Women use violence, dirty tactics in outdoing each other - Study

A RECENT study by local thinktank, Research and Advocacy Unit and the Women's Trust, has revealed that some female political candidates violently fought their female counterparts during the 2013 elections.

The report released yesterday confirms that women can also use the "pull her down syndrome" on fellow women to destract them from participating in politics.
Lately, the First Lady Grace Mugabe has used the same tactic to annihilate Vice-President Joice Mujuru from Zanu PF and government.

The survey also revealed that 4% of rural women in 2013 witnessed women candidates perpetrating acts of violence against other women, while 2% of urban respondents experienced the same.

"Rural women reported two significant irregularities (personally) with greater frequency than their urban counterparts, and these were witnessing violence against women candidates and women participating in political violence against other women" read the report.

"These were not reported with any great frequency, but nonetheless were more likely to occur in rural areas, as has been commonly reported in the past," they said.

Other problems said to have been experienced by female voters during the 2013 harmonised elections were irregularities in the voters' roll where many urban women reported they could not find their names in the voters' roll.

"Urban women reported encountering voter registration problems, finding registration offices inaccessible, experiencing long queues, and having no identification documents more frequently than rural women. Additionally, urban women were themselves more likely to have been turned away because they had no proof of residence or were in the wrong ward, and had witnessed other women being turned away."

The women interviewed also revealed having witnessed people being bussed to polling stations, people voting more than once, some being turned away, while others were witnessed being referred to more than one voting ward.

"There was a very strong overall trend in both groups to support women candidates. 94% stated that it was important to vote for a woman. 73% felt that it was important for political parties to reserve seats for women, but less than half (43%) felt that women were adequately represented in government," they said.

Currently female composition in Parliament is 35% due to the 60 free seats availed to women by the new Constitution.