LOS PARTIDOS POLÍTICOS

Many of the gains made in terms of community responses to violence against women in the 1990s in East New Britain were not evident in 2012–13. During the thesis research period, ENBSEK closed down because of lack of funding. The counselling and legal aid services had not been in place for several years and the organisation had not provided focussed training on family and sexual violence for some time prior. Some people remembered awareness songs and messages that had been played on the local Radio East New Britain in the 1990s about preventing violence. However, no research respondents mentioned the services that had been in place during the 1990s that were lauded by Bradley (2001), although several at Kokopo and NCR spoke about how there had been less violence in the early 2000s compared with when they were interviewed as part of this research some 10 years later.

Across the research sites, redress for family and sexual violence was sought through a combination of state services, community-based justice systems recognised by the state and family, clan and church networks. At the time of the thesis research, there had been resurgent support from international donors for law and justice infrastructure addressing family and sexual violence. In Kokopo, there was an FSVU at the police station, established shortly before I began my fieldwork in January 2012. There was also a Sexual Offences Squad (SOS) and during the research period, a provincial police commander who was proactive and vocal about wanting to improve justice outcomes for women in the province and attitudes towards women in his forces. District court magistrates were based in Kokopo and mandated to issue Interim Protection Orders (IPOs) to women who had been subject to family violence. The district courts also engaged two volunteer counsellors to support survivors of violence and provide anger management counselling and drug and alcohol counselling to some perpetrators. Community development welfare officers were often approached in cases of violence related to adultery17 _{and for assistance} with maintenance payments and child custody after a separation. The local FSVAC representative also ran a private trauma counselling service servicing the Gazelle Peninsula.

17 _{This could mean that a wife was assaulted by her husband because he had learned, or suspected, that she} was unfaithful; that a wife was assaulted because she learned that the husband had been unfaithful and had confronted him about it; or a woman confronting and assaulting another partner of her husband or a women accused of enticing her husband to commit adultery (see Adultery and Enticement Act 1988).

FSVU and SOS provided considerable assistance to women across the Gazelle Peninsula. A 2015 newspaper article indicated that East New Britain had one of the highest numbers of reports and arrests in Papua New Guinea, second only to the more highly populated National Capital District (Faiparik 2015). This indicates growing faith in police from the public and responsiveness to complaints of violence against women. Nonetheless, these specialty units were overburdened. The police to whom I spoke in Kokopo, particularly those working with the SOS and FSVU, reported that under-resourcing in terms of staffing and transport was one of their biggest challenges. This, combined with high numbers of complaints every week, meant that it was often difficult to balance hearing new reports with making investigations, arrests and preparing cases for prosecution. FSVU officers also reported frustratingly retrograde attitudes from some magistrates. For example, one magistrate decided that, rather than providing IPOs to women when they reported to the court, it was better to send the accused away with a legally informal ‘warning’. He reasoned that if it was a genuine issue of ongoing abuse, the woman would come back but if it was only a single incident he did not want to waste court time processing the order. As the police officer who recounted this to me pointed out, this denied the fact that for most women, making an official report of violence happened after repeated incidents. Denial of assistance could also deter subsequent requests for help. At NCR, the closest police station to the village where I stayed employed five officers. Most of the cases that came through their office concerned addressing the local production and distribution of illegal homebrewed alcohol. They also reported a high number of disputes related to accusations of sorcery and fights over land. These police told me that they saw a number of family and sexual violence cases, but that most women would not report either because it was a private matter or they were ashamed of having been assaulted. Cases handled locally were seldom progressed to the prosecutions office because, the officers said, women were scared of losing their family’s security if their husband was jailed. Rather, when cases were reported, the officers would sometimes try to counsel fighting couples themselves, but said that this was usually a short conversation where the couple were advised of laws about ‘wife bashing’ and adultery; but also given advice on ‘root causes of violence’. These ‘root causes’ laid blame with women for being, for example, too cross with their husband or for talking badly about him in public. The officers at NCR preferred to refer complainants up to FSVU in Kokopo. However, they complained that ‘those FSVU ladies’ did not always see the clients: they were too

busy or not in the office. This meant that women had to spend K12–15 on bus fares— more if they had to take children with them—with no progress on their complaint. They would then sometimes also have to explain to their abuser why they spent a whole day away from house, garden or market. This issue, of course was the result of overburdening of the FSVU because other police stations across the Gazelle Peninsula were not processing complaints.

