Source: The Observer
The ministry of Gender, Labour and Social Development, in partnership with Uganda's development partners, has for two years now held a campaign dubbed "16 Days of Activism against Gender Based Violence in Uganda."

 

The campaign, which was launched in December, 2009, was meant to rally everyone who is committed to unflinchingly fight Gender Based Violence and end the vice.

In this light, I commend President Yoweri Museveni who pushed for the ratification of the United Nations Security Council Resolutions (UNSCR) 1325 and 1820 and the Goma Declaration. The UNSCR and Goma Declaration seek to protect women and young girls in conflict zones.

These resolutions were enacted by the UN Security Council with a view to underscoring the role women play in enhancing peace and security in conflict prone areas where perpetrators of violence use rape as a weapon of war.

Much as the statistics are telling on the situation in Africa and other Third World countries, women and girls in the developed countries have not been spared either.

It is reported that in the UK, one woman gets killed, physically assaulted or raped every week. In USA, which is considered the model of the free world, about 12% of females suffer sexual assault annually. Worldwide, at least three in seven women have been raped.

Teenage girls form the largest proportion of victims of this kind of violence. Most of them are forced into early marriages by their parents or guardians in exchange for material gain, and they are more often than not married off to men old enough to be their grandfathers.

These girls find themselves trapped in abusive marriages and relationships whereby they can't fight back in case of assault by their beastly husbands.

Such helpless teenage wives and mothers would rather suffer silently as they get tortured and humiliated by their husbands than come out in the open for fear of getting embarrassed.

The rural poor and illiterate teenage mother, mostly in Africa, is the one who receives the heaviest dose of Gender Based Violence. Men feel it's their prerogative to assault or torture them whenever they feel like it. It is an attitude that is ingrained in the African man's mindset.

This means that all efforts for the victims' emancipation from violence must be geared towards reaching out to the African man with a view to persuading him that battering and mistreating women is a thing of the past.

Eradication of violence against teenage mothers requires massive reach-out programmes through seminars and workshops, especially in rural areas. Unfortunately, most of the seminars and workshops are usually held in urban centres like Kampala, where elite participants sign for huge allowances while the real victims, the rural teenage mothers and women, continue living in inescapable violent relationships.

The rural folk need most of these seminars and workshops. Government and her development partners should devote more funds to addressing this issue.

Teenage mothers should be more economically empowered so that they do not solely depend on their husbands for survival, as it has been observed that the high dependence of women on men's income is one of the major causes of Gender Based Violence.

And our failure as leaders, and society in general, to appreciate the fundamental problems that teenage mothers would go through on a daily basis at the gruesome hands of their partners is what would also fuel infanticide.

Hardly a day goes by without reports of mothers, especially young mothers, killing their own children as a revenge mechanism against their abusive husbands.

• Uganda