Domestic Violence, From Theory to Practice

It was a crispy Friday afternoon in Yaounde, I was resource person to a three days seminar on domestic violence, and my presentation was entitled “Mitigating domestic violence, filling the gabs with genuine love” talking to a cross-section of women and men from development NGOs, I passed on my message, capacitating them to stand up and fight domestic violence stating from their respective homes and then expanding to the communities in which they found themselves.

My audience was attentive, imbibing all I had to say and asking questions where necessary. At the close of the day, I went home satisfied, knowing that I had imparted knowledge that would be replicated in different communities latter on and that my objective would have been on the way to realization. This constituted my reflections as I drove home that day counting the day as a blessed Friday.

The next Sunday morning, I was on my way back church, so happy to have listened to an eloquent pastor preach as if he had attended my lesson the Friday before. A dynamic Pastor, he handled the sermon so well, bringing out Biblical explanations of why domestic violence should not be condoned in the Christian community. Had I known (always Mr. Late) earlier on that this was going to be his theme; I would have invited my seminarians to come for filed work.

Reflecting over this as I slammed on the horn of my car inviting an ever sleepy security guard to open the gate, I noticed from my driver’s mirror that a woman was descending behind me. The gates were flunked open and I drove into the yard. I had barely settled down over a glass of orange juice when the guard came in to announce that a woman wanted to see me. Well I almost shouted on him for accepting visitors at such an hour given that I had earlier on given firm instructions that I don’t entertain visitors on Sundays immediately after Church service. He insisted that the woman was in pain and crying. This told me something way up and so I thus gave instructions for the woman to be shown in right away.

As unbelievable as it turned out to be, the woman was one of my seminarian the previous Friday, she actually tailed me all the way to my house. Her face was swollen and she had all the brushes one can imagine all over her body. She told me that she was on her way back from the hospital and decided to stop by to have a chat with me and to seek my advice on what options to take.

She recounted a pathetic story about a fight she was engaged in with her husband the previous day, in fact just a day after the seminar. She told me the fight erupted during a dispute over some money (her money for that matter) she had used to pay the child’s school fees without the husband’s consent. She told me that her reason for not informing her husband about her intensions was because she knew he would have collected the money and that would have been it while the child stayed on out of school for fees.

I did a few phone calls, calling a friend who’s a senior commissioner of police and another, a social welfare worker. When they arrived, she recounted her story and I told my friends to deal accordingly with the husband if it turns out that he had no justification (which I was sure he hadn’t) to put the wife under such pains.

I pleaded with my friends to make good use of the law to teach such a nasty husband that gone are the days when men still torture their wives physically for what ever reason. This happened barely a month after I handled my tenth case of domestic violence. I was more than determined to use the case at hand to sound a lasting warning to perpetual perpetrators of domestic violence against women that we are in an epoch in which such barbarism must end.