Husband Battering: Is it a Cry for Help?

By Daniel Saenyi

Women have been on the front line fighting for their rights since time memorial and though it has been a slow process they are slowly gaining ground soon to be the mightier gender with the recent husband battering spree. This has been a comic extravaganza for the past few weeks with people painting the women from Nyeri as the autocrats.

We as a society are so bent on condemning these women that we forget to listen to their side of the story. This saga could happen to anyone and we should not brand Nyeri women as any woman can stand up and say enough is enough the virile way.

Woman threatening her husband at a Police station

What if walloping these husbands is the only way they can express their cry for help? These women could be in a hopeless marriage with a useless husband, who do nothing but come home drunk and harass them. For what it’s worth I even commend them for standing their ground; there is no husband who provides for his family in every way possible that can receive such treatment, as we convict the women we should do the same to the men for not taking up their God given rights as the leaders of the household.

The 21^st Century man has grown so soft and lazy that he has destroyed the image of our forefathers who took their errands seriously and were proud of it; the modern man sees his accountabilities as a burden and always finds a way of leaving it to the woman, either coming home late or having a mountain of imaginary workloads`` in the bar’’.  The woman has had to take up the two roles which will prove to be stressful on anyone, so don’t blame the woman for snapping with all the pressure she has to go throw day in day out.

Self-defense is another reason that the woman could borrow to give the men a pounding of their lives, they might not have done this in a face to face combat but it’s always said that mind is mightier than brute strength and this case the women were intellectual about it. The best way to win a fight against a stronger opponent is to apply the element of surprise, and these women applied it only too well. 

Portrait of a Man Crying

The rates of wife battering far exceed the rates of husband beating in the country and currently only two cases of husband beating have been reported yet we act as though the Nyeri have unleashed war on the whole society. Many women have agonized in silence all these years and nothing was done against the men responsible, so why should we brand the first two cases of women standing up for themselves?

All the husbands who evade their responsibilities and leave it all to the women should be critical at one point and put themselves in the women’s shoes and see if they won’t crack at the first instance of trouble.

It’s not always fair that sometimes you don’t get what you need from the people you expect to get it from, it maybe love, support, or care. And if you don’t get it do you let them get away with it or do you fight for it? The women saw it fit to fight so maybe the husbands could get the idea and take up their responsibilities, and if the men keep trending downwards maybe that’s what they deserve.

The Kenyan society always fails to look into the bigger picture and we focus only on what we have been fed by the media. We run our judgment based on one side of the story but it’s time to we start peeling the onion no matter how much it may hurt so we see what’s hidden underneath as there’s always two sides to a story.