In Melkoi, there was no formal police presence at all for most of the year. Approximately once every 12 months, a police delegation would arrive at the LLG office to follow up on any outstanding unresolved matters. In the event of a crime considered especially serious, police might be radioed to travel from the district headquarters of Palmalmal to make an arrest.

These rare occasions usually related to acts that threatened the whole community. I was often given the example of a young man, considered by those with whom I spoke to be mentally ill, who had burned down the local primary school. The risk to surrounding houses and the long-term effect on the community’s children meant that people were angry enough to demand state justice. Cases of domestic assault, incest or rape were reported to Jonathon, the community development officer at the LLG. Jonathon provided counselling where he could and said that he was thankful for his wife’s patience: sometimes women would come to find him at his house on the weekends to report incidents. However, few of the reports recorded were ever followed up by police. Public advocacy about prevention of violence against women, even in the context of HIV awareness, was rare.

At all of the field sites, community mediation was the main mechanism for seeking justice or resolution after a complaint of family violence. This might be taken to the village court for arbitration by village court magistrates (Goddard 2013) or settled by a local councillor, clan leader or church elder. Although village courts are not mandated to hear criminal matters such as assault, in places such as Melkoi where there are few other options, serious cases might appear before a village court magistrate regardless. Women and men felt that village court decisions at NCR and Melkoi tended to favour men, saying that rulings were often guided by pasin sori long ol man [biased sympathy towards men.]

Pasin sori long ol man was invoked in conversations with interlocuters who were generally critical of what they saw as high and unacceptable rates of violence against women in their local area and Papua New Guinea more broadly, and who were critical of village court arbitration of cases of family violence or marital disputes. In their telling, pasin sori long ol man reflected generalised tendencies within society to attribute fault or blame for provocation to women. Some suggested that a tendency to show pasin sori long ol man from one elderly (male) village court magistrate in particular was suggested to be a way of normalising and avoiding accountability for his own alleged domineering behaviour within his family.18

Positively, FSVU officers reported that by doing awareness themselves in communities around the Gazelle Peninsula, they had mitigated the tendency for pasin sori long ol man among some community leaders. One of the female officers told me that:

In Papua New Guinea, lots of men don’t understand about the need to respect the dignity and rights of women … men look at women like we’re nothing. But here now, even though there are lots of cases coming in still, we’ve been going out and doing awareness in communities. Through the awareness, lots of councillors have come up to us and said, some of your talk really resonated, you’ve won the hearts of the men in the village community and so there is less domestic violence. Some people have got it.

At NCR, Conrad, the local ward councillor, affirmed that he had become much more proactive about reporting cases of violence to police in his community since the FSVU officers had given a presentation in the village. It was important to make men scared of the consequences, he said, so that they would not beat their wives. There was some backlash, however, with men reporting that women were now not scared of being bikhets because men could not ‘discipline’ them; men needed to be able to assert themselves as heads of families. These comments highlight the complexities of sustaining cultures that do not support violence, even where legal responses are improved and embraced.

2.5

Conclusion

This chapter has discussed various aspects of what people in Papua New Guinea mean when they talk about ‘doing awareness’. I have described the key methods of delivering

18 I did not encounter any corresponding suggestions that any courts showed _{pasin sori long ol meri in} any of the research sites.

awareness encountered during the research: mass media, posters, public talks, peer education and outreach by service providers. The key messages that remain current in much of HIV and violence against women prevention advocacy—ABC and ‘wife bashing is a crime’—and human rights-focussed campaigns have been placed in historical contexts from the transnational to the local. Crucially, here, I have highlighted the complexities and nuances that have been produced in the interactions with diverse levels of service accessibility, and with the different social, cultural and economic contexts. Moreover, we have seen the effects on how public perceptions of issues, responsibility and ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviour have been shaped by and around syndemic awareness campaigns.

In the next four chapters, I consider how these ideas play out in narratives about men’s behaviour, as described by men themselves and by women and men who are members of their communities. In the following chapter I begin by examining how ideas of risk, responsibility and safety play out in men’s discussions of health and health priorities in a more general sense, before turning to perspectives on HIV more specifically.