CULTURE-MALAWI: Women Still Harassed for What They Wear

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Frank Phiri

BLANTYRE, Oct 22 2003 (IPS) - One morning Maria Lucas (not her real name) was walking across the busy Haile Selassie road that pierces into the heart of the commercial hub, Blantyre, when she was seized by a gang of unruly street vendors.

The unsuspecting 34-year-old expatriate volunteer worker was dressed in a tight-fitting miniskirt when the gang attacked her.

They knocked her down, as they hungrily scrambled to undress her and force their way down into her knickers in an attempt to rape her. But some good Samaritans intervened just in the knick of time, foiling the gang’s sinister plot and whisking her to safety.

“I still feel disgusted about what happened. It was so brutal and inhuman,” recalls Lucas, who works for an international non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Malawi.

Enraged by the incident, women lobby groups staged a protest march in the city, denouncing the attack on the woman.

Lucas was part of the march, which grabbed the attention of the city as the protestors waved a copy of the Malawi Constitution in the air. Some held placards, carrying angry messages like ‘Castrate All Rapists’.

Lucas is not the only victim of sexual harassments in Malawi.

Police say there has been an increase in the prevalence of incidents where women and young girls have been raped or harassed for wearing what their attackers describe as ‘sexually revealing and arousing clothes’.

“The trend has resurfaced after almost being wiped out. It’s deplorable,” says George Chikowi, police spokesperson in Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi.

He says out of every 10 suspected crimes reported to police every day, five involved women who have either been raped or harassed by men who attempted to rape them.

The increasing prevalence of rape cases has sparked a debate in Malawi with women’s groups suspecting stereotypes to be playing a major role.

“Our men refuse to change their mindset. But they have no excuse because freedom of dress is enshrined in the constitution, and these are modern times,” says Emma Chanika, executive director of the Civil Liberties Committee.

She says rape culminates in a crime bordering on morality and on harming another person’s body – in a country where AIDS affects more than 10 percent of the country’s population.

Despite a transition to a multi-party democracy in 1994, the dark era of the late dictator Hastings Banda, who enforced a strict dress code, refuses to die with him.

In Banda’s Malawi for over 30 years, wearing of trousers, miniskirts and other tight-fitting clothes by women was banned. Banda himself strictly guarded what he preached, preferring his ‘mbumba’ (women cheer leaders) to dress in the traditional long and sweeping wrappers (zilundu) that run from the neck and kissed the toes. Banda wore smart suits and necktie, a homburg cap replete with a flywhisk.

Lucas believes there is more to the stereotyping than meets the eye.

“It’s a question of mentality and refusing to adjust to the times. This country seems to have a long way to go before people learn to respect the freedom of dress,” she says.

Margaret Kubwalo, acting chairperson of Young Women Leaders Network, says police and the courts are failing to do their job. She accuses them of being lax and of handing out soft sentences.

“If these villains were punished enough, these cases would have been history now. They are excited because the punishment is soft and somehow, they know that nobody really cares out there,” she says.

Kubwalo suggests stiffer sentences of not less than 14 years imprisonment with hard labour. Currently a rapist attracts a maximum sentence of seven years in prison, which is hardly ever handed out.

Penelope Kamanga, a gender columnist with Malawi News, says “women face insurmountable obstacles in trying to bring perpetrators to justice”.

But police spokesperson Chikowi says law enforcement officers do everything possible to bring culprits to book, although a lot of cases still go unreported.

“The problem is not the police. We charge the suspects and hand them over to courts. From there it is the evidence that counts,” he says.

Invoking the old adage ‘prevention is better than cure’, Chikowi advises women not to tread where they feel they will not be safe from would-be rapists.

Malawi is not the only African country where women are harassed for what they wear. Swaziland, Sudan, Somalia and northern Nigeria have all enforced a strict dress code for women.