Upon us looms the annual 16 days of activism against violence, emblazoned on posters and all sorts of advertising media will be a close-up shot of a battered and bruised, vulnerable and afraid woman – that whose scars are unmistakable.
Embedded in the images will be a nameless bruised and unrecognisable woman, whose scars speak when her words can no longer carry her. But violence against women, particularly young women in marriage, is far more than just a fist to the chest or a kick in the abdomen – it can take the form of an emotional nature.
The emotional abandonment, the repeated use of culture to hold women in subjection, the reminder that lobola was paid, the expectation that a woman must remember her place – in its own form, in its veiled and underhanded kind of way, a form of abuse.
The truth is that, emotional abuse is real. Husbands and their families with their expectations that a good wife deserts her previous life in order for her marriage to work – the pressure just too much.
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The boundaries constantly being set up as her stumbling blocks in life, the constant draining and draining of anything and everything that she can possibly have to offer, and even her reserve energies … even just to get married.
As things stand, he ought to be giving up those late nights out drinking, the expectation for more from another when he does not really measure up, then you emotionally blackmail the woman and so does your family when the head of the house does not get his way.
Far too many women in South Africa are living with emotional abusers and by extension, emotionally abusive in-laws. And in all of this, repetitive conferences and summits, of nonsensical rhetoric … meanwhile women are dying. I’m hopeless.
Society, particularly black society, fails to identify the cries for help because “women are expected to persevere, these are the hardships of marriage, the covenant made before God cannot be broken.” She is left questioning her sanity because she has no physical scars that serve as evidence.
