Women getting no protection against high levels of abuse, says Amnesty

Up to two-thirds of women in and around Nigeria's biggest city Lagos have suffered some form of abuse at the hands of family members sometimes simply for not having dinner on the table, Amnesty International said on Tuesday as it urged the government to do more to help them. In a report entitled “Nigeria: Unheard Voices”, the human rights group said the widespread gender violence was enveloped by silence and that state authorities did nothing to stop the attacks happening, in some cases even going so far as to condone them. "On a daily basis, Nigerian women are beaten, raped and even murdered by members of their family for supposed transgressions, which can range from not having meals ready on time to visiting family members without their husband's permission," said Stephane Mikala, deputy director of Amnesty's Africa Programme. Amnesty said there were no official statistics but estimated that up to two-thirds of women in certain communities in Lagos State had been the victims of physical, sexual or psychological violence in the family. Some of the worst cases mentioned in the study included women who had been given 'acid baths'. "Ronke from Lagos died of her injuries after she had acid thrown over her allegedly by her husband's younger brother," the report said. "Her husband had died from a stroke but when she attended his funeral... she was apparently accused of wanting to kill him." Amnesty said that abuses against women were typically carried out by their husbands, partners or fathers and said this familial connection was one reason why not much state help was on offer. "The police and courts often dismiss domestic violence as a family matter and refuse to investigate or press charges," said Itoro Eze-Anaba of the Lagos-based Legal Defence and Assistance Project (LEDAP), which helped research the study. Even when the attacker is not related to the victim, justice was not forthcoming, Amnesty said. "It was Folake who was jailed after she accused a man of rape," the report recounted. "She said her employer's husband had forced her into his bedroom and made her watch a violent videotape before forcing her to have sex. A medical examination supported her allegation. Yet she was the one brought to court, charged with slander for making the accusation and remanded in prison until her family could raise the bail money." According to Amnesty International, the situation in Lagos is reflective of the level of domestic violence across Africa’s most populous country of more than 126 million people. The report acknowledged that some legal reforms were slowly being enacted. It cited a federal Violence Against Women Bill that recently received its first reading in the National Assembly, and the fact that local authorities in Lagos State were currently mulling the first state-level bill on violence in the family. "Yet massive levels of family violence remain untouched by these developments," Amnesty said. "In most cases, the criminal justice system fails to offer protection, justice or redress to women who have been subjected to violence in the home." It also pointed out that where laws do exist, their provisions are often discriminatory to women. For instance, Amnesty said, the punishment prescribed by the Nigerian criminal code for indecent assault against a man is three years imprisonment, while the punishment for the same offence committed against a woman is only two years. And marital rape is explicitly excluded from the definition of rape and is therefore not a crime, the rights group said. In its recommendations, Amnesty called on the government of President Olusegun Obasanjo to monitor violence against women in the home more closely, take legislative action to stem it, end judicial discrimination against women and take measures to challenge the social prejudices that encourage the gender violence.