Gender Violence in Africa: African Women's Responses (review)

Violence against women is currently a major and global issue. In Africa, as in the rest of the world, it has long been ignored or denied. In public and private context, the practices of rape, wife battering and female gynecological surgeries have been justified by customary and codified legal systems which either do not deal with or specifically allow physical and emotional violence targeted at women. Recently, a number of organizations have established policies and programs, from the very local to broadly international, to address these problems. This book is therefore a timely and appropriate addition to the literature by and about African women. The themes of women's agency and resistance provide organizational coherence to descriptions of violence done to women in a range of contexts. Three major feminist theories are used to develop a multilevel approach to gender violence in the family, society, and the nation. Each level is explored in a chapter linking sexuality and power. The last two chapters explore women's agency in resisting violence in informal and formal sectors.

Chapter Two addresses violence and the sexual relations of power in the family. Green uses radical feminist theory's family focus to analyze the ways in which wife battering and genital cutting are used by men to control women within the domestic sphere. Her treatment is sensitive to the issues of human rights and cultural relativism that surround these topics and is well balanced and realistic. The use of violence as a political message which reinforces gender boundaries and limits women's opportunities to participate fully in their society is also treated.

The third chapter puts gender violence in the context of economic relations of power and social change. Rape, murder, and sexual harassment are defined as tools which men use as political weapons to extinguish women's will to resist. Green uses Marxist feminist theory, with its emphasis on the economic relations of power, to delineate the ways in which emerging capitalism has had major impacts on women. The effects of the social and economic dislocation of men are discussed, and the chapter also focuses on the ways in which women have been blamed for social unrest and attacked as witches, prostitutes, and the like by local people and government agencies. Mass rape and ethnic cleansing are classified as acts of war and as political weapons during times of political and economic upheaval. Drawing parallels between the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and the Eritrean and Somali wars, mass rape is presented as a political tool of male dominance allied to genocide and to the capitalist system.

The fourth chapter is concerned with the state and its relationship to gender violence through the law and its responsibility to protect women. At issue here are legal protections for women from marital rape and violence, unfortunately often conceptualized as "private business" and effectively exempted from regulation. The discussion here expands from Africa to the global conditions of women as they face male-dominated legal systems with major interest in the control of women.

The fifth chapter, "Gender Violence and the Politics of Disengagement," is to my mind the most important in the book. Arguing against the perception of women as passive victims or as collaborators in their own subordination, Green urges an alternative interpretation of women's behavior based on resistance and the use of informal structures of power. Women use a variety of strategies to confront male dominance which may be misinterpreted by outsiders as passive avoidance. Because many of these strategies are based in the home, they may be invisible to those who look for group or collective action. A rough typology of strategies--management of suffering, insulation, collective action, and escape--describes women's actions as active, not passive, responses to male violence. These extralegal strategies are disengaged from the state, and are methods devised, modified, and manipulated by women to protect and promote their own interests...