By Favour Nnabugwu

Adetutu’s domestic abuse story started like so many others with occasional violent attacks which she ignored in the interest of the family. But over time, the beating became so severe that she could no longer bear it.

Adetutu did not have a history of abuse until she got married to her husband, Ademola. She recognised it when it began, yet she was drawn into it as the society brainwashed her into accepting that violent behavior of her husband was part of the terms of marriage. It was only after 17years of marriage that she finally realised what had been happening, and that it was time to put an end to it.

Mrs. Adetutu Ademola and her husband have four children together in the 17 years whereas those years were not enough for her husband to endure or, at least, tolerate his wife. It was battering all the way.

Sunday Vanguard met Adetutu at a hairdressing salon. She opened the injuries sustained from her husband’s battering to the owner of the salon while our correspondent joined them.

Mrs. Udonta…I blame 90 percent of domestic violence on men

The woman, in her early 40s, said she reported the matter to the police where she was told there was little or nothing they could do in family matters. She did threaten to go to National Human Rights Commission and also file for divorce.

Adetutu is just one out of the many wives and ladies that increasingly receive beating from their husbands and boyfriends on daily basis in Abuja.

Woman beaters, often times, cannot endure a simple matter. A woman regularly gets the beating of her life if she failed to set the table on time or maybe dinner was not just right; or maybe she decided to escort her best friend without telling her spouse about it beforehand; or maybe nothing happened at all, she is just a steady punch bag for her man.

In this present day, men who pound their wives and girlfriends senselessly are viewed as out-of-control barbarians, violent and virulent, often drunk on liquor or power or both. And, lately too, women have come to realize that they can no longer turn blind eyes to the plight of battering hence they have started voicing out in preparedness to set themselves free from those slave drivers.

A self-confessed victim of domestic violence, Mrs Nsini Udonta, now Shelter Administrator of Project Alert on Violence against Women, who claimed to have escaped death by whiskers in the hands of her husband of 12 years, said she has regained her self-esteem after losing it to fear all those years.

Speaking to Sunday Vanguard on her new life after three years of leaving her husband whom she has two sons for, Nsini admitted that life after domestic violence could be challenging but consoled herself with her strong will and determination to move on in life.

Nsini said, “A woman is vulnerable. Not all the men that come around her have genuine intentions. A woman must be able to set the limits to which she can endure any form of abuse from a man.

“The past three years has been challenging and it has been a learning process for me.  I have been able to discover my inner will and my purpose on earth. I have regained m y self-esteem. I no longer live in fear. Though I may not have all the comfort at my disposal now, I have peace, and rest of mind which I cannot trade for anything in the world again.

“I deserve to be happy. I cannot bring up my godly children in an abusive home as they may end up being abusers too.  My two boys know they have to respect a girl no matter the provocation. Marriage, for me, is not a do-or-die affair. Violence is not part of God’s plan for marriage; as such, violence should never be endured.

“There must always be disagreement between couples but issues can be resolved without violence especially when good communication and understanding exist in a home”.

Behavioral researchers argue that alcohol, joblessness, possessiveness, stress, insecurity, frustration, lack of money problems are not enough precipitants of abuse.

On the other hand, batterers claim that smacking or beating a spouse or girlfriend frightens the victim and allows the batterer to get his own way. “Those men tend to be desperate about keeping their wives and beating them to prevent them from leaving,” Mr Samuel Abioye, a Marriage Counselor, said. “They are miserable, suffering low self-esteem, and are vulnerable to stress and hostility. They use battering to control their partners.

“The violent partner might conceive his or her behavior as a ‘loss of control’, but the same individual, unsurprisingly, would not lose control in this way with a boss or friends”.

Sunday Vanguard investigations revealed that not all men who batter their women realize that what they do is wrong. Further findings proved that injuries from domestic violence range from cuts, bruises, and black eyes to miscarriage, bony injuries, splenic and liver trauma, partial loss of hearing or vision, and scars from burn or knife wounds.

Such violence is all too frequently excused and tolerated in communities where women are assigned an inferior role, subordinate to the male head of the family and effectively the property of their husbands.

On who is to blame for the violence in the home, Mr Kevin Ebhohimen, a quantity surveyor who spoke to Sunday Vanguard, heaped the blame on men.

“I blame 90 percent of domestic violence on men because a man has the ability to either control his anger or avoid it”, he said.

”It is only a stupid man that will lay his hands on his wife or any woman for that matter, no matter how provoked he may be.

“For me, it is an act of cowardice for any man to beat his woman no matter the provocation”.

Ebhohimen argued that men that beat their women do so out of frustration, insecurity and when they do not have money in their pockets, they tend to vent that anger on their wives.

“In my own view, a man may go to the extreme only when infidelity is involved, otherwise, l see no reason any man will beat a woman no matter how hard a woman tries to frustrate him”.

Interestingly, women and men in Nigeria are drawing attention to injustice and discrimination against women, and asserting the rights of women and girls who suffer violence in the home.

Women’s Rights Advancement and Protection Alternative (WRAPA), a non-governments organization, frowns at the unacceptable way men inflict injuries on their spouses in the course of domestic violence.

The Secretary-General of WRAPA, Hajia Saudatu Mahdi, said the organisation has been in existence since 1999 to eradicate the menace of violence against women.

Mahdi said some men hide under the guise of Section 55 (1) (d) of the Penal Code which gives men the right to chastise their wives, arguing that men have not only misinterpreted that section of the law but massively abused it.

“Some of those obnoxious laws give room for impunity and non-accountability by perpetrators while also making discriminatory provisions on form of punishment for violence against males and females”, she said.                 Mahdi confirmed that most cases of domestic violence handled by the NGO are perpetrated by the men while, in some cases, women contribute to the violence in their homes.

“WRAPA has been in the forefront of the passage of the Violence Against Persons Prohibition Bill (VAPP) Bill presently at the National Assembly. At a public hearing in March 2015, WRAPA and a host of women and human rights groups enjoined the outgoing lawmakers to write their name in gold by ensuring the passage of the bill before the end of the 7th Assembly”.

“The bill, when passed into law, will go a long way in curbing domestic and other forms of violence against all persons and in all locations where it occurs and irrespective of the gender of the perpetrator. This gender-neutral feature of the bill recognizes the fact that victims and perpetrators of violence can be men or women”, the WRAPA scribe stated.

Husbands, partners and fathers are responsible for most of the violence against women. The violence persists because discriminatory laws condone and even legalize certain forms of violence against women. Dismissive attitudes by the police and an inaccessible justice system compound the failures of the state to protect women’s rights. Speaking to Sunday Vanguard, FCT Police PRO, ASP Anjuguri Manzah, denied the police attitude to domestic violence.

”I think that is not true because we are out to intervene in situations to make sure things don’t go out of hand.  Our duty is to bring family members together in domestic violence and address contending issues while we make sure they go back home amicably”, Manzah said.

“We have a Gender Desk in our stations that deals with issues like that and we also have provision of security for such victims.

”It is our duty to investigate domestic violence whenever it comes up in our stations because the needful has to be done to avoid situations getting out of control. We do not and cannot treat such issue with levity”