Women who live in agony of domestic abuse

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BY Njai ka Wambui

Nairobi, Kenya

8^th of March 2021

Imagine paying all the bills in the house while your man is busy flipping channels and playing video games.  To add salt into the ulcer he beats you and abuses you. That’s the story of Jane (not her real name).

In her beautiful smile endowed with a natural gap, you will think that she has everything figured out in life. Jane is a greengrocer at the east of Kiambu county in a small town called Gitaru, Kenya.  She is a hardworking woman who has beaten all odds to be where she is now.  I get vegetables from her shop but on this particular day, I was not there for vegetables. I had noticed bruises severally and I wanted to probe further.

I asked about the bruise on her hand and for a minute she did not want to talk about it, but her face uttered a thousand words in a split of a second. I could see a sense of defeat as she tried to find the right words. At last, she opened about and told that they were from last evening night when her husband battered her. For some reason, she seemed to trust me.

“Hizi ni mzee aliniweka jana,” (this is from the man of the house), she said.  These are just minor ones I may say, I’ve nursed worst,” she added. Jan e had a flourishing marriage.  A working husband, children in school and everything was perfect and normal until when COVID-19 came and her husband lost his job.

“My husband lost his job when COVID-19 came last year and since then he does not bother to look for a job. What angers me the most is that he abuses me and calls me all manner of names in the presence of the kids”, she said fighting tears back.

Jane is among many women in Kenya who are suffering from domestic violence. Since the COVID-19 stroke, there were massive job losses as companies closed down as others downscale their operations hence retrenching their staff. Jane’s husband was among the affected.

 Another woman came in — let’s call her Grace, and before she could buy vegetables she told Jane that she was going to move and that she should discontinue her monthly supply of milk. She said she was leaving for her mother’s place. At this juncture, we were both curious as to why she was moving in the middle of the month and worse still to her mother’s place.

“ Nimechoka kukaa na mwanaume kwa nyumba kila wakati ni ugomvi na hakuna kitu analeta,” Jane, (I’ve given up staying with a man in the house who does nothing apart from quarrels), Grace said.

In what seemed like the same script different characters. Both their husbands lost their jobs and are stay home men.  Interestingly the two women said that their men did nothing, not even clean utensils after eating or even tidying the house.

“I leave for work at 7 a.m. every day after preparing to do all the chores in the morning, I prepare him to lunch, but I’ll find dirty utensils, and he’ll be sitting at the couch playing video games, “Grace lamented

According to a survey by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics, more than 300,000 people lost their jobs after Covid-19 struck.  This being just a small estimate as many people from the informal sector and self-employed people lost jobs too which were not accounted for. Before that, about 9.89 m women were working according to the 2019 census.

Government statistics shows that two out of three women in Kenya have experienced violence both sexually and physical violence and worse still very few get treatment get or justice. In many cases women also don’t know that they are being abused for it’s done by perpetrators in a cunning yet, in an exploitive manner, emotional and mental abuse.

Mutemi Kungu a counselor at Jamii na Afya clinic says that women are not to be providers s but the managers of what the head of the house.  She added that men nowadays don’t want to take responsibility citing that may be when growing up they did not get a mentor to tell them how a man should behave.

“The problem we are having now is that men are not taking fully their responsibility, for they lack mentorship when growing up,” she noted.

“What will people say if I leave my marriage, and we did a church wedding?”, asked Jane.

Mutemi said that no one should stay in marriage because of the kids or because they did a wedding. She cited that if it gets worse, you’ll leave them behind.

“Children or a church wedding should not make you a prisoner in an abusive marriage, if it gets worse you will die and people will still talk,” she argued.

She also urged men not to be lazy and show some effort by helping in house chores if they are not working noting that house roles got no gender delegation.

 ‘Women in Leadership’. It is this year’s International women’s day theme. And even as the title suggests, there is more that needs to be done to protect women even as they manage the family unit. Doc Jarvis a family doctor at St James Mirema Hospital noted that women need to be protected to give their optimum productivity. “A woman will deliver better if she feels appreciate and secure,” he argued. He further noted that cases of domestic violence have risen since the Covid-19 era pointing that he encounters almost 3 cases every week.