Africa: Violence in the Hungry Season

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Tackling violence against women and girls is rightly riding high on the development agenda and so too is food insecurity. But it has only been in the last few days, travelling around Malawi at the start of a particularly hungry season, that the direct nature of the causal link between the two has crystallised for me. Tackling violence in poor families and communities must start with protecting people's - all people's - rights to food.

How does food insecurity cause sexual- and gender-based violence? I can only tell you what we heard from staff in government and UN agency facilities, including a refugee camp near Lilongwe and from women we met there. The consistency and the clarity of the message were startling: cases of violence against women and girls tend to increase sharply with hunger, and they are currently seeing a rise. Simple as that. Other factors - cultural acceptance, patriarchal privilege, perpetrator impunity, women's lack of economic power - all matter, but are ever-present background factors, not triggers for the current rise. And after a bad maize harvest, widely attributed to climate change, this looks sadly like being a bumper year for abuse.

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