Entrenched Epidemic: Wife-Beatings in Africa - New York Times

Entrenched Epidemic: Wife-Beatings in Africa - New York Times: "Women suffer from violence in every society. In few places, however, is the abuse more entrenched, and accepted, than in sub-Saharan Africa. One in three Nigerian women reported having been physically abused by a male partner, according to the latest study, conducted in 1993. The wife of the deputy governor of a northern Nigerian province told reporters last year that her husband beat her incessantly, in part because she watched television movies. One of President Olusegun Obasanjo's appointees to a national anticorruption commission was allegedly killed by her husband in 2000, two days after she asked the state police commissioner to protect her.

'It is like it is a normal thing for women to be treated by their husbands as punching bags,' Obong Rita Akpan, until last month Nigeria's minister for women's affairs, said in an interview here. 'The Nigerian man thinks that a woman is his inferior. Right from childhood, right from infancy, the boy is preferred to the girl. Even when they marry out of love, they still think the woman is below them and they do whatever they want.'"