For Rebecca Weng, gender-based violence remains a familiar encounter that she has been living with since her childhood.

Her struggles mirror the grim fates of many victims suffering in silence and drowning in sorrow entrenched by societal bias.

Weng, 24, a mother of two children, says she started experiencing GVB after her father married a second wife and accused her mother of only producing girls.

“My stepmother gave birth to boys while my mother delivered all five girls. This angered my father, who beat our mother whenever he visited us from the house of her ”Queen”, whom he thought had given him pride and respect among his peers. “

Weng says her father refused to educate them because they were girls and only sent their stepbrothers to school. But the boys later dropped out of school due to inadequate finances.

In their house, her mother had to indulge in selling illicit brews to make ends meet.

“Our mother could brew local alcohol, which she sold to sustain the family. So, my father decided not to pay our school fees because we were girls. He could not even provide anything like clothes or other necessities for us, ” Weng recalls.

“The good thing is that God blessed us. We used to perform well at school. We used to be in the first position and second, so my uncle took this opportunity to help us and took me to Kampala, where I studied up to senior two, ” she says.

Weng’s uncle later lost his job, and he returned her to Juba. However, the church where she fellowshipped stepped in to pay her school fees until she completed her secondary education.

“When I was in senior four, there was a lot of hardship, no support, and I struggled by washing clothes to meet other needs as the church only paid the school fees,” Weng narrates.

Passion for education          

Weng felt the harsh hands of destiny and decided to get married as an option to the challenges her sisters faced in exploring avenues to advance their studies.

“With all these conditions, I decided to get married so that I could get some assistance to go to university. So, I got married when I was twenty, and when I completed my senior four, unfortunately, my husband also lost his contract, and he could not work. So, he was jobless, ” she said.

She bumped into suffering again, and luckily, the Church gave her a chance to be a teacher at Fr Abraham Nursery and Primary School, Gurei residential area.

“I could not continue to the university. I gave birth to my first son, and then also to the second one. Then, the church helped me. They said since I was brilliant, I could not stay at home, I should teach. “

“I started teaching and after that they said, I should not remain at O-level, I should go to university. I picked up the registration forms from the university, but currently, there is still no support. “

Weng says she has a lot of responsibilities and the little SSP 25,000 salary cannot meet her basic needs.

She says she is passionate about education and is struggling to get the support to achieve her dream, adding that her husband was behind her, but lacks the money to pay her at university.

Forced marriages

While working as a teacher, Rebecca could divide her monthly incentive so as to cater for her sister’s other needs as her cousin took care of her school fees till she (her sister) finished her secondary education. After that, she called her to Juba in order to get her a casual job, but her father insisted that she should go see him first.

She says her father instead married off her sister at the age of 17. She also reveals that their thirdborn was forced to marry at the age of 14.

“They forced our third born at the age of fourteen to get married, and they are suffering right now, deep in the village, while the other two sisters are still very young.”

Rebecca says her mother was already ageing and could not manage well enough to brew alcohol as she did. She disclosed that her father had so far married two more wives, and their lives were really miserable.

“He has the first wife who gave him boys, and my mother is the second wife. He has even brought a third wife, and now I hear that he has brought another one also. The family is now declining because he is only focusing on the younger wives, ” she said.

“He is no longer staying with my mother, and my mother has been bearing with this situation, so she is used to it.”

Pieces of advice

She says that gender-based violence is a form of humiliation and should be discouraged. She called on all the parents to give fair treatment to all their children, irrespective of their gender.

“Gender-based violence is humiliation. Other people are being humiliated and we are all equal. All parents should consider their children equal, and they should at least promote their education, both formal and informal, by not segregating because it can hurt, ” Rebecca advised.

”My father used to beat my mother too much because she gave birth to girls. So, men outside there should not mistreat their wives because they are helpers.”

She says parents should stop forcing their daughters into early marriages. Weng says her aspiration to become a doctor has not waned.

“Negligence from our parents does lead us to be failures in life. So, all parents should at least leave this issue of mistreating girls, chasing girls out of the home, and beating women. “

She says she does not want other women to go through what she experienced and that they should therefore acquire skills that could help them support themselves. She says that they had a centre where they taught women basic literacy and numeracy skills in Gurei.

 “Out of this hardship that I experienced, I don’t want other women to experience it. At our centre right now, we have almost five hundred and sixty-nine women, whom we use to teach basic skills of living literacy and numeracy every evening. At the duration of six months, they may be able to do something that can help them.”