LOS OBJETIVOS DEL MNC SON LOS SIGUIENTES:

Men described overwhelming or uncontrolled desire, mangal, as a threat to self-discipline and as a factor in sexual assaults, incest cases and illicit sexual relationships. Mangal can mean the excitement of mutual sexual desire but usually had overtones of something taboo, for example, unsanctioned relationships between young people; a line crossed between appreciation and pleasure into something potentially damaging for agent or subject or both, for their families and for their communities. For example, to mangal a woman can also mean to desire her without considering what she wanted, and was often used in discussions of rape or use of malira [love magic] or komkom [vengeance magic] (Epstein 1999a). It implies unthinking behaviours—a lack of discipline and respect, and was also used in discussing theft or robberies; something wanted that was just taken (Gewertz and Errington 1998). Desire in these contexts is closely related to jealousy,

coveting another’s goods or circumstances, and was therefore said to be at the root of malevolent sorcery, marital breakdowns and fights within communities. Holly Wardlow (2006, 46) describes similar feelings among the Huli of Tari in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea, described there as madane, a sense of covetous jealousy:

Madane is an emotion term that encompasses a complex social scenario: it is about

feeling entitled to a particular thing because of another person’s explicit promise or implicit social obligation, the failure of that person to follow through the consequent sense of having been let down or betrayed, and the potentially destructive acts one does in response to these feelings.

In discussing rape and other crimes as mangal, desire as entitlement is used to excuse hyper-masculine attributes, including aggressiveness, sexual potency and high libido (Hukula 2012).

Men claimed that an increase in the incidence of these kinds of behaviours was in large part because of changing social mores. For example, women were accused of dressing ‘provocatively’, which could refer to any clothing other than a meri blouse and laplap, including baggy t-shirts and below-the-knee shorts, or tight clothing (Cummings 2013, Jolly 2012). Women, particularly younger women, disputed this. They gave examples of times when they or women they knew had been assaulted while dressed modestly and argued that buying Western clothes second-hand for only a few kina was much more economical for everyday wear than the K30–60 it might cost for a meri blouse.26 Nonetheless, in a discussion group, security guards spoke about how ‘before’, their Tolai ancestors had not worn clothes so there was no mystery about bodies. There were also stricter and more violently enforced laws prohibiting adultery (Banks 1993). Today, however, everything was more sexualised and men were always thinking about sex:

Yu bungim em lo rot go lo wara, yu kuapim em. Yu bungim em lo rot go lo gaden, yu kuapim em...Bifo, tingting bilong ol I no bin bruk. Olsem mipela ol as nating tasol. Tasol tingting lo sex, kuap, kam insait...Nau mi lukim olsem, sapos yu no putim kolos,

ol man I tingim kuap pinis [If you meet [a woman] on the road to the river, you’ll fuck

26 _{Clothing was not, of course, chosen simply on the basis of either modesty or economic necessity.} Particularly in areas closer to town, women and men also expressed themselves through fashion, using new fabrics and variations on styles to make meriblouse, creating outfits from garments found at second-hand clothing outlets and celebrating favourite musicians through emulating their style or wearing their image on t-shirts (see Spark 2015).

her. If you meet them on the road to the garden, you’ll fuck her … Before, people’s thinking wasn’t broken [like this.] So we were all walking around just naked. But now thinking about sex, fucking, has come inside. Now the way I see it, if [a woman] does not wear a meriblouse, men are already thinking about fucking her.]

Paradoxically, even while recognising that men were being promiscuous and indeed sexually aggressive to the point of committing crimes, men simultaneously positioned themselves and their peers as having little control over their sexual decision making. By claiming that they were at the mercy of mangal, desire, or simply ‘feelings’, men re- centred discussions of pasin pamuk around women’s attitudes, actions and blameworthiness. As Mo Hume (2009, 82) observes, by deflecting attention away from men’s responsibility, men engage with ‘the two-fold objective of mitigating and obfuscating culpability while at the same time seeking forgiveness and absolution’. When these narratives were left largely unchallenged, men’s endeavours to position themselves as good could be augmented and made easier by shifting blame onto women for behaviours that they recognised as harmful to community good.

