Session 3: Violence Against Women
8th Global Conference
Monday 4th May – Thursday 7th May 2009
Budapest, Hungary
Eradicating Cultural Based Violence against African Women: The Role of Traditional Leaders
Serges Alain Djoyou Kamga
Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria, South Africa
Gender based violence in Africa is usually cultural related. In fact, in various African countries, traditional customary law is informed by culture and traditions which usually view violence against women as normal. This normalcy becomes part and parcel of communities’ and national behavior, is accepted and crosses the boundaries of traditional set up and finally finds a comfortable place in the national legal system in general. From a human right perspective, this paper seeks solutions to tackle gender based violence, starting from its traditional and customary sources. In achieving its objective, the paper will address the following question: How to ensure gender equality through established traditional institutions? In answering this fundamental question, the paper explores African’s commitment to women’s rights. In details, it first looks at the laws (International and regional) and investigates women rights’ abuses in various parts of Africa as they relate to cultural practices. Second and more importantly, the paper discusses the “sacred traditional institutions” upon which women rights abuses find their “legitimacy” and argues that traditional leaders have a fundamental role to play in ensuring women’s dignity on the continent. The paper goes beyond simple arguments and demonstrates how traditional leaders can in practice become the most important machines to change the status of women; change which will be considered a “sacrilege” if coming from outside traditional institutions.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Violence Against Women in Medieval Martyr Legends
María Beatriz Hernández Pérez
Universidad de La Laguna, Canary Isles, Spain
One of the consequences of the master narrative of Western History as one of gradual development of rationality and civilization is the emphasis placed on medieval violence as an agent of instability deeply ingrained in that culture. The distorted notion of the bloody and barbaric Middle Ages has prevailed and fostered the traditional contempt for medieval societies, which are presented as fascinated by all sorts of violence. Notwithstanding this, hagiography is one of the main literary grounds on which the evidence of such fascination cannot be denied. In fact, it is in these early Christian accounts where for the first time the spectacle of torture and cruelty was presented as a basic asset to attract the attention of massive audiences, ready to distinguish moral issues after the particular way in which the relationship between the divine and the lay and between the Christian and the pagan elements was established. In the records concerning the lives and deaths of early martyrs as well as in those about the first practitioners of anachoresis, the saintly body was represented as a site of constant torture. Precisely by symbolically representing the flesh, the bodies of women saints were particularly revealing of the role of violence in the crystallization of early medieval gender structures. Departing from Girard’s hypothesis on the relationship between violence and the nature of the sacred as well as from Gender Studies, this paper will look at some female martyr figures as recorded in medieval English literature and to their depiction in medieval art (illuminated martyrologies and paintings), in order to discern the degree and quality of the representation of violence against women in popular literature and art.
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