Women Left “in Constant Peril” as Biya Government Breaks Decade-Old Pledge on Violence—Report

A new Human Rights Watch report finds that fifteen years after promising to halve gender-based violence, The Biya government has done little, leaving survivors without protection or justice.

A promise made, and broken

Fifteen years ago, Cameroon’s government promised to confront the violence that shadows the lives of millions of its women and girls, pledging in 2011 to cut its prevalence in half. In a report and statement shared with MMI News, Human Rights Watch says that promise was never kept. Far from halving the violence, the government has failed to take meaningful steps to address it at all, even as its own officials concede the problem is getting worse.

The 75-page report, titled “‘I Live in Constant Peril’: Discrimination, Lack of Economic Autonomy and Violence Against Women in Cameroon,” documents how women across the country endure physical, psychological and economic abuse, most often at the hands of husbands and intimate partners, with little hope of protection or redress.

For the organisation, the failure is not an accident of circumstance but a product of how the country is governed. “Violence against women is not simply the result of abusive actions by individuals,” said Juliana Nnoko, senior women’s rights adviser at Human Rights Watch. It is, she argued, enabled and compounded by discriminatory laws and institutional failures that leave survivors with nowhere to turn.

What the researchers found

The findings rest on interviews carried out between September and December 2024 with 60 women who had survived domestic violence or discrimination, alongside three religious leaders and seven government officials responsible for delivering social services in Maroua, Douala and Buea. Researchers also examined a range of government policies and reports on gender-based violence.

What emerged was a portrait of abuse that reaches well beyond physical harm. Women described being controlled through their finances, cut off from income, employment, property and any path to independence. The report frames these patterns not as isolated tragedies but as the predictable result of entrenched inequality, weak institutions and years of underinvestment in prevention and support for survivors.

Trapped with no way out

For many of the women, economic abuse was the lock on the door. Husbands had sold jointly owned property without consent or compensation, sabotaged their wives’ jobs, cancelled business leases and destroyed the equipment they needed to earn a living. Stripped of any means of supporting themselves, women found themselves bound to the very men harming them.

One woman told researchers she had spent close to three decades confined to the family compound, forbidden from leaving, from speaking to others, or from pursuing her wish to open a small business, and beaten when she disobeyed. The dispossession often outlived the marriage itself. Because of structural discrimination, the report found, women are routinely stripped of land and property by male relatives and in-laws even when they hold documents proving ownership, with widows pressured into surrendering what is rightