This Day South Africa)
Monday 8 March 2004
By Carien du Plessis
Domestic violence was nothing new to Hunadi Madimalo. She knew exactly how to advise women who were abused by violent partners and she was suffering under the burden herself, but all her knowledge couldn't save her when her former policeman husband turned his gun on her before he killed himself.
Last month the 35-year-old Madimalo, who worked for the Commission on Gender Equality in Johannesburg, became a tragic statistic: In South Africa, 40 per cent of women who are killed by their partners are killed by guns, according to research done by the Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation (CSVR).
Even though men, particularly between the ages of 15-34, are in general more likely to die from gunshots than women, and even though men are the ones who usually carry the guns, the CSVR study showed that the incidence of women being shot dead by their partners rose by 78 per cent between 1990 and 1999.
Last week activists and researchers from around the world gathered in Cape Town to make recommendations to governments about how and why they should include women in the measures they take to reduce gun deaths.
The conference was organised by the United Nations University in collaboration with swisspeace, the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue in Geneva and the Centre for Conflict Resolution in Cape Town.
Vanessa Farr, an independent consultant and with Albrecht Schnabel, one of the organisers of the conference, said women are already informally very involved in disarmament and opposition to small arms, but they needed to make their voices heard by speaking out in positions of leadership.
"What we notice in our research is that women don't want guns around because they not only experience the effects of gun violence in their everyday lives, but people they love and care for are hurt and injured by guns. Women often have to clean up the mess afterwards by looking after disabled relatives or living without breadwinners," she said.
But men "own the conversation about guns" and are often invisible when it comes to solving the problems, she said. "We are no longer interested in the bland, politically correct approach to addressing the impacts of small arms on women - that is, as an afterthought, grouped under the heading of 'women, children and the elderly'. We want action that recognises the essential roles that women play in combating gun proliferation."
Former ANC MP Pregs Govender said at the conference that particularly in South Africa where a large proportion of government is female, women had an important role to play in decision-making about weapons.
For this reason she criticised the South African government's authorisation of a multi-billion rand arms deal.
"Whether it's small arms, whether it's an arms deal, whether it's nuclear arms, we are looking at who has the power to make spending decisions. The rhetoric of what governments say about making people safe needs to be measured against the reality of what they actually spend their money on," she said.
According to a statement given at a 2001 United Nations Conference on small arms by the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), which is a global network of civil society organisations working to stop the proliferation and misuse of small arms, light weapons and small arms have been the weapons of choice in 46 of the 49 regional conflicts waged since 1990.
IANSA also claims that the easy and cheap accessibility of these weapons in post-conflict societies mean that interpersonal violence replaces violence between warring factions and people in these societies often turn to guns to resolve private conflicts.
As a result criminal violence, domestic violence, suicides and accidents caused by small arms claim an estimated 500 000 to 700 000 lives each year.
Rela Mazali, an Israeli researcher who is investigating the growing presence of armed and apparently unaccountable security guards in Israel's schools and on its streets, said at last week's conference that society was becoming more militarized without people realising what was happening.
"When guns are seen as a means of making communities secure, they become normalised. Instead of understanding readily available guns as part of the problem, we make the mistake of thinking that they are part of the solution. We no longer notice their presence on our streets and in our homes," she said.
Perceptions of security also differ between genders. IANSA claims that women experience the presence of small arms in the household as threatening while many men feel more secure.
Women's campaigning on small arms has been shown to contribute to reducing weapons in communities. When a new national gun control law was put in place last year in Brazil, a country in which about 40 000 people are shot dead each year, a Rio de Janeiro-based non-violence group called Viva Rio ran a campaign aimed at getting women to persuade their male partners to give up their guns.
The idea for the campaign - titled "Choose Gun Free! It's Your Weapon or Me" - came about when it was noticed that men surrendering their guns to voluntary weapons collection programmes said that their partners had persuaded them to do so.
Viva Rio's campaign aims to provide women with research information and data so that they can counter male arguments about why gun possession is seen as necessary.
By means of popular actresses and soap operas the campaign has focused on changing the public perception that guns are macho and provide more security, and according to Viva Rio campaigner Jessica Galeria, public opinion polls are showing that it is working.
"We hope to use information as a tool to empower women to use their strength both to make their environment safer and also to have an impact on public policy," she says.
In South Africa the lobby group Gun Free South Africa has been campaigning to transform the 1969 law on gun control, which spokesperson Margie Keegan claims was "one of the great apartheid pieces of legislation".
"It only gave authorities the power to take guns away," she says, "but it created a lax system where anyone could be issued with firearms."
Regulations to implement the new Firearms Control Act of 2000 were passed last month, and the new law is due to take effect in July. It requires that prospective gun owners be issued with a certificate of competency, which involves a background test on whether the applicant is fit to own a gun, whether they are mentally stable and not inclined to violence, and whether they are drug-dependent.
Although NGOs applaud the changes to the law, they say there is still room for improvement.
Lisa Vetten, programme manager on gender violence with the South African Centre for the Study of Violence and Reconciliation, says there is an evidence of a history of abuse in 20 per cent of the cases where women are killed by their partners, but women only lay charges in three per cent of domestic abuse cases due to intimidation, fear of intimidation or a lack of awareness of rights.
Only written or reported allegations of violence or abuse are taken into consideration when prospective gun owners apply for a certificate of competency.
Speaking at last week's conference David Atwood of the UN Quaker office in Geneva stressed the importance of governments and civil society organisations working together."It's not just an adversarial process of NGOs demanding that governments act. There should be a recognition on the part of both governments and activists that we need to work together, rather than just talking about it."
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