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9. “I killed her because she disobeyed me in wearing this new hairstyle . . .” Gender-Based Violence, Laws, and Impunity in Senegal
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203 9 w “I killed her because she disobeyed me in wearing this new hairstyle . . .” Gender-Based Violence, Laws, and Impunity in Senegal codou bop doki niass, a thirty-year-old woman, was beaten to death by her husband in 1993. She was beaten to death because she was sick during Ramadan, the mandatory Muslim fasting period, and was unable to cook dinner for his guests. It took two years of protest from women’s and human rights groups for the murderer to finally get arrested. Nonetheless he spent only three months in jail. The case was dismissed on the grounds that the forensic evidence did not prove that the beating was the cause of her death.1 In 1999, an eight-year-old girl was raped by a sixty-six-year-old man, an important political and religious leader who had four wives and twenty-two children. Again women’s groups got involved in the case, gained media attention , and actively protested. Unlike in the previous case, the law on violence against women was applied, and the man was sentenced to the maximum sentence of ten years in prison and a fine. In August 2002 in the northern region of Senegal, a twelve-year-old girl bled to death after her first and coerced intercourse with her husband. She had been forced into the marriage by her uncle. After the trial, the girl’s husband and uncle were each sentenced to only two months in jail, an extremely lenient sentence given that the legal age of marriage in Senegal is sixteen for girls and that the law forbids forced marriages. Specific provisions of the penal code are in place supposedly to protect minors.2 This judgment was a setback for the Senegalese women’s movement and for Senegal’s adherence to international and national laws prohibiting violence against women. In July 2006, in a town in southern Senegal, a twelve-year-old girl who had been forced into a marriage was sentenced to six months in jail and fined 50,000 CFA francs (roughly US$100). She was charged with abandonment of 204 w Codou Bop the conjugal home after running away from physical and psychological abuse. In court, however, the girl reported that it was not the violence that led her to flee. She stated that she would have stayed except for the fact that her in-laws were trying to force her into having sex with her husband’s younger brother. Once again women’s groups intensively protested and fought for the case. They were able to secure the girl’s release after twelve days imprisonment. Chosen among hundreds, these cases show a common pattern with respect to gender-based violence in Senegal. This chapter highlights the disconnect between Senegal’s willingness to sign all the major international and African conventions committing the nation to ending violence and discrimination against women and both the persistence of gender-based violence in Senegal and the state’s failure to address the problem forcefully. In the first section of the chapter, I define violence against women and examine the scope and forms of violence that apply to Senegalese women. Some forms of violence apply to women everywhere; other forms of violence are shaped by cultural and social factors specific to the Senegalese society. The second section examines the body of domestic laws and the ways in which the Senegalese legal system actually contributes to violence against women through its complexity and its repressive character. In the third section, I analyze the various influences on the Senegalese legal system and how those influences lead to tensions between customary laws, social norms, modern laws, and the international conventions ratified by Senegal. Those tensions play an important role in determining why a Senegalese husband is able to get away with murdering his wife over a meal not cooked or a hairstyle not liked. In the final section I focus on the struggles of Senegalese women to end such violence—whether at an individual level or a collective level—through the action of women’s groups. definition, scope, and forms of gender-bas ed violence in sen egal I prefer the concept of “gender-based violence” rather than “violence against women” because I believe that violence is a gendered phenomenon that is linked to power relations within a given society and that it is used to control women. In my preference, I follow the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (UNCHR), which defines gender...