No one will even negotiate a bride price for uncut girls."

Uncut girls, sometimes referred to as "raw" as opposed to mutilated "ripe" women, can expect to be shunned by their neighbours. They are forced to walk for miles to fetch water so they don't "contaminate" pumps and wells; local midwives even refuse to deliver their "unclean" babies.

In Liberia, a girl who has not had her clitoris cut off would not be allowed to attend community meetings or participate in local decision-making. She would be seen as unclean, and could even face accusations of witchcraft later in life.

Reuben Orgut,  one of the elders in Sandai, is unapologetic about FGM and the economics behind it. "When I get this dowry it's a way to support the other siblings. It means that when my sons also marry I have something to give out." He says the girls who refuse to be cut and married off are "stealing" from their own families. "It is not fair since they are a source of wealth. Some who have not been circumcised leave the family without us getting the bride wealth."

When men and women cease to be a commodity, bought and sold, then these archaic  practices will disappear.

traditional oppression in South Africa

The Traditional Courts Bill is meant to replace the Black Administration Act of 1927 with a law that is constitutional. As is stands, the bill creates a separate legal system for rural folk, geographically recreating the old Bantustans with no irony. If passed, it will in effect strip between 17 million and 21 million people living in rural South Africa of many of the rights we enjoy in the rest of the country.

The bill partly recognises what is already operational in many of these spaces. This includes royal patriarchs who explicitly endorse the kidnapping of girls into marriage – ukuthwala – as Chief Mandla Mandela does, to those who silently endorse it, such as Chief Mwelo Nonkonyana. Many rural communities organise against repressive patriarchal practices, resisting forced unpaid labour, refusing to pay tribal levies, and in countless ways refusing to be docile subjects of chiefs who are given absolute power by this bill. The bill will bestow the final say on the chief presiding over a dispute.

Legal researcher Dr Simiso Mnisi reminds us that ordinary rural Africans shape and reshape custom, culture and practice all the time. She calls this living custom. Living custom enables culture and custom to continue to work in the interest of those who own it.

Mamphela Ramphele challenged this false opposition often held up in conservative culturalist arguments between “foreign” legal systems at work in the rest of the country and “indigenous” legal systems that will be protected in the proposed bill. She points out that our specific legal framework is home-grown. We created our Constitution and legal framework. We did not import it from anywhere else. This is why it is the most progressive Constitution in the world and is globally recognised as such.

The Bill lists criminal offences that can be heard by a traditional court. The Bill allows for the minister to appoint a traditional leader as the presiding officer of the court—without community input. The Bill does not allow a defendant to have an attorney, nor does it give a defendant the option of being tried in a mainstream court.

Dr Sindiso Mnisi Weeks, senior researcher at the law, race and gender research unit of the University of Cape Town, said "It centralises power to a single individual who may have conflicts of interest.”
Mazibuko K Jara, of the Democratic Left Front, said that for the past month he had “listened to harrowing stories from many women and other rural dwellers about the conditions they face living under unaccountable and undemocratic chiefs. The struggle for democracy has only just begun again in rural areas.”
Nomonde Mbelekane, president of the Rural People’s Movement, testified in 2010 about injustices at the hands of traditional leaders. “Some of the chiefs in Peddie have said that women are impure, dirty and involved in witchcraft. In Prudhoe village, an eight-month pregnant woman was called to the Dabi tribal court. She had tried to claim damages from the man who made her pregnant. The court decided that she was just accusing the man and dirtying his name. The court said the man’s father is rich and important; he cannot just have his family name pulled through the mud. She was then sentenced to corporal punishment.”

Other activist groups such as the Association for Rural Advancement, The Rural Women’s Movement  and the Landless People’s Movement also expressed concern about the proposed law.

The situation gets even worse for women. In many traditional courts, women are not allowed to represent themselves or even speak during proceedings. This bill reinforces this by allowing for women to be represented by their husbands or family members (the bill prohibits legal representation in traditional courts) – entrenching existing discriminatory practices. Women’s groups and particularly rural women’s groups are justifiably outraged. 18 years into democracy, women in rural areas are about to be declared second-class citizens by their own government. In practice, many rural women already struggle with decisions by traditional authorities that regularly attempt to strip them of things like land access and inheritance rights. This will only get worse when women find themselves stuck in a system that refuses to recognise their right to speak for themselves or provide legal protections from the very people now making legal decisions. Other gaps include the fact that there is no explicit recognition of crimes such as physical and sexual abuse which are currently considered private or ‘domestic’ matters not fit to be brought before a public court.

