Date Posted: 8/5/2013 7:08:22 AM
Posted By: Brendah Aroko Membership Level: Gold Total Points: 3317
Women go through some very rough and tough patches of their lives that at times lead them to become timid and shy away from the spotlight. When I talk of women I mean any person of the female gender be it a child as young as a year old or an elderly woman beyond ninety years of age. In Africa we are unfortunate enough to be born in a male dominated environment where the men have the say and the women have to obey blindly despite the consequences that are bound to arise.Not so long ago women did not have jobs because they did not go to school to the required level like their male counterparts. Women were considered a burden and their parents did not feel the need of taking them to school and so the man automatically became the breadwinner and he was the only person who could make decisions on behalf of the family. Until recently even after there was sensitization of parents to educate the girl child, women have not been as active in leadership positions in companies and institutions. I totally agree that there have been strides towards that but the ratio of men to women in leadership positions is 7:3 and this culture is bound to continue simply because most people are still biased towards women. In most African communities a woman receives more praise and more visitors when they give birth to baby boys and when they don’t get baby boys they become despised and looked down upon. Most fathers who have not been lucky enough to sire male children tend to feel unhappy and they don’t give their female children as much love as they would give to baby boys if they had any. And these lead me to wonder why is it that girls are so valueless in society, are they not human beings and are they not worthy of living? Most parents consider having boys as a good thing because then their property will have a good heir when they die and they also consider that their generation or lineage is bound to continue when there is a male child in the family. I have witnessed situation where by a wife is disowned by her husband simply because she only gives birth to baby girls and this is very sad because biologically speaking it is the man is genetically able to sire a girl or a boy because he has the X and Y genes. Most uneducated people tend to blame women for all their shortcomings which is very prejudicial and untrue. The world today has more women than men and this angers some people like in the Asian countries where there is a one child policy and when the parents go through a scan and they discover that they’re expecting a girl then they force the woman to procure an abortion and they’ll do so until they confirm that the child they’re expecting is a boy. It is also in these countries that girls are thrown away by their parents because they are considered to be a burden and expensive to maintain. In India girls are thrown away because their parents know that when they are of age they will have to marry and pay dowry and this will be solely on the parents to raise and so they decide to evade responsibility by throwing away their female children.In today’s society we also come across instances where girls get pregnant out of wedlock and the blame is put entirely on the girl who gets pregnant and the man is left to go scot free. Re we forgetting that it takes two to tangle and there is no way that a girl can get herself pregnant without a man being involved. Responsibility should go to both the girl and the boy and the stigma that is associated to women who give birth out of wedlock should be done away with. When I talk of equal allocation of responsibility I mean that a woman should not be left to struggle with raising a child all by herself while the father of that child does not contribute at all. Men should man up and take up their rightful places by making sure that they contribute to the upkeep of the child without being forced to do it.We also find that women are not valued in society as well because of the rising cases of rape and defilement. Men have become so evil that they find pleasure in abusing children and women despite their ages. We have seen elderly women being gang raped to death by young men, men who can become their grandchildren and they don’t feel the guilt of doing it. Men have lost respect for women that they would defile children who are not even a year old. Most people consider women to be tools of sexual pleasure and so they use them to satisfy their sick desires and get away with it. The burden of proof in such cases is also very strict that most people get away with rape and defilement at the expense of the girl child or the woman.When it comes to ownership of property, women get the last slot after all the men including little children have been considered. Women are not given the pleasure of inheriting from their fathers and when they do so the society sees to it that they are looked down upon for the rest of their miserable lives. In some cases the real children of a deceased person are left with not share of his inheritance and it all goes to the extended family simply because they are all female. This is just how rotten the society is today, this is just how biased men are towards women, this is just how ungrateful men are towards the people who give them life and bring them into this world. Would you imagine a world without women, who would get pregnant and carry the pregnancy to full term and give birth to children? No one and so why do we look upon women as if they have no value at all, we need to accord them their respect and give them their right treatment that they deserve because without women we would not be alive doing whatever we are doing today.And to those men who defile little children and rape women, they need to realize that that same thing could happen to their children or parents or even spouses and whom do they have to blame apart from themselves because what goes around comes back around.
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