When the year began, two women suffered miscarriages after they were beaten up by police in the border town of Beitbridge.

They were suspected of being prostitutes, apprehended and then they were assaulted to the extent of losing the pregnancies they were carrying.

Perhaps they were prostitutes, perhaps they were not but one thing is certain – when we live in a society that insists on pushing some of its members to the margins by discriminating and stigmatizing them – it is inevitable that we increase the vulnerability of such individuals.

Their exclusion and ostracism serves no purpose other than making them easy prey for those in position of power and who would not hesitate to abuse that power.

Yet for the greater part, there is a tacit approval of these violent acts because they affirm the prejudices of our society, they are premised on the moral judgments people make about women who prostitute themselves either through overt means by selling their bodies in return for money or those who covertly prostitute themselves by acquiescing to be the mistresses of married men for economic gain.

Addressing at a two-day regional conference hosted by SAfAIDS on a series “changing the river’s flow examining the HIV/Culture confluence”, Jason Wessenaar the Project Director of Siyazi Counselling and Testing Project made the very astute observation that while culture helps us to make sense of the world around us by giving people a sense of identity and belonging, it also governs human behaviour.

So our intolerances, our prejudices and our bigotry are a reflection of our cultural beliefs and our interpretation of what is appropriate and what is unacceptable conduct.

Remarking on the limitations of culture, he pointed out that, “culture is a tool that can be used to empower or exclude, exploit and control” members of a society.

What we cannot tolerate reflects what our deep-rooted convictions and beliefs are, yet using Wessener’s observation that culture is a lens we use to view the world, as a premise, how do we then know that what we perceive as reality is in fact so and not just a consequence of the lens we are using to view it?

We push women to the margins, increase their vulnerability, ostracize them and give them an “otherness” such that they have no choice but to engage in more risky behaviour – pushed to the limits, their desperation will drive them to the extremes.

Whilst we bemoan the prevalence of small houses, of women engaging in long term relationships with married men, of men having multiple concurrent sexual relations – we need to find out why and how women avail themselves to these relationships.

One lady remarked in response to my column, “No girl grows up dreaming of one day becoming a small house, not one. But I know there are many boys who grow up dreaming of one day having a small house.” So when one would seek to interrogate what happened to that girl, who never dreamed of becoming a small house? How did she get here? What are the circumstances and situations that led her down this path?

The thing with culture is that it makes us not think about our behaviour or attitudes, it makes us not examine our beliefs, we take them for granted, we take for granted that what we think, assume of life and our perceptions of reality is accurate, altruistic and infallible.

“Culture is a lens we use to understand other people we interact with, and this often leads to us judging, imposing, discriminating and labeling,” noted Wessener.

I submit that the girl who never to be a small house, an appendage like the rose on a man’s laurel – grew up and found that she couldn’t clothe her own back, couldn’t fill her stomach, couldn’t afford a roof on her head and had no prospects whatsoever.

So she decided to pawn herself off to any man who so much as asked, married or not – where did society fail her or did she fail herself?

Did all these small houses and prostitutes fail themselves?

I think not.

I think women who are empowered make choices that are not harmful to them or that impinge on their sense of dignity.

I identify lack, as the key reason why small houses exist, why prostituting oneself becomes an option for most women. Something other than payment of lip service needs to be done to empower women, to elevate their status and to work towards addressing the gender imbalances inherent in our culture.

Whatever else society may label these women – the truth is that we as a society are all diminished by their continued humiliation or coercion along sexual lines.

As we continue to push them to the margins, we increase their vulnerability, we increase their desperation and ultimately we push them to the limits and possible over the edge.

This entry was posted on April 14th, 2010 at 11:56 am by Delta Ndou and is filed under Governance, Reflections, Uncategorized, Women's issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.