Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum Special Report Gender and Constitutional Issues forego this privilege by educating daughters who will get married and work for another family. Without land or education, rural women have no option except to perpetuate their dependence on others through the cycle of marriage and reproduction. Ironically, the most vocal and active organisation seeking land rights for women is the Women and Land Lobby Group (WLLG), composed of well-educated urban women who themselves have little if any interest in farming. WLLG14 has severely criticised Government policy on and results of land resettlement for being insufficiently gender-sensitive, and reported that: ‘Although females heading households15 can access land and be given permits in resettlement areas, their married counterparts still had to access land through their husbands and have no security of tenure should their husbands die; There are not many women who own land in small scale commercial areas as most women are poor; Legal and policy framework has not incorporated inheritance rights pertaining to land for widows; The fact of women's lack of access and control over land leads to them being excluded from credit,16 marketing facilities, decision-making powers over agricultural production activities and benefits, negatively impacting on the productive capacity of women; Only 23% of the women in communal areas have secondary access to their own land parcels allocated to them by their husbands.’ Urban women, who are generally better educated than their rural counterparts and often employed, have a different property problem. Their problem is how to secure, in their own right and names, extremely scarce urban housing. This problem entails ensuring that property jointly owned with husbands is registered in both names, to avoid a husband’s patrilineal kin claiming ‘his’ property on his death and evicting his wife and children. A growing number of sons who inherit such family homes are reported to sell them without informing their widowed mothers. Such sales often entail legal difficulties, as a result of which these elderly women end up homeless. There are many such cases reported in our press. In a particularly vexatious case, the State required 67-year-old Mrs Ednah Mahureva to serve three months’ imprisonment for contempt of court when she refused to vacate her former matrimonial home to the purchaser to whom it had been sold without her knowledge by her son. Single or divorced women may experience difficulty in negotiating a lease or a mortgage bond to acquire property from municipal or private owners. Self-employed women may have particular difficulty in proving their income level, while most female employees earn salaries lower than those of men seeking to lease or own homes. Urban women want secure homes in town because home ownership expands their economic and financial options. They can increase their incomes through letting rooms, and invest such income in trade-goods which are safely stored in the house. As self-financed small entrepreneurs, women with little education can become independent heads of household and educate their children for greater upward social mobility. Such female independence, for Zimbabwe’s increasing number of young widows, is particularly important in the era of AIDS. Domestic violence Like child sex abuse, domestic violence affects all social classes. Although there are cases reported of domestic violence perpetrated by women against men, the overwhelming majority of cases are by men against women. Domestic violence is in practice discriminatory by sex, although it does not feature in the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women. According to Justice Elizabeth Gwaunza, a former High Court judge who specialises in family law and chairs the Musasa Project, one in four women is beaten, raped or molested by her male partner and one in 14 WLLG 2001a (p. 10). 15 Single, divorced and widowed women. 16 Women receive less than 10% of the credit advanced to small farmers in Zimbabwe, despite being more reliable in their repayment of loans (WLLG 2001b, p. 11). 15