Canberra, ACT: ANU E Press, 2012. xxvii, 280 pp. (Tables, figures, maps). A$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-9218-6285-4.
This book offers a timely examination of gender and violence in Papua New Guinea (PNG). The country recently attracted world-wide publicity about incidents in several provinces involving the torture, beheading or burning of women accused of witchcraft. The report by Amnesty International, Papua New Guinea: Violence against Women—Not Inevitable, Never Acceptable!(London, 2006) is among many reports by international agencies documenting and decrying ill-treatment of women. The government of PNG recently released a Country Gender Assessment (February 2013) sponsored by the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank, which documents extensive female disadvantage in education, health and the economy. A number of studies have also linked the epidemic of HIV and AIDS to the powerless circumstances of PNG women, for example those in the anthology edited by Leslie Butt and Richard Eves, Making Sense of AIDS: Culture, Sexuality and Power in Melanesia (University of Hawaii Press, 2008). Further, PNG is the only country in the Pacific to be rated by the Pacific Island Forum Secretariat as “off track” for progress on all the Millennium Development Goals, in its 2011 Pacific Regional MDGs Tracking Report (August, 2011). Most of the MDGs have indicators related to the status of women.
The collection contains an overview and eight essays, most of them by anthropologists, examining aspects of gender and violence in particular regions of the country. In her introduction Margaret Jolly notes that gender violence is a human universal and suggests that in the context of PNG, gender violence cannot be understood in cultural terms alone, but must also be contextualized in relation to the country’s fraught colonial and post-colonial history.
Male supremacy was once affirmed in most if not all PNG societies by cosmology, ritual and exchange; today, as the contributors to the book show, there are uneasy juxtapositions of old and new religious values and economic forces. Naomi McPherson’s ethnographic case study of the Barai (West New Britain Province) suggests that violent behaviour is particularly provoked by challenges to male prerogatives. Their shift to charismatic, fundamentalist Catholicism has reaffirmed and re-legitimized male dominance, particularly in relation to control of female fertility. Laura Zimmer-Tamakoshi’s historical case study of the Gende (Madang province) examines the impacts of mining projects, migration and new economic opportunity on marriage chances, conjugal relations and increasingly “troubled masculinity.” In the past, young men had to wait many years to obtain wives, dependent on their elders and the slow processes of inter-group politics and an un-monetized economy. Now that some men are financially independent of traditional expectations and obligations, they can challenge status hierarchies, by paying bride prices for themselves and acquiring multiple wives, in a situation of increasingly competitive commoditization of women.
Beliefs about witchcraft and sorcery reflect people’s anxieties about social and gender inequality. Philip Gibbs explains that the Simbu (Simbu province) believe that both men and women could practice sorcery, or might be witches; but men are thought more likely to be victims, while women are more likely to be accused, and violently assaulted or murdered. He suggests a woman might be more feared as an outsider married into her husband’s clan, as a marginalized widow or as someone poor, oppressed, vulnerable and unprotected. Young men have been particularly visible perpetrators of such vengeance in recent years, and Gibbs suggests this reflects negative behavioural affirmations of masculinity.
At present there is little that women can do to overcome their vulnerability to violence in PNG. Anna-Karina Hermkens describes how many Catholic women in Madang province feel spiritually empowered to cope, by taking the Virgin Mary as a model of humility, obedience and faith. So far the courts in PNG have not been successful in decreasing violence in its highly prevalent form of rape. Jean Zorn documents the generally unsympathetic attitudes of judges since colonial times towards the emotional as well as physical effects of rape on victims. This is why, Zorn argues, rape has long not been treated as the serious crime that it is. She describes some improved trends in judicial decisions and sentencing in recent years. Fiona Hukula examines rape from the perspective of sentenced perpetrators. Her case studies demonstrate alarming senses of male entitlement to sexual gratification, or beliefs that sexual violence may rightfully be used as a means of revenge. The author rejects the argument by many other scholars that rape has more to do with power than sex. Arguing that this explanation has “western connotations,” she proposes that the themes of frustration and retribution in the narratives of her interlocutors suggest that in PNG rape is motivated more by generalized anger and aggression towards women. Christine Stewart, in her case study of the brutal treatment of women and girls charged with prostitution, concludes that such anger most likely arises from the perceived challenges to masculine status and authority presented by the wider opportunities and choices available to women in modern PNG.
Martha Macintyre’s discussion of Millennium Development goal 3 for gender equality and the empowerment of women points out that the causes of violence against women are structural and, as the other contributors to this volume show, have to do with constructions of masculinity that allow the denigration of femininity and “deeply ingrained cultural attitudes and economic relations that naturalize female disadvantage and male entitlement” (239). Macintyre argues convincingly that approaches such as gender mainstreaming in development projects, and the targeting of women with programs for their empowerment, rest on the false assumption that women themselves can be the agents of change, if they are educated and given equal opportunities for employment. Violence against women is the ultimate expression of gender inequality and the disempowerment of women, and these essays all suggest that change will only occur when men are required to give up privileges that are currently maintained by the threat of violence.
Penelope Schoeffel
National University of Samoa, Apia, Samoa
pp. 394-396