SPOUSAL killing is the most lethal outcome of couples’ disputes compared to other forms of domestic violence.
Although killing a beloved one is not as common as any known form of domestic violence such as wife battery, it nevertheless goes on unabated in nearly all Zambian societies.
If accurate statistics were given though, the trend could be of more women being murdered by their husbands and less men being killed by their wives.
And wife murders, some of which go unreported, happen nearly every week, if not every day.
Only today, we are carrying a story of a woman being murdered by her husband in Kasama, Northern Province. No concrete reasons are known yet apart from the police pointing to ‘marital disputes’.
The heinous crime has become just as common as the killing of elderly citizens of this country. However, while many senior citizens are murdered over allegations of practising witchcraft, reasons for spousal killing may not be known.
Where the reasons are known, they are scanty and vary.
Foremost, some school of thought attributes the phenomenon of wife-killing particularly to what is commonly known as pathological jealousy or sexual possessiveness.
This happens especially when the husband, or even the wife, feels that any separation from the life partner by and large entails a loss of one’s own identity.
Reasons for couples’ separation are not all known. They may not even all be disclosed in local courts where such cases normally come up before his/her worships, although adultery seems to top the list.
However, if such separation involves the killing of the once beloved partner, it points to what in the Bemba language they say ‘ukufilila munsenga’.
This is a situation where a spouse is ‘snatched’ by someone, seemingly a competitor, for one reason or the other, and the person on the losing end feels all must ending up losing – in which case one has to ensure that the spouse he/she has lost is ‘eliminated’ so that both lose out.
The other reason, especially for wife-killing, points to traditional and even modern perception of masculinity.
Psychologists say that this dictates that the man has full power, honour, and control over his woman. But where the male finds himself in a situation of dependency upon his wife, this reliance is evidence of his weakness and humiliation – and therefore an affront to his perceived masculine honour.
Whichever way one looks at it, experts feel that killing a spouse is rather a deliberate act, one which is the culmination of emotional distress that has prepared the psychological grounds for committing such a murder.
Of course some people explain such murders differently, ranging from the perpetrators of such acts being possessed by evil spirits to clear cases of insanity.
The worst case scenario, though inexcusable, is someone saying he did not know what he was doing, and blaming the murder on excessive alcohol intake.
But those who mean to murder in most cases also kill themselves, obviously knowing that the maximum penalty for their action is death by hanging.
Whatever the reason may be, the murder of a spouse may be seen generally as an unintended result of violence that simply went too far.
And as the situation currently is, corporal punishment has done little to end spousal killing. For this reason, such acts will continue to the end of the world and, as some one reads this, some one today has been killed somewhere in the country by his or her spouse.