RIGHTS-CAMEROON: Report Paints Bleak Picture of Women’s Lives

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Sylvestre Tetchiada

YAOUNDE, Mar 12 2004 (IPS) - “The situation of women in this country is worrisome. At home, women are beaten, girls are sexually abused, there is violence linked to the dowry and there is marital rape,” says a new report about the challenges facing women in Cameroon.

“Surveys seem to indicate that at least a third of women are raped, beaten, forced to have sexual intercourse or mistreated in one way or another during the course of their lives,” it adds.

The document, released earlier this week (Mar. 8) to mark International Women’s Day, was published by the Association for the Promotion of Cameroonian Women (APFC) – a non-governmental organisation.

Written with the support of the United Nations Women’s Development Fund (UNIFEM), it also has little good news about the situation of women outside the home.

“In the community women are harassed, intimidated at work and in educational institutions. There is trafficking of women and children, as well as forced prostitution and numerous forms of discrimination.”

“Three-fifths of schoolgirls are victims of violence for no reason other than their gender,” says the report.

With cases of domestic abuse, however, women seldom press charges against their spouses – as they fear this might break up their marriages.

One of the few instances where the courts did probe domestic violence concerned a civil servant who was found guilty of murdering his wife after a prolonged period of physically abusing her. Last February, a court at Mbalmayo, some 50 kilometres south of the capital – Yaounde – sentenced the man to 20 years imprisonment.

Women’s activists say the spread of AIDS in Cameroon has compounded the problems facing women.

“Among those infected with AIDS, at least 65 percent are women. At the beginning of the 1990s, women were just at the periphery of the epidemic. Now in 2004, they are at the epicentre,” observes Agnes Yolande Abena Nnomo, Head of the Office for the Promotion of Women’s Rights at the Ministry for Women.

Violence against women is one of the factors underpinning this high rate of infection.

According to the APFC report, “AIDS is a consequence of violence…The results of the studies we’re conducting show that HIV-positive women are more exposed to this type of mistreatment.”

Anne Epee, a sociologist, says that violence doesn’t only precede HIV transmission. She says women who become HIV-positive also risk having their husbands accuse them of contracting the virus from prostitution – and then beating them up.

Adds Elise Nkongo of Heart of Gold, an organisation that assists the poor, “As soon as a woman reveals that she is HIV-positive, she is immediately attacked or ostracized.”

“Today, pregnant women are required to be tested for AIDS and risk being identified and accused of transmitting the disease, more than their partners.”

In November 2002, a young student from the University of Yaounde was stoned to death for announcing on national television that she was a carrier of the AIDS virus.

The National Committee Against AIDS says the rate of HIV/AIDS prevalence in Cameroon is in the region of 12 percent. About 600 Cameroonians are infected with the HI-virus every day, more than two-thirds of them women.

“We hope that Cameroon will soon adopt a law against all acts of violence against women and enforce it, and reduce the spread of the AIDS virus,” says Josephine Elingui, a member of parliament.