Zimbabwe: Loitering law discriminates against women

Imagine this: its 9:30pm and you are walking back to your apartment in the city centre after an early evening movie with your partner. Suddenly a police Defender filled with women comes to a halt in front of you. Two policemen armed with batons jump out, threateningly prowl around you and tell you you’re under arrest.

 

Such was the predicament my husband and I and his brother and wife found ourselves in on a recent Sunday evening. After a stunned moment we naively produced our identity cards and explained that we were walking back home – which was a block away – after watching a movie. We even used my seven-month ‘bulge’ to emphasise that we were married.

 

“You are wasting our time; we deal with you prostitutes all the time. You will explain when we get to the charge office. You’re being charged for loitering.” We could tell that they were losing their patience with our insistent explanations.

 

My first concern naturally was my unborn baby, so we listened to them. Bewildered, my sister-in-law and I hopped into the truck; me of course with great difficulty. The police told our husbands that if they were genuine, they would follow us to the charge evidence and produce evidence of our relationship.

 

We were driven around town in the open truck as the hunt for ‘loiterers’ continued. After I had settled down in the best way possible, I began to observe my fellow inmates. There was a variety: a clique of heavily-made up, scantily dressed night time sisters (sex workers) laughing and taunting the police; a few quiet, confused women who have no idea what they has done wrong, wondering what was so unacceptable about being out at 9:30pm on a Sunday night; and lastly, a hysteric woman who is kicking, screaming and hurling insults.

 

A few blocks away we picked up two elderly women vending outside a nightclub. They are heaped on top of us together with their improvised cardboard table, boiled eggs, sweets, cigarettes and condoms.

 

Across the road, a girl with a west-African accent is picked up. She tries in vain to explain her position as a foreign student on her way back to college with her boyfriend. She is lifted into the truck, kicking and screaming causing her visibly shaken boyfriend to jump into the truck. But he was pushed out and told to follow. 

 

In the end, close to 15 women packed like sardines in the back of the truck, on an icy cold night were being charged for loitering and driven to the charge office. Luckily for us “our men” arrived just as we were being ushered into the office, bearing marriage certificates and identification cards to prove they were brothers.

 

The charge for loitering is Z$25 000, and then one still has go through great pains to explain why you as a woman were on the street at that hour. Women who have no money with them because they were in the company of someone else, or simply were taking a stroll, are held at the remand prison until morning when they can call a relative or friend to bail them out. Those who pay the bail and are released then have to walk back into the city centre, a journey undertaken with the risk of attack by genuine ‘loiterers’ and thugs.

 

So the question is: does loitering only refer to women?

 

According to Zimbabwe’s law on loitering under the Miscellaneous’ Offences Act in Section 4(1), any person found loitering in a public place for the purposes of prostitution or solicitation shall be guilty of an offence. However, the definition of a ‘public place’ is very broad and includes any building or part of a building to which the public has access.

 

The major concern for the police has been that they have a right to clear the streets of loiterers especially sex workers. However what is not taken into consideration is the demand from men for their services. 

 

If in Zimbabwe, it is assumed that every woman who walks in the streets at night, accompanied or unaccompanied is a sex worker, then the same should go for men. Also, by the blanket attitude adopted by the law enforcers, surely male loiterers should be considered even more dangerous as they may intend to rape, mug or break into property.

 

The biased attitude towards women is evident everywhere, even in the media. On August 11, 2005, Bulawayo woke up to The Chronicle’s headline “Prostitute dies in love nest.” The story described the death by electrocution of a sex worker who had been providing a service to a male client at an electrical substation. It was reported that the man missed death by a whisker.

 

Now here is the issue; the initial story did not include any information about any action being taken against the man (who had it not been for him, the woman would have not died as she would not have been there in the first place). As readers we would have liked to know whether he was charged (which he should have been) for being in a situation that led to the death of his ‘friend’, as much as we would have if the situation was vice-versa.

 

Sadly, the double standards of society yet again make themselves visible. By virtue of our womanhood, Zimbabwean women it seems are doomed to life indoors after 9pm.