![]() ![]() Often you will see even our highly educated women continue to live their lives through their husbands, with everything being about him. And sometimes we Papua New Guinea women believe that when a husband hits us, it means that he loves us or is jealous. When a woman goes long-long (mad), people say it’s sorcery, it’s never the husband’s fault. There are many myths about this violence. How do we help to change women’s minds/attitudes so they do not think it is OK for their husbands, brothers and fathers to beat, rape and even murder them? For instance, a woman will keep quiet about sexual abuse because she does not want to see her family hurt. In PNG community rights are more important than women’s rights and hence we see many times women agreeing to do things that would violate their rights. Men are expected to have control over their women and it is accepted that a man should correct his wife or sister to conform to the expectation of the community. And when we are talking about combatting family and sexual violence, we are also talking about changing our own way of life (for example, the practice of incest in matrilineal societies). Incest is a traditional practice allowed in our matrilineal societies to retain land by the brother’s family. It lets the other violence that is seen in our families fall through the cracks–when our brothers beat us up or kill us, where we are beaten by fathers for falling pregnant to men they don’t approve of, honour killings. Why do we call this problem ‘family and sexual violence’ when we could just say it is gender-based? Because when we talk about gender-based violence, we mostly see this as intimate partner violence. Through this network, we have also established committees in the provinces. The committee involves various sectors, with 81 member organisations. So we decided that there should be a peak body established to reduce the violence that we see in our country. We were being beaten, raped and murdered. This was because the women of Papua New Guinea were saying, when the country was celebrating independence, that we had nothing to celebrate. The Family and Sexual Violence Action Committee (FSVAC) was established in 2000. Recent data shows that 50% of Papua New Guinean women have been raped in their own homes and 68% of women have been subjected to physical violence. Family and sexual violence is a crisis facing the women and children of Papua New Guinea.
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