Wife battery is an anti-human rights. Therefore, wife battery contradicts Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which runs thus: all human beings are born free and equal dignity and rights. They are endowned with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. Battery according to the Advanced Dictionary (1988) is a term in law which involves the unlawful beating of another person or any threatening touch to another person’s cloths or body. The definition connotes great force or intensity; the use of excessive physical force that ultimately results to injury to that (person or animal) which the great force is being applied upon.
Battery against women constitutes an oddity because women are the direct targets, even though the entire society indirectly shares in its effects in the long run.
Burns (1997) submitted that every day, women are slapped, kicked, beating, humiliated, threatened, sexually abused and even murdered by their partners. Mary
and Scott (2000) echoes that wife battery or women battery or assault are used interchangeably to refer to a range of behaviour that includes hitting, kicking, choking, and the use or threatened use of weapons or objects. Woman assault has several dimensions. Those most commonly discussed in the literature is wife battery.
Battering, in fact, is the single-most common cause of injury to women-more frequently than automobile accidents, muggings, burglaries and rape combined. Most experts agree that woman battery is probably the most common and one of the most under-reported in this country.
Wife battery is an exposure of a married woman to serious beating or repeated injuries. Violence by the husband or male partner or relative is higher and far more harmful form of violence. Wife battery is not a type of violence that is publicly known or witnessed, that is why many do not know its prevalence in the society. To sustain the above claim, Davies (1999) says that wife battery may happen in 30% families, but is not recognized in the public eyes. This practice is very injurious to the health of women and girls and is very prevalent in Igboland. It cuts across socio-economic classes, although data with which to determine its prevalence among the upper class is not always available.
However, its prevalence among the lower class is high. Many observations studied by Omorodion (1991) revealed that women sustained all kinds of injuries, facial bruises, cuts in the mouth, loss of one tooth or more. In a statement released by (Vanguard, May 15, 2014); it reported that a woman Shehi said she was regularly subjected to violence by her husband. After one assault, she was left permanently blind in her left eye. Her husband reportedly suspected her of having a sexual relationship outside their marriage. In the same vein, Lips (2003) narrated an ordeal of a teacher;
Agnes, a teacher whose husband was also a teacher, said the violence began few years after she got married. When she caught her husband in bed with a teenage girls. He began to beat her every evening. He forced her to give him her pay check. He called her his slave. For about two years, the violence eased, but alcoholic rages and financial irresponsibility again became the norm, and the beatings got worse. Nonetheless, Agnes did not tell anyone about the beatings, even those closest to her because, she said “I was so scared, and I was feeling so embarrassed. I did not want people to know about it”. (p.425).
Where in this world did this happen? In what country or society are women so vulnerable to violence from their husbands that they bear it for years without leaving and without telling anyone about it? This is a very common story in almost every society of the world. In many cultures, Igbo culture inclusive, men have traditionally claimed the right to beat their wives as a matter of authority, superiority and control over property.
In the history of humanity, Owan and Aniuzu (2002) averred that, man had been known to Lord it over the woman with power and authority as he used tradition as the camouflage. In addition, Bradley (1994) also submitted that the practice of wife beating is not just hidden and invisible, but hard to tackle because many traditional and transitional cultures have a blind-spot about it. Dwyer (1996) viewed the invisibility of marital violence, especially as it affected women as stemming not necessarily from the fact that society regarded the problem as normal and therefore not a problem. Research on battery Dwyer (1996), and Okolo (2004), revealed that due to the private and hidden nature of the problem it was somewhat difficult for the law enforcement agencies and similar bodies to have reliable documented and
quantifiable information about it. This, in turn, made it difficult for the intensity of the problem to be known in order to ascertain how much effort to put towards addressing the problem.
Amongst the Igbo, battery against women is not seen as a ‘problem’ but a
‘normal’ social occurrence. Okolo (2004) further observed many women who faced battery were reluctant to let even the closest person known, and even when their experiences were those of severe pains, they would simply wear guise that all was well, all for the purpose of concealing their bitter and heart-rending experiences, according to the researcher were due to; women’s fear that society would blame them for such happenings, homes where battery is frequent are often stigmatized as unsuccessful homes and because no woman would want her marriage to be stigmatized, in the event of battery, most women would rather keep the matter concealed than disclosed it; women would never want the public to know that their husbands have abusive tendencies because it is ‘criminal’ for them to disclose to an
‘outsider’ that their spouses were women barterers, and any attempt to go against this would mean more battery. Burns (1997) also ‘observed that most women stayed on in battered homes because they had no other place to go to. Furthermore, Bannett (1993) observed that a number of women saw their marital homes as the only home they had and, did not know where else to go to if they left them. As such, to avoid the difficulty of having no home of their own or for fear of becoming homeless most women simply accepted the only option open was to stay.
It is also worthy to mention that in traditional Igbo Society, women were blamed and also condemned for all the wrongs that went on in their families.
Women’s inability to remain and manage their homes were always “the topic of discussion” in different drinking spots, and the fear of becoming the ‘talking talk’
often made women remain with their partners in spite of the battery. In addition, the researcher argued that the issue of social conditioning inculcated into women from childhood that, irrespective of their other interests, they would never be fulfilled unless they were married and had children. In the words of Brown (1997) when women accepted this social conditioning, leaving an abusive husband meant failing not only as a mother or wife, but as a woman. This from all sound arguments rested on a disastrously premise that kept women in battered homes from this, we could say that women stayed in abusive homes in order not to be branded as ‘failure’s, stigmatized and shamed as unsuccessful wives. In addition, Brown (1997) observed that women were told that love conquered all and as such, in the event of being battered, they were urged to remain in the hope that the men would change positively in no distant time for the wonderful times they once had during courtship to occur again.