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Women as perpetrators of political violence in Zimbabwe
Research and Advocacy Unit (RAU)
September 13, 2011

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"A crime is a crime: there should be no special treatment for women perpetrators."

On Saturday 23rd July 2011, journalist Levi Mukarati, from the Financial Gazette, was head-butted by a female mobster, while covering the public hearings of Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on the Human Rights Commission Bill, before he sought police protection. He was among a group of journalists, members of Parliament, and the general public who were assaulted by a mob, while the police stood by and watched. The irony of the events of the 23rd July is that all this violence was unleashed to disrupt public hearings for the Human Rights Commission Bill.

Political violence is nothing new in Zimbabwe and despite calls by political leaders to end it, it persists, and women are not always on the receiving end.

The use of violence in contemporary Zimbabwean politics is part of the machismo political culture inherited from settler colonialists, which successive political systems are failing to dismantle. During the liberation war women got involved because they saw this as an opportunity for their emancipation, but they found that it was national liberation first and emancipation later. This emancipation was achieved in part on paper, but not in reality, and the same rhetoric is being espoused by opposition politicians today.

Gender based violence has been used as a political tool both intraparty and inter-party. In both cases Zimbabwean women have generally been portrayed as victims in the political crisis particularly in the last ten years. Women are said not able to run away and protect themselves during periods of violence because of their gender roles and domestic responsibilities as well as their weaker physical status. However, increasingly there are more and more reports of women involved in violence as perpetrators to the extent that organisations are disaggregating their data to show the different roles women are playing in political violence. Interestingly, as women's participation in political violence is being documented to show that women want to claim their space in the political arena, there appears to be a downturn in their involvement in the broader women's movement, and the tackling of the issue of patriarchy which is the basis of discrimination and inequality between the sexes.

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