There also appears to be no opt-out clause. Anyone whose civil or criminal matter arises in the jurisdiction of the traditional court (i.e. Chief) can be summoned to the court and failure to show up carries whatever penalties the chief sees fit, up to and including those he (and it will almost inevitably be ‘he’) could hand down in sentence. People living in areas control by chiefs won’t have the option of choosing to have their cases heard in a magistrate’s court, like other citizens, without first going through the traditional court process, and even then can only appeal on limited grounds. While everyone else in South Africa has one legal system, these people have another.

Those who support the bill vehemently argue that this is a necessary part of respecting traditional culture and that it is important because constitutional authority has undermined the power and authority of the chiefs. Those opposing it point out that the bill takes us right back to the era of a separate legal system for black people – an era that was problematic precisely because those living in the homelands, those who were deemed (through no will of their own) to fall under the authority of traditional leaders, were not equal before the law. South Africa is a complicated country and the careful balancing of the rights of different groups is inevitably necessary. For this democracy to work, however, the rights of an individual to have a say in his or her future, to be treated equally before the law and to be recognised as part of the same system as everyone else, rather than being regarded as a subject with no say in the matter, have to be secure.

10 problems with the Bill

1. It creates a second-class justice system for over 17 million South Africans.
2. It gives even more power to those chiefs recognized by the state law and nothing to all other legitimate traditional leaders.
3. It allows these chiefs to decide what custom means.
4. All other members of the community, including women and young men, are not included in decision making.
5. It removes checks and balances on power, creating room for corruption, including the power to demand illegal levies.
6. It confirms apartheid “Bantustan” boundaries.
7. It negatively affects women, especially by supporting rules that prevent women from representing themselves.
8. It allows for forced labour and removal of customary benefits as punishments.
9. It applies to everyone; you cannot opt out even if you have valid reason.
10.Regardless of what charge you are facing, you can never ask for legal representation

Last year the Malawi government was widely condemned over local courts bill that gave legal authority to ‘lay courts’. Part of the reason for the criticism was the bizarre crimes that were recognised, such as “writing or uttering words with intent to wound religious feelings” and “fouling the air”, but the more important problem was that it created a parallel, largely unregulated local legal system.

http://www.pambazuka.org/en/category/features/82004
http://mg.co.za/article/2012-02-17-traditional-courts-bill-out-of-step/
http://www.africanscene.co.za/2012/03/traditional-courts-bill-a-travesty/

The struggle after the war

Abeja is one of the many women struggling to survive the horrors of war. Her home is a few kilometres from Barlonyo, where the LRA massacred over 200 people in a single attack in February 2004. Abeja was captured in 2002. She was a wife and a mother of six children. She was captured along with a daughter and a son by Uganda's feared rebel group the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and was forced to join them. But not before the soldiers made her kill her one-year- old baby girl, by smashing her skull in, and then gang raped her. Abeja can’t remember how many men they were; she says there could have been 10 to 15. She doesn’t know what happened to her son or if he’s still alive. Like many abductees, Abeja had to kill or be killed. In her four years with the LRA she tells IPS she can’t recollect the number of people she was forced to kill, but she puts the number at more than 40.

The LRA fought in the north and north eastern parts of Uganda for 23 years. The war, which forced close to two million people into internally displaced persons camps for decades. Thousands of people died as a result and the war was characterised by its use of child soldiers and the conscription of civilians into the rebel group. The LRA were forced out of the country in 2006 and are currently operating in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Central African Republic and western South Sudan.

Since the war ended in 2006, people went back to their original homes and depended on emergency aid. A recovery and development plan was put in place in 2009 by the Ugandan government but this has not covered the emergency medical needs of the population. Most of the money went into building new blocks of health units and rehabilitating the destroyed ones.

In Ogur, Lira in northern Uganda, Abeja has come to a temporary medical camp run by Isis-Women’s International Cross Cultural Exchange (Isis-WICCE), a women’s organisation working with women in conflict and post-conflict settings. The camp is specifically for women with reproductive health complications, which they have mostly sustained from being raped during the almost two decades of war. For most of the women here it is the first time they have been offered special medical attention since the war ended in 2006, and for many it is the first time they have been treated by a doctor. It is also the first time that many of these women have ever spoken out about the violence they had to endure. Dr. Tom Charles Otim, a lead gynaecologist at the camp, says Abeja has lived with a prolapsed uterus for years now. Uterine prolapse – the descent of the uterus into the vagina or beyond – is one of the long-term complications associated with sexual violence. In Abeja’s case, her uterus is hanging out. She will need surgery, which costs about 200 dollars, to remove her uterus. She and 39 other women are referred for treatment to a regional hospital many kilometres away. A majority of the women seeking medical treatment at the camp have chronic pelvic pain as a result of pelvic inflammatory infections. "The infections are high here; because of the war, the women were not able to access medical care early," says Otim. This has had an effect on the women’s sexual lives and the majority of them have painful sex. Many women who have come to the camp have fertility problems.

