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NewsDay

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What drives men to such brutality?

Columnists
Nobody owns anybody, even their own flesh and blood, wife/husband or lover. This week NewsDay reported the brutal attack and disfigurement of a woman by her husband. The husband, consumed by jealous rage after suspecting her of cheating on him, attacked her with a machete, inflicting grisly injuries and completely severing her thumb. The picture […]

Nobody owns anybody, even their own flesh and blood, wife/husband or lover.

This week NewsDay reported the brutal attack and disfigurement of a woman by her husband.

The husband, consumed by jealous rage after suspecting her of cheating on him, attacked her with a machete, inflicting grisly injuries and completely severing her thumb.

The picture told it all! This amounted to sadistic torture.

Such brutality can never ever be justified under any circumstances, whether the spouse has cheated or not. Furthermore, why should one completely invest emotionally in another person as to totally lose his/her senses?

This can be, and is, extremely dangerous as shown by the machete attack. People should take charge of their lives and learn to esteem and love themselves first before extending such favours to others.

Only through that can they cultivate affections in which they relate well to others in a balanced, sober and mature way.

The husband now faces a long stretch in prison after being charged with attempted murder and the evidence against him is overwhelming.

These crimes of passion occur across all classes and ages, but in this case there could be a major catalyst which led to the attack.

A study in the United States early this decade established that victims of political violence were much more likely to engage in domestic violence against their partners.

Researchers interviewed men who immigrated to the US primarily from Latin America and found that those who experienced political violence either directly or indirectly were more than twice as likely to report that they had perpetrated violence (whether physical or sexual) against their partners within the past year.

In the most extreme cases, the participants reported being detained and tortured, or had family members disappear.

Others said they had witnessed people being tortured, raped, and even killed.

The factors triggering such violent reactions were found to be connected to mental trauma or post-traumatic stress syndrome, similar to what combat soldiers may experience following a tour of duty.

“The traumatic effects of political violence are long-lasting,” said lead author Dr Jhumka Gupta.

“These findings can help inform programmes that can ultimately work towards the prevention of male-perpetrated intimate partner violence in these communities.”

Gupta first became interested in the issue when she was working in a hospital in rural Haiti.

There was a spate of violence in Haiti at the time surrounding a coup, and she heard anecdotally from women treated in the hospital how they were being abused more by the men in their lives.

“I thought the issue was worth exploring, as such gender-based concerns are rarely given adequate attention during times of political crises,” she said.

“In addition to intimate partner violence against women, sexual assault of women and sex trafficking are also believed to be rampant during humanitarian crises.

Thus, the study findings have important implications for other settings affected by political conflict, and underscore the need for public health programmes to integrate gender-based violence concerns into overall programming.”

Political violence has been a fact of life in Zimbabwe, resurging in 2000 and peaking in 2008 during the run-up to the presidential election runoff.

Commercial farming communities such as Raffingora suffered immensely during the so-called Third Chimurenga, with workers targeted after the Zanu PF government for the first time, lost a national referendum and defeat loomed in the imminent parliamentary elections.

Hundreds of thousands of people were displaced as white-owned farms were virtually turned into war zones.

Whole families, entire communities going back generations in Zimbabwe were uprooted, sacrificed on the altar of cruel and cynical politics.

Farmworkers had to be removed for voting against Zanu PF’s wishes in the constitutional referendum.

A senior Zanu PF politician even went to the extent of declaring that they would be deported en masse to Malawi, Mozambique and Zambia, where they traced their ancestral roots.

During that dark chapter, there were many sorry sights of farmworkers and their families camped by the roadside with all their earthly possessions.

Communities were fractured with some completely destroyed. Now these places have become havens of anti-social behaviour such as crime and vice.

That was the tragic circus of those days. Violence, gratuitous violence, was glorified as politically macho and the ramifications are still being felt today, one of which could be last week’s brutal act of domestic violence in Raffingora.

Is it any surprise that the court this week refused to grant bail to the alleged attacker on the grounds that “he is of no fixed aboard, a nomadic tenant”?

How many thousands more are in such a predicament in the former predominantly white commercial farming areas?

There are many time-bombs waiting to explode in those fractured communities. They are like war victims; even the highest office in the land has labelled their kind “totemless”. When people became rootless, they react disproportionately; they become anarchic.

Now the nation could be rearing a whole generation of maladjusted people who could become a danger to themselves and others.

These are the yet-to-be-quantified heavy social costs of that physical and psychological dislocation. It’s time to heal and cure.

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