Gender Based Violence in Northern Nigeria: The Role of Advocacy

Gender Based Violence in northern Nigeria: What role for advocacy?

By  Hafsat Magaji (magaji777@yahoo.com)

Introduction

No amount of persuasion would make the man yield ground. Not even the plea by a female ward attendant who chose to stay with the dying woman while being attended to by the lone doctor. Not even the sight of his wife! And the wife could not have been more than twelve, at most. Insisting his dying wife be released to him to be taken home, it was apparent the man was not even moved by the sight of his dying wife who had been bleeding almost non stop for close to two hours.

Salihu, and that was the husband’s name, arrived with his under aged wife at the government run village clinic when all efforts by traditional birth attendants to deliver her proved futile. For the nine months the wife carried her pregnancy, she never for a day accessed the services provided by the ante natal clinic within the locality. Not that there was much to be accessed by pregnant women at the clinic anyway! More trouble was waiting for the dying young lady.

First the husband insisted that only a female Muslim medical doctor would attend to his wife. Later, he ‘yielded’ ground and requested for the services of a male medical doctor but who must be a Muslim. None was available: the most senior health worker at the clinic was a lone youth corps member who was on ‘call’ once in a fortnight. That was when Salihu really got angry: he was not going to have the youth corps member touch his dying wife. The poor lady died on the way back home. She became just another victim of negative traditional practices; another classic case of gender based violence.

What is gender based violence?

For conveniences purposes, we shall look at gender based violence as anything a man does with the conscious or unconscious intention of hurting or harming a lady, woman or young girl. It does not really matter whether the act was carried out by a husband against his wife or by a father to his daughter. If you use abusive language or deny a girl the opportunity to go to school or send your daughter to go out hawking on the streets, you are abusing such a girl or woman. If a parent withdraws his or her daughter from school and go ahead to force that girl into marriage, that parent is abusing his daughter. That is gender based violence:  violence act against you, a girl, simply because you are a girl or a woman. Rape, which is when a boy or boys or a man forces a girl and sleep with her is violence. It is criminal! Even a husband should not force his wife before sleeping with her. In times of crisis or war, we hear cases of men forcing young girls and women to sleep with them. This is war crime. Apart from being a criminal act, rape is responsible for the spread of diseases such as HIV/AIDS.