Abeja not only has to live with the physical scars of the rapes but the psychological effects as well. She and women like her have to endure intense stigma from the community. Her husband rejected her after she returned, and left her to raise their four surviving children and her child from the war. Fighting back the tears she wonders: "Do they think I wanted to be abducted and raped by the rebels? Do they think I wanted to kill my own child?" Women like Abeja need more support than just surgery.

The district health officer in Lira, Nelson Opio, says that "When war ends, there’s a silent war that has to be fought.Politicians here think they will just put up structures so they can say ‘This is what I did during my time’ and ignore people’s real needs." .

Feeding ourselves

Nearly a half-century after the Green Revolution, a large share of the human family is still chronically hungry.

"The international community has been neglecting entire segments of the food system in its efforts to reduce hunger and poverty," said Danielle Nierenberg, co-director of Worldwatch's Nourishing the Planet project. "The solutions won't necessarily come from producing more food, but from changing what children eat in schools, how foods are processed..."

Serving locally raised crops to school children, for example, has proven to be an effective hunger- and poverty-reducing strategy in many African nations.
Roughly 40 percent of the food currently produced worldwide is wasted before it is consumed.

In 2007, some 6,000 women in The Gambia organized into the TRY Women's Oyster Harvesting producer association creating a sustainable co-management plan for the local oyster fishery to prevent overharvesting and exploitation. Oysters and fish are an important, low-cost source of protein for the population, but current production levels have led to environmental degradation and to changes in land use over the last 30 years.

In Kibera, Nairobi, the largest slum in Kenya, more than 1,000 women farmers are growing "vertical" gardens in sacks full of dirt poked with holes, feeding their families and communities. These sacks have the potential to feed thousands of city dwellers while also providing a sustainable and easy-to-maintain source of income for urban farmers. With more than 60 percent of Africa's population projected to live in urban areas by 2050, such methods may be crucial to creating future food security. Currently, some 33 percent of Africans live in cities, and 14 million more migrate to urban areas each year. Worldwide, some 800 million people engage in urban agriculture, producing 15–20 percent of all food.

Pastoralists in South Africa and Kenya are preserving indigenous varieties of livestock that are adapted to the heat and drought of local conditions--traits that will be crucial as climate extremes on the continent worsen. Africa has the world's largest area of permanent pasture and the largest number of pastoralists, with 15–25 million people dependent on livestock.

The Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network (FANRPAN) is using interactive community plays to engage women farmers, community leaders, and policymakers in an open dialogue about gender equity, food security, land tenure, and access to resources. Women in sub-Saharan Africa make up at least 75 percent of agricultural workers and provide 60–80 percent of the labor to produce food for household consumption and sale, so it is crucial that they have opportunities to express their needs in local governance and decision-making.

Uganda's Developing Innovations in School Cultivation (DISC) program is integrating indigenous vegetable gardens, nutrition information, and food preparation into school curriculums to teach children how to grow local crop varieties that will help combat food shortages and revitalize the country's culinary traditions. An estimated 33 percent of African children currently face hunger and malnutrition, which could affect some 42 million children by 2025. School nutrition programs that don't simply feed children, but also inspire and teach them to become the farmers of the future, are a huge step toward improving food security.

Nigerian government's health neglect

In Nigeria , 59,000 women die during or soon after childbirth every year.

Nigeria's maternal mortality rate is the second highest in the world, after India -- 1,100 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births. The country is home to 2 percent of the global population, but 10 percent of all maternal deaths take place there.

The Center for Reproductive Rights places blame squarely on the "government's lack of political will" to implement policies and allocate funds to improve women's health and prevent maternal deaths.

It also points to widespread corruption in the oil-rich country as a fundamental problem undermining health care for women.

