Violence from the bush to the home

The joint counselling session of a married couple seemed to have gone well. In fact so cooperative was her husband, a lecturer at an institute in the capital Luanda, that after three months of being apart, 34-year-old Juliana and her three young children were advised by her lawyer to return home. Juliana followed the advice. But the next day, she was back at the counselling centre, run by the Angola Women's Organisation. This time alone with her three children. Dressed elegantly in a crisp green and white African print cloth and matching top, her head held high, Juliana, who did not want her full name used, explained to IRIN what had just happened. "My husband asked me why I had returned. Then he grabbed my head and put his fingers in my ears, pressing hard." She demonstrated how he crushed her head with his hands. "Then he punched my face and squeezed my neck and kicked me." Her face stood testimony to the morning of terror she had endured. Juliana had a cut and swollen cheek the size of a golf ball, red bruises around her neck and grazes on her legs. The counsellor looked bemused. Even one of the other young women, who was recovering from a broken jaw, meted out by her husband, was shocked. "But her husband was here yesterday listening so well," said the young woman shaking her head. "My husband always beats me. I can't talk in that house. Before I left the other time, he beat me because US $20 went missing. Then he found it in his nephew's pocket," said Juliana. Juliana is not an unusual case. Domestic violence has fertile ground to grow. Decades of war have broken down traditional coping mechanisms, four million people have been uprooted, educational opportunities especially for women are poor, unemployment is high especially for urban men, (the women are absorbed to some extent in the informal sector) and abject poverty is widespread. "Most of us have grown up only knowing war," said Arnaldo Junior, the executive director of an Angolan association working with those living with HIV/AIDS. He said that many of the women who come to the association are divorced or separated and many have suffered violence. "It is a problem of education. We have just grown up in a time of violence. We learnt that you can kill a person like you kill a chicken." However, statistics of domestic violence are unreliable because most cases are kept secret in the home and go unreported. In the counselling centre where Juliana sought help, which is staffed by 12 people, over 100 cases of domestic violence are dealt with each week. One of the counsellors, Joanna de Jesus, said over 90 percent of the complaints come from women. Many of them suffer severe physical violence, "some of them even worse than Juliana", she added. The media are gradually taking up the story of domestic violence. In the state-owned daily newspaper Journal de Angola, a report on 14 October said cases of domestic violence were growing in Luanda. The article said that a state counselling centre recorded 1,820 cases in the first quarter of the year. Some of the cases involved firearms. Ten female and four male print and broadcast journalists had the chance to participate in a five-day workshop last week on how to improve the coverage of gender violence in the media. Solange Machado, an Angolan lawyer, discussed with the journalists about the cases she had personally dealt with. She agreed that the war, and resulting poverty, has directly or indirectly put a lot of pressure on families. "Some of the women I see have injuries that will be with them for life," she said. The workshop was organised by Gender Links, a southern African organisation that promotes gender equality, in collaboration with the Mozambique-based NSJ Trust that specialises in media training in the subregion. One of the participants, a 45-year-old TV journalist and a mother of six, had been subjected to both psychological and physical violence from her husband for many years. She had married at the age of 16 years after her mother forced her to leave school at 14 years. "My mother felt I needed to learn how to keep a home and to have children." The violence started when Maria, not her real name, started to work in the provincial radio station while studying at night. Her husband did not accept either. The physical violence came when she decided to spend Christmas with her family. "I was pregnant with my sixth child, but he beat me in my stomach until I bled." Maria did not lose her baby, but had to spend one month in hospital recovering. Then she moved with her children to Luanda. That was 20 years ago and she has not seen her husband since, nor does she want to. But she still has not managed to get a divorce. As for Juliana, her future is now uncertain. Like many urban Angolan women, she works as a trader in the informal sector. Juliana said she no longer wants to return to her husband and will have to survive with her children alone. The immediate plans however, explained the counsellor, were to accompany Juliana to the police station to report the crime. Then she would be taken to see a doctor. It suddenly became too much for Juliana. She sat down on a small wall in the garden outside the centre and sobbed softly into a handkerchief, while her children stood helplessly by.