Another aspect to this tendency to give women key responsibility and blame for sex outside marriage (including assault) is the positioning of women who participate or are forced to participate in casual sex as ‘money minded’ or greedy. Receiving a fortnightly wage meant that men were able to flik, a slang term for exchanging a small amount of money, whether as cash, drinks or gifts for sex. The term related to flicking a coin, an image that implies that paying for sex can be simultaneously a casual and furtive act, and that is dismissive of women and their value. This is also reflected in some of the ways that women who exchanged sex for money are labelled: for example as tukina meri [two kina women], which refers to cheap sex, paia-rais [burned rice], which refers to women as used up (literally, the scrapings at the bottom of a pot), raun nabaut meri [itinerant women] and rausim kus meri [handkerchief or sneeze woman], a woman who is disposable and only needed for men’s sexual release.

However small the value being used to flik, it requires having a source of income that allows a man to ‘hold coins’. Some of the security guards spoke with resentment about the fact that it was almost impossible nowadays to have casual sex without paying for it, which was framed as an indictment of women’s morality and character. These damning portraits of women’s character were reinforced by setting women who accepted flik

money in opposition to the ideal of an industrious grasruts meri who worked her garden to sell produce at market:

Na ol les meri lo wok, lo digim graun na painim moni. Ol I save laik five minute noodles a? Pamuk yia, faiv minute tasol na money bai come, ol man save talk. Sapos yu wok gaden, em bai take days, hours, harvestim na kisim moni. Na dispela pasin pamuk, sapos nau mi laikim 149 assim149149, two minute noodles, nau tasol money bai

puldaun [These lazy women don’t want to work the land to get money. They just want

instant noodles; you know? They’re sluts, five minutes and the money comes, that’s what people say. If you work at your garden, it will take days, hours, you need to harvest and then you’ll get money. With this whore attitude, if you want money now, two-minute noodles, straight away you’ll get money.]

The use of the reference to instant noodles is especially evocative: a sign of modernity, of conspicuous consumption, a junk food associated with the worrying rise of non- communicable disease (Government of Papua New Guinea 2010a). This is set in opposition to kaikai lo ples or garden food, grown by virtuous women, which is key to rebuilding healthy bodies, villages and nation.

The discourses of blaming women for being conniving, greedy and lazy intersect with men’s narratives about their own lack of agency in the face of desire and accessible sex. These intersections were used to create rationales that allowed men to distance themselves from taking responsibility for perpetrating acts of sexual violence, including sex that was coerced using social pressure, or men who engaged in sex outside of marriage (see also Hume 2009).

In these accounts, men did not necessarily see themselves as clients of sex workers. Nor would many of the women that they described self-identify as sex workers (Stewart 2014, 30–1) or even people who willingly exchanged sex for money or goods (Kelly et al. 2011). However, some women were primarily reliant on transactional sex for income. Staff and volunteers working with PAC had in recent years begun working more with women who made a living from exchanging sex for money or gifts. One volunteer with whom I spoke said that many of the younger women that he encountered slept rough in Kokopo Town after being forced to leave their villages because of incestuous abuse or other sexual assault. A combination of shame and stigma, or being blamed for inviting the abuse, meant that they could not stay at home. These women formed groups who slept

in various locations around town, on the beach or in business car parks. Sometimes they would stay overnight in guesthouses with clients. There was usually one woman who acted as leader and caretaker, and ensured that food and money was shared with anyone who had not found any clients that day. During the day, the women would wait around kai bars [fast food counters] and markets finding clients with whom they would swap mobile phone numbers to arrange a liaison for later. Other, older women who travelled to Kokopo Town to sell garden produce would sometimes not make enough money to buy transport home, and would sleep overnight at the market and exchange sex to make up for their revenue shortfall. Some of the nightclubs in town had ‘ladies nights’ once a week where women would be allowed in without paying a cover charge. These nights were discussed as useful opportunities for women to find clients without encountering overheads.

