Evils behind the women and girl empowerment agenda

By Hastings Yobe

The 21st century has seen a lot of women and girls fighting for their rights by demanding an end to sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression and to achieve full gender equality in law and practice.

As this sounds more of fashion and acceptable by the society and time in which we are living in, some people and studies are finding these movements to shade a dark future for the boy child, for example in Malawi, most girls who have passed well during their Malawi School Certificate Examination (MSCE) have more opportunities compared to a boy child. The question should be what about a boy child?

Recently the media has been awash with news articles where girls who have done well in their studies are being awarded. In 2022 and recent past years the primary school certificate examinations has been witnessing students from both genders imaging highest with exact points during exams.

For example both students might score 448/500 but only the female receive a number of scholarships, huge sums of money as well as gifts while the male?? Well seems like for now they will keep on getting side-lined from the story.

While people always praise the girl with a wash of congratulatory messages on the internet, only a few will remember about the boy’s success.    

But this is not a new thing in Malawi or Africa at large, a Kenyan study done by Isabel Pike in 2019 proves that there is indeed a danger in the future of the boy child.

The study mentions that generally the boy child has been neglected with 5% of such reasons for being neglected pointing fingers direct at women rights groups or the girl child campaign explicitly, framing the neglect of the boy child as a consequence of over focusing on the girl child.

“But as good as recognising the girl child has been, it has come with its own downsides. Too much attention has been paid to the girl child that the boy child has completely been ignored. The roles has been reversed and boys are experiencing neglect,” says part of the report.

The study further made a claim that shows that such a trend (neglecting of boy child) is “a time bomb” and “Dangerous trend.” The trend “the study further says” might result to an increase or troubles by men in areas such as Education, Substance abuse, Violence and partnering.

Putting Kenyan problems aside, back to Malawi young men are being heavily abused in the name of gender equality, a thing that was supposed to reflect a 50-50 chance of possibilities in the view that no gender is being weaker than the other is making the boys weak gradually. Equality cases are unequal when there is allocation of resources on one side of the balance than the other.

One of the articles written in April of 2018 published on Nyasa times titled IS THE MALAWI BOY CHILD OUT OF THE PICTURE? Indicated that since women expect security, ability to provide and responsibility from the masculine gender, but there is none or very little being done to mould the boy child to grow up into this ideal man that community needs.

“There is need for more programs, organisations, and the government to come out as mentors for programs both for boy and girl child and not only using them as political party toys. There is need to guide and teach them of what is expected of them as they grow up into men. We need to build the ideal man for our increasingly educated girls,” said part of the article. 

A Malawian Non-governmental organisation called Centre for Social Equity (C.S.E), through their communications director Beston M’betewa says that though in Malawi statistics looks sketchy but certain studies done by USAID shows that at least 909 540 boys are facing different forms of violence in the hands of teachers and their peers especially from girls.

“That figure makes up at least 2% but it is only representing number of boys who have reported these forms of violence. Masculinity still pose as a big challenge as far as the fight against GBV is concerned, a lot of boys or men fail to report violence because of their gender roles and the fear of how they will look weak in their communities,

We have cases of young boys being molested by teachers and even older females, our goals now is to expose such cases done to boys,” said M’betewa.

CSE further says the trend of giving un equal rights to men is what is increasing the amount of men committing suicide in the country because men despite not reporting GBV cases but also they don’t have anywhere to report the cases to.

“The trend is living a lot of boys and gents being mentally traumatised because the effects of such issues take long to deal with hence a lot of men end up committing suicide,

We must take these matters seriously, we might lose a lot of boys and grown men in these scenarios. It seems we have been doing this all wrong, instead of promoting only one gender (girl child), let’s also promote the boy child rights to make this even,” M’betewa said.

The CSE has further asked other NGO’s to not only focus on where the money is but rather to focus on the real issues that affect day to day lives of individuals.

But the situation has gone up to the point where even international bodies such as the African Union talked about it in its recent meetings that took place in Ethiopia where one of the key topics discussed was,

 The AU wrote on their website; both men and women are victims, survivors as well as perpetrators of violence, but why do we only focus on females as the only victims of GBV? Why there is such a stereotype towards men?

One of the participants of the event, ikhosi ya makhosi Gomani 5 said a lot has to be done in order to end such a stereotype.

“it is important for us traditional leaders to lead in the fight against GBV and to remind people that our communities are formed by both sexes (males and females), it is important therefore that we work together men and females because once we live one gender behind, let’s say boys, then we are crippling the whole society,” said Gomani.    

 Meanwhile, while all these interventions are being done there is still more to be done to make sure that the future still has enough men to protect their female counterparts in the future, in 2022 alone from January to October 168 men against 40 women committed suicide which experts said was due to mental health issues caused by the society, spouses or even work related.

 There is a need for government to place and enforce policies which ensure gender balance between boys and girls instead of using the former as political toys during electoral campaigns though the boy child is being side lined like that but the damage impacted on victimized boys is just as normal as rape that everyone spits saliva over.

Actually, the difference is only a question of semantics but the feeling of desolation, devaluation, worthlessness and powerlessness that clamp the victims cannot be translated into words.

There is much to be done from mind-set changing initiatives to a lot other campaigns that might help to serve the dying boy child being bullied, there is need for societies to learn to value a boys feelings just the same way they value a girls emotions, we are all made with a heart of fresh that gets sliced every time we are ill-treated.

So what if we say no to positive discrimination, a boy child matters too.