Criminal law must deal seriously with gender based violence - Lawyer

A Bulawayo based lawyer and former Marilyn Mutshina has said the criminal law must deal effectively with gender-based violence.

In a Facebook post Mutshina said for instance, the criminal law must severely punish a man who responds with violence towards a woman when he misguidedly believes that he is entitled to special privileges from the woman and she refuses to grant him these privileges.

"Such an attack must be condemned under the criminal law in order to disabuse the accused and like-minded men of these mistaken notions. The case of S v Jeri[6] shows how the criminal courts can play an important role in this regard. In this case a man violently attacked and killed a woman simply because of her rejection of his sexual advances towards her. The woman was working at a bar serving food and drinks. The accused approached her and when she rejected his sexual advances, he slapped her, pushed her against a fridge and head butted her. To protect herself the woman hit him with a bottle," said Mutshina.

"Efforts were made to try to restrain the accused from further assaulting the woman but the accused was now in a frenzied rage and he took out a knife and stabbed the woman in the stomach which led to her death. At the time of the stabbing the deceased was standing behind a patron who stood as a buffer between the accused and the deceased. The court convicted the accused of murder, rejecting the defences of self-defence, provocation and voluntary intoxication. As regards self-defence, the court found that at the time that he stabbed the deceased, the accused was the aggressor who was intent on causing harm to the woman."

She said he was not protecting himself as the deceased no longer had a bottle. But even if she was still holding a broken bottle piece as alleged by the defence, it is clear that the accused was not under attack as the woman had sought protection by locating herself behind a patron.

"As regards the defence of provocation, the court found that this defence did not apply. The accused had at least legal intention to kill and, under the second stage of the provocation was certainly not such that it would have caused a reasonable person to completely lose self-control and cause death and thus to reduce murder to culpable homicide. Finally, voluntary intoxication was not a defence to an intentional killing although it could be a mitigatory factor in appropriate circumstances," she said.

Mutshina said Tsanga J explored in detail the gender-based motivation for the fatal attack, pointing out that the accused acted to avenge the supposed affront to his manhood and to "show her who was master."

"His attitude arose from "the dangerous perception that a woman's ‘no' does not mean ‘no' and more significantly that a woman does not have right to make independent decisions about what whom she likes or does not like and whom she wishes to associate with or not to associate with," she said.

She said the fact that "the accused had at least three girl friends at the same time, lead to the conclusion that the accused was clearly a man not accustomed to women saying no to him.

"He obviously perceived his manhood to have been challenged due to his own dangerous sense of entitlement in his dealings with and perceptions of women."