Other women who are not reliant on transactional sex for survival (Stewart 2014) are also pushed into accepting money or gifts for sex, or for sex that happened in ways to which they do not consent (e.g., without a condom). Men indicated that when they were drunk and had ‘feelings’, they would be unlikely to take no for an answer from a woman in whom they were interested, especially if they had been buying her drinks or dancing with her already. The implication was that women would demand ‘compensation’ for sex as a kind of admission that sexual assault was almost inevitable. Coercion was not, however, only related to money or compensation; knowledge of women’s sexual histories (even if they had been sexually assaulted previously) was used as currency for blackmail. For example, a male security guard in Kokopo explained to me that if his friend had slept with a woman, he would feel competitive and want to as well. If she refused him, the guard said that he would threaten to report her to the police for enticement to adultery, as he knew that she had already slept with his married friend. He claimed that this was usually sufficient to coerce women into having sex, it being well understood that she would likely bear the brunt of the blame for the reported affair.

Men and women uphold the social dynamics that facilitate victim blaming in incidents of sexual assault and invisibility of male responsibility in consensual sex outside marriage. Women’s navigation of the gendered precariousness highlighted by fear of HIV and AIDS can mean distancing themselves from being positioned as meri nogut by focussing blame on others. This was clearly illustrated in a story relayed by the Kokopo security

guards in the context of a conversation about women getting into fights with other women at the nightclub housed at the security barracks:

Long hia, mi bin lukim wanpela taim. Ol meri olsem, ol asples long hia...ol bin paitim ol meri olsem, ol raunabaut meri, ol, bai mi tok, paia-rais meri o kain olsem. Ol save go senisim man, slip wantaim man bilo narapla meri, bihain, next day ken long em, slip wantaim narapela man. So ol bin kam lo danis lo hia...Ol I paitim dispela kain. Ol meri lo ples bin poret lo ol man bilong ol, nogut ol meri bilong taun givim sik go long ol,

kain olsem. So ol bin paitim ol lo stapim dispela kain pasin long ol. [I’ve seen it once

here. Local women came and fought women who, like, the roundabout women, prostitutes, that kind of woman. The kind who change men all the time, sleep with one woman’s husband one day and then the next, sleep with another man. These women came to dance here … The locals fought with those women. The local women were scared for their husbands, they were worried that the women from town would pass infection onto their husbands. So they fought with them to stop their bad behaviours.]

The local women had won the fight and run the ‘town women’ out of the club. I asked the guard where the men had been during the fight:

Ol man I bin sanap tasol lo pulim rausim ol meri. Ol meri yet ol I pait na ol man bin

pulim rausim ol meri ken. Olsem, ‘noken paitim’. [The men were standing to the side

and trying to pull the women off each other. The women were the ones fighting, and the men were trying to separate them, like, telling them not to fight.]

Another guard interjected, however:

Sampela narapela man, ol I hait. Ol man I wokim raun ol laik hait. Em les lo meri bilong em lukim em stanup wantaim dispela meri. Em bai semim em. Man em bai hait

lo meri bilong em. [Some other men, they hide. Those men who were sleeping around,

they wanted to hide. They did not want their wives to see them standing with those other women. That would have shamed them (the men). So they just hide from their wives.]

There were several reasons why the local women attacked the ‘town women’ rather than their husbands. In interviews with family violence police and clinical staff at hospitals and health centres, I heard repeatedly that one of the major causes of violence against women was men’s infidelity. This usually resulted in one of two scenarios. Either a wife confronted her husband suspected of infidelity and he beat her as a result; or there were

fights between concurrent partners of the same man. There were, usually, considerable advantages to a wife targeting the other woman rather than her husband. As in the case related above, shame at having been caught out in a lie might mean that a husband simply makes himself inaccessible and the other woman may be easier to target. She would be more likely to be a physical match in a face-to-face fight. There might be fewer risks to family relationships or further damage to the marriage relationship. If there came a need to make a complaint to community leaders, police or welfare, she would have a distinct advantage making a claim against an ‘adulterous’ woman rather than her husband. As such, when people spoke about ‘violence against women’, they referred to a more expansive spectrum of violence by women and men than the axiomatic meaning of transnational prevention campaigns. Even when they referred to violence against women by women, the violence was shaped by gendered inequality and patriarchal norms, such as where women’s social and economic precarity was exacerbated by men’s philandering or suspected infidelity.