For example, one study found that 42 percent of Nigerian health care workers went unpaid for as long as six months, although the funds had been provided by the federal government. As a result, these workers began demanding "contributions" from women seeking maternity-related care.Similarly, the report notes that public health facilities demand that women seeking care provide many of the needed supplies (disinfectant, bandages, etc.), and require the women to purchase a particular brand.Women who deliver in hospitals must pay immediately or risk detention. One informant told CRR researchers of a woman who fled the hospital in the night after undergoing a birth by Caesarian section, even before her stitches were removed.

"I have seen women who after delivery had to come round the wards begging for money."

The government has also failed to provide access to information on family planning and contraception, two issues very closely related to maternal death. Early marriage is common in Nigeria, and young women are often required to conceive immediately and frequently, endangering their health.This failure, CRR charges, means that the government "violates its duties under international human rights law, namely its obligation to ensure the right to health, the right to access family planning services and information, the right to decide on the number and spacing of children, and the right to equality and non-discrimination."

The Forgotten War

There is much media coverage of the conflict in Darfur that concentrates the minds and concerns of the great and good yet in other parts of this continent other conflicts and violence goes on with little comment .

According to the mortality survey carried out by the International Rescue Committee and published in the British medical journal Lancet between 1997 and 2004, up to four million people died in the Democratic Republic of Congo due to conflict. The IRC also estimates that today, three years later, 38,000 people continue to die there each month.

Democracy Now talks to Christine Schuler Deschryver is a Congolese human rights activist. She lives in Bukavu in the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo and particularly on the the violence against women .

Speaking to the New York Times, John Homes, the UN Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, called the sexual violence in the Congo “the worst in the world.”

CHRISTINE SCHULER DESCHRYVER: Four million. It was three years ago, in 2004. And now we are waiting for the new report, I think, for beginning October. It will probably be seven million or more, and nobody is talking about this silent war that's going on in Congo, because the official war ended three years ago. We had elections last year.
But there's another form of very violent war with sexual terrorism going on in Congo. We are talking about more than -- in all eastern part of Congo, more than 200,000 women, children and babies being raped every day, and now, right now, I am talking to you, thousands of women are taken and children into forests as slave sex. And today --

AMY GOODMAN: As sex slaves.

DESCHRYVER: As sex slaves, yeah. And we are not -- I’m sorry just to talk like this -- we are not talking about normal rapes anymore. We are talking about sexual terrorism, because they destroyed, and they -- you cannot imagine what's going on in Congo. Rape is a taboo, I think, in most of African countries, so the women who accept to go to the hospital or to be registered, it's because they don't have a choice anymore. They have to go and be repaired, because we are talking about new surgery to repair the women, because they’re completely destroyed. And the ones who are just raped without big destruction, they don't talk about rape, because the African -- the Congolese woman, she suffered so much that she can support being raped without telling it, when she doesn't need medical care...

GOODMAN: Who is doing this?

DESCHRYVER: The ones who are doing this, they are 60% -- because we made studies -- it’s 60% is committed by these people who made genocide in Rwanda, by Rwandans, the Hutu, the one who made the genocide. And, you know, we talk to women, and sometimes these people who made this can tell them, “You know, we died in ’94 in Rwanda, so now we don't care about what we are doing.” So 60% of these rapes are made by these random Hutu who made the genocide in their country.

GOODMAN: There are supposedly peace talks that are going on. Foreign ministers from the Great Lakes countries failed to make progress in two days of talks in Uganda. Latest news, no solution has been agreed on how to deal with the dissident General Laurent Nkunda, whose forces were at war with the Congolese authorities. How does this figure into what you are describing?

DESCHRYVER: You know, I’m just sorry to say that it's one more meeting, and I think these meetings are just going on because of the international pressure. The consequences, I’m sure, it will be nothing. Like General Nkunda, he has an international mandate against him, but everybody, every journalist who go to Goma -- Goma is north part of Bukavu -- can go and interview him. He’s like a king there. He became a pastor. So is that normal, this impunity? ...

DESCHRYVER: People can help me, first of all, being our ambassador, you know, talking about the problem that's going on in Congo, because it's a silent war. It's like silent. They are killing, they are raping babies and women in Congo. It's to talk about -- you know, it's like Darfur. Darfur started four years ago. I don't want to compare, you know, problems we have in this world, but Congo, it started almost eleven years ago, and nobody's talking about this femicide, this holocaust.

GOODMAN: Femicide.

