Reasonable Men and Provocative Women: an Analysis of Gendered Domestic Homicide in Zambia

This article is based on 150 cases of killings and alleged killings of women and girls by intimate partners and male family members in Zambia from 1973 to 1996. The female victims range from infancy to old age, but half were women in their child-bearing years. The alleged perpetrators represent men of all ages, all social classes and from all parts of Zambia. They used a variety of weapons, and methods that parallel state-sanctioned torture, to beat, burn, stab or shoot their victims to death. Power and control are underlying factors in these cases of gender-based homicide. Suspected adultery appears to be a leading 'motive' of the killings, as does any threat or challenge to a husband or male relative, or refusal to obey orders or perform domestic tasks. For many of the victims, the punishment for deviating from their expected gender roles was death. Newspaper accounts of such killings create a secondary level of silence about domestic violence and homicide by blaming the victims and concealing the brutality of the attacks. Cases are described simply as 'domestic disputes', thus obscuring what are actually violent and deadly assaults by men against women. A lack of detail about the victims, who are sometimes not even named, ensures they are erased, both literally and in the public eye. Comments by the judiciary, as reported in the press, reflect certain attitudes about gender roles and appropriate behaviour. The women are judged to have 'provoked' their perpetrators, whose violent reactions are all too often seen as inevitable, understandable, and therefore somewhat pardonable. Comments which legitimize men's violent behaviour could be said to sanction violence against women in the home.