Family and s-xual violence is a crisis facing the women and children of Papua New Guinea.

Recent data shows that 50% of PNG’s women have been r-ped in their own homes and 68% of women have been subjected to physical violence.

The Family and S-xual Violence Action Committee (FSVAC) was established in 2000, as the women of PNG were saying, when the country was celebrating independence, we had nothing to celebrate. We were being beaten, r-ped and murdered. So we decided that there should be a peak body established to reduce the violence that we see in our country.

Why do we call this problem “family and s-xual 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. 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. Incest is a traditional practice allowed in our matrilineal societies to retain land by the brother’s family. None of this is reported to the police.

This is why we say family violence. And when we are talking about combatting family and s-xual violence, we are also talking about changing our own way of life (for example, the practice of incest in matrilineal societies). 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. 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. For instance, a woman will keep quiet about s-xual abuse because she does not want to see her family hurt.

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, r-pe and even murder them?

There are many myths about this violence. When a woman goes long-long (mad), people say it’s sorcery, it’s never the husband’s fault. And sometimes we PNG women believe that when a husband hits us, it means that he loves us or is jealous. Often you will see even our highly educated women continue to live their lives through their husbands, with everything being about him. But tomorrow, if he walks out, he will leave her with nothing. Many times we make excuses for the violence that we see, blaming it on culture or alcohol and drugs. So our own understanding of domestic violence is confused, and we continue to accept living like this.

From what we see, the age group that is witnessing the most s-xual violence — whether it is gang r-pe, r-pe in the home, or r-pe by a father or step-father — are those between the ages of five and 19.

The other thing we are now seeing, because the status of women is so low, is a lack of interest from parents to make sure their daughters have opportunities. As a result, many young girls are getting married at a very early age. In Papua New Guinea, we have 733 maternal deaths for every 100,000 births. More women die in childbirth in PNG than in any other Pacific country. One of the many reasons for this is because women are having babies at such a young age, when they are still girls. By the time they are 21 years old they might already have three children.

And so the story goes on. Whether we are living in mining areas, in villages or in the towns, this is the story of life for PNG women. Every time PNG participates in international human rights events, we say the different ribbons we wear tell a story of a PNG woman: blue, s-xually/abused as a child; white, beaten up as an adult; red, infected and died from HIV/AIDs.

The only laws now available in the country are assault laws, and these are currently used to charge perpetrators for physical injuries, while s-xual abuses are addressed under the 2002 Amended Criminal Code and Evidence Act. We are now working on the Family Protection Bill. We hope it will go through so that we can actually take those causing violence within families to court and have them charged for an offence under the term domestic violence.

We need more facilities to help women and families. We can’t just look to developed countries for examples, we need to look at what we can offer ourselves. Right now, we have established family support centres where battered women and children can go for immediate medical treatment and psychosocial support. There are now about 15 of these centres in the country, and we have seen around 12,000 women come through them in six years. But this only counts those who are willing to come, and these centres are not available everywhere.

Another thing that we urgently need is to establish services for men. For example, if a man cannot get an erection, he then blames his wife and beats her up. So we need men to also understand their own health problems.

* Ume Wainetti is the national co-ordinator of the PNG Family and S-xual Violence Action Committee. This is an excerpt from a piece posted on the Development Policy Blog, which is run out of the ANU and covers aid and development analysis, focussed on the Pacific.

** Photograph by Vlad Sokhin.