Violence against women should be universally condemned

Violence against women takes a sadness variety of forms, right from domestic abuse and rape to early child marriages and female circumcision. Such women violations are crucial fundamentals of human rights world over. Violence affects the lives of millions of women worldwide, in all socio-economic and educational classes. It cuts across cultural and religious barriers, impeding the right of women to participate fully in society. The dilemma of Rwanda in 1994 Genocide left a mark of women violence on the heart of every person in Rwanda and up to date a number of women are experiencing its effects. Women were subjected to sexual violence on a massive scale, perpetrated by members of the infamous Hutu militia groups known as the Interahamwe, by other civilians, and by soldiers of the Rwandan Armed Forces (FAR). The administrative, military and political leaders at the national and local levels, as well as heads of militia, were in charge of directing or encouraging both the killings and sexual violence to further their political goals of destroying the Tutsi as a group. Though men had nothing for excuse but only to be killed, raping of women was extremely widespread countrywide and thousands of women were individually raped, gang-raped, with objects such as sharpened sticks or gun barrels, held in sexual slavery either collectively or through forced marriage and sexually mutilated. Sometimes rapes were followed by sexual mutilation with machetes, knives, sticks, boiling water, and in some cases with acids. Jane who is a Genocide survivor with no source of income in Kicukiro revealed that she was gang-raped by a dozen of Interahamwe and later by chance, managed to escape and flee to her friend in Kayonza where she stayed throughout Genocide. Because the injuries she got took long time to get healed, she became physically lame. And even up to now she is still trying to recover from the brutal attacks that left her in constant pain, unable to bear children and even infected with sexually transmitted infections (STIs). When the Interahamwe came to our village, they gathered some of my family members into our grass thatched kitchen hut and set it on fire. hen they raped all the women including me, said Jane, lying on the ground because sitting for long hours is still painful. She added that; I am always exhausted and weak, I don’t think I can gain weight any more and I never sleep well because of the experiences I went through. In addition testimonies from African women presents a stark portrait of systematic violence including sexual torture, rape, and sexual slavery, which is sanctioned by both state and opposition forces as a tactic of war and a political act to terrorize communities. Rape is still being used as a weapon of war, a strategy used to subjugate and terrify entire communities. Soldiers deliberately impregnate women of different ethnic groups and abandon them when it is too late for them to get an abortion. Women in Sudan for example, are raped either to show the southerners how they have been defeated or that they do not have the right to object to the masters’ whims which southerners believe it’s a genocidal war. There is an over all violence against women in Africa in general and more particularly in the sub- Saharan Africa. Contact: pauluskayiggwa@yahoo.com