DESCHRYVER: Yeah, it's a femicide, because they are just destroying the female species, if I can talk like this, because can you imagine now -- in Africa, woman is the heart of family. She is doing everything, babies, looking for food, looking for the whole family. And now they're destroying this resource.
Also, can you imagine with this massive rape, AIDS? How will be the population, for example, in ten years? And these children who are teenagers now, who just know violence, seeing murdered the family, raped sister, the mother, what's the next generation?
So, for me, the most important thing now, it’s that the international community to realize that there’s an holocaust, to wake up and try to change something, because even the war we had in Congo, it was not -- it was like an African world war, because so many countries were involved, but it was not a Congolese war, Congolese against Congolese. It was some countries who came and invaded Congo with the help, of course, of the international community to come and steal everything out from Congo. And now we are asking for the international community reparation, not for money, but to be involved to try to find solution, Rwanda to take back these people, these genociders, and also Congo to prioritize security of the population.

Full interview can be read at the link

One of the few international media articles about these atrocities can be read here .

Denis Mukwege, a Congolese gynecologist, cannot bear to listen to the stories his patients tell him anymore.Every day, 10 new women and girls who have been raped show up at his hospital. Many have been so sadistically attacked, butchered by bayonets and assaulted with chunks of wood, that their reproductive and digestive systems are beyond repair.

"We don't know why these rapes are happening, but one thing is clear," said Mukwege, who works in South Kivu Province, the epicenter of Congo's rape epidemic. "They are done to destroy women."

Andre Bourque, a Canadian consultant. "Sexual violence in Congo reaches a level never reached anywhere else. It is even worse than in Rwanda during the genocide."

WHY?

Many Congolese aid workers denied that the problem was cultural and insisted that the widespread rapes were not the product of something ingrained in the way men treated women in Congolese society.

"If that were the case, this would have showed up long ago," said Wilhelmine Ntakebuka, who coordinates a sexual violence program in Bukavu. Instead, she said, the epidemic of rapes seems to have started in the mid-1990s. That coincides with the waves of Hutu militiamen who escaped into Congo's forests after exterminating 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus during Rwanda's genocide 13 years ago

UN's John Holmes said that while government troops might have raped thousands of women, the most vicious attacks had been carried out by Hutu militias. "These are people who were involved with the genocide and have been psychologically destroyed by it," he said.

Bourque called this phenomenon "reversed values" and said it could develop in heavily traumatized areas that had been steeped in conflict for many years.

Birth and Death

In the 35 countries covered by the report of the World Bank , mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa, the estimated 210 million women who become pregnant every year worldwide, more than 500,000 women die during pregnancy and childbirth. One in five women resorts to abortion because of poor access to contraception . 68,000 women die each year as a result of unsafe abortion, while 5.3 million suffer temporary or permanent disability, and many end up being ostracised within their own communities.

"Poor women endure a dis-proportionate burden of poor sexual and reproductive health because they run into financial or social barriers getting access to these basic but vital programs," said Mrs. Joy Phumaphi, the World Bank's Vice President for Human Development, a former WHO Assistant Director General, and a former Health Minister in Botswana, 1999-2003. "The low status of women often poses a barrier because in many societies, women lack the power to make their own decisions about using contraceptives or using other reproductive health-care," said Phumaphi.

Gates and Aids

The Socialist Banner is no friend of Bill Gates and other capitalist philanthropists [ see here ]believing that only going to the root cause of Africa's problems will alleviate the poverty that exists - and that problem is capitalism , itself . But we do acknowledge that out of charity there can be some limited good , even if in this case it is bad news .

We now note that a $37 million 3 -year study funded by the Gates Foundation have found that women who used a latex diaphragm for possible protection against HIV had the same infection rates as those who did not. Researchers conclude that they cannot recommend use of a diaphragm as a low-cost intervention that women could use as a means of reducing their risk of HIV infection.
Researchers are desperately seeking a low-cost method that women could use -- without the consent of male partners -- to protect themselves against HIV. About 20 percent of adults are infected in Zimbabwe and South Africa, where the experiment was conducted, and women there run twice the risk of infection as men. In cultures where women are traditionally subservient to men, they have less of a say about matters of sex -- when to have it, whom to have it with, and whether condoms or other safer sexual practices will be used.

The study was conducted in Durban and Johannesburg, South Africa, and in Harare, Zimbabwe. It enrolled nearly 5,000 women ages 18-49 and followed them an average of 18 months. Half of the women were given diaphragms and a gel lubricant, while the other half were not. Both groups were also given condoms and extensive counseling to have their partners use them.
By the end of the study, HIV infection rates were high and almost identical .