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Vaidah Mashangwa
THE recent campaign by the inter-ministerial committee against rape and sexual abuse of women and girls in Harare was welcomed by many including traditional leaders. At the event the traditional leaders were represented by Chief Fortune Charumbira. Vice-President Joice Mujuru has also reiterated the need to stop this barbaric act plaguing our nation.
The reason being that rape has a crippling effect on the survivor herself, the community and consequently the nation at large.
Some of the rape victims will be traumatised for the rest of their lives and might not recover. Children whose parents divorce face the same predicament as divorce also has a permanent psychological effect on many children.
Children of divorced parents have vivid memories of their parents’ separation. The details become firmly etched in their minds and they refer to themselves as children of divorce. In most instances, conditions in the post-divorce family are less supportive to the child than conditions in a failing marriage.
Divorce was thought to be a brief crisis that soon revolved itself but research has shown that is not the case. Young children might have difficulties of falling asleep while older children might have problems concentrating in school. Men and women may become depressed and find themselves in unplanned sexual affairs.
Some might try to remarry after a year or two but find themselves in a worse situation than anticipated and some might be treated for psychiatric disorders.
A study which tracked sixty families after divorce, found out that while some divorces work well, more often than not divorce is a wrenching long lasting experience for at least one of the former partners. For children, it exerts powerful and wholly damaging effects.
After a year of divorce, the same families were visited to find out whether there were recoveries among men and women and to look at how the children were coping with their parents’ divorce. By that time, families were still nursing fresh wounds. Turmoil and distress had not noticeably subsided.
The men and women were highly humiliated and felt rejected and most could not get their lives back together. The children were worse off than they had been soon after the divorce. After five years the same study showed that half of the men and two thirds of the women said they were more content with their lives and thirty four percent of the children were doing well. Another thirty seven percent were depressed and could not concentrate at school, and some had become trouble making friends and suffered a whole of other behavioural problems. While most of the children were able to function on a day-to-day basis, they however had not recovered.
The rest of the children could not fit into any category as their behaviour was unpredictable. The major problem is that soon after divorce, most parents stop their parenting roles whether or not they remarry. Parents should learn to put their differences aside and allow children a continued relationship with both parents.
When a marriage breaks down, men and women alike experience a diminished capacity to parenthood. They may give less time, provide less discipline and be less sensitive to their children since they are still preoccupied with the divorce and its aftermath. At times its failure by both parents to differentiate between their children’s needs and their own.
After a 10-year period, the same follow-up study revealed that most of the children were now adults. Overall, forty five percent were doing well but forty one percent were doing poorly. They were entering adulthood as worried, underachieving and angry young men and women.
Generally, boys and girls go through the same experiences after divorce though girls may be susceptible when it comes to starting relationships. Studies have found that emotionally disturbed parents within a marriage produce similar kinds of problems in children.
The child’s role after divorce becomes that of holding parents together psychologically. The children’s major roles become that of warding off the serious depression that threatens parents psychologically. When studies were conducted on children of divorced parents, some revealed that they had to stop going to school in order to look after their mothers who now had turned into prostitution and drug abuse.
Such children may need support and counselling just as the battered and abused children need such treatment. In reality such children cannot rescue their parents but they become trapped by their parents’ demands. Some due to dwindling parental support may not have their needs gratified but are over-burdened by their parental needs.
In comparing the post-divorce lives of former husbands and wives, it was revealed that 50 percent of women and 30 percent of men were still angry at their former spouses a decade after divorce. For women over 40 years life was lonely throughout the decade and not one of them remarried or sustained a steady relationship. Half of the men over 40 years had the same problem.
In terms of children, three in five felt rejected by one of the parents, usually the father. The children did not care about the frequency of visits by the father. Children simply longed for their father and the need increased during adolescence. If the children are in the custody of the father they equally miss the mother.
Vaidah Mashangwa is the provincial development officer in the Ministry of Women Affairs, Gender and Community Development. She can be contacted on 0772111592 or email [email protected]
derick.khumalo