Post 274.

Zi came home from school with minor injuries. A boy had pushed her down making her bleed from her knee. Another day, one kicked her in the neck, somehow, and it hurt her for a week. Next time, a third hit her in her eye. The physical violence wasn’t purposeful, the boys were being wild. But I wondered if there was a later lesson, that men can behave how they choose and women must learn to manage their own safety or risk injury.

The fact of ‘boys being boys’ as the denominator of social rules isn’t good enough when spaces are shared. One of the boys was also calling her and other children names. I said she should tell him not to call her names, she doesn’t like it and to stop. She said, he wouldn’t listen and would anyway. I said tell the other boys that they have to make sure how they want to behave doesn’t hurt others, including her. She said they wouldn’t care. I said, tell your teachers. She said, they just say, don’t worry about it and go play somewhere else, so she stopped saying anything.

Is this how gender-based violence becomes familiar, when girls realise that they cannot state their right to not be insulted or injured and have it heard, thus changing boys’ behaviour? When there is impunity and lack of accountability about respect and safety in shared spaces, raising these realities gets read as advocating the feminisation of childhood, but something else is at stake when girls learn to stay silent and be more careful.

Zi wasn’t prepared to press her point or fight back, risking further rough play to defend her terms, so she experienced a moment of socialisation about silence, inability to change the conditions she experiences, and responsibility for her safety. Sound familiar? I began thinking about what she’d need to be able to state her fair needs and rights as a basis for autonomy, sovereignty and empowerment.

I thought about continued government failure to implement gender-based violence programmes in schools or preventative programmes in social life. Global literature will tell you that gender ideologies –  beliefs and values about manhood and womanhood, their roles, and their right to different forms and expressions of self and power – are at the heart of violence against women.

Other factors, whether interpersonal conflict, substance abuse, economic insecurity and infidelity, are triggers, and sometimes consequences, but not the cause.  A country that takes such violence seriously would systematically transform our gender ideologies, giving girls greater practice stating the terms of their relationships with others, and refusing verbal or physical violence and harm.

People think women are too empowered or have ‘too much equality’, but the numbers of applications for protection orders, the deaths from intimate partner violence, and rates of sexual violence against girls and women tells a different story.

Religious messages are those most pervasive and least likely to emphasise the legitimacy of women having full sovereign power over their own bodies, sexuality and reproduction. Pastoral care often reminds women of the sanctity of marriage to men, the need to respect husbands as authority figures, and the necessity of sacrifice for peace in the family.

Male violence is backed by surprisingly common ideas that women don’t have the right to decide when the relationship is done and should peacefully cooperate with practices of male culture and control.

Do girls have the right to state what they want and how they want to be treated, and to have that respected? Do they have the right to say no to insult or aggression? When do they get to practice the skills they need to stop any experiences of violence?

Neither state nor society takes preventative programmes seriously enough to stop violence against women. Seeing those moments of gender socialization that don’t help either stops all my public activism in its tracks and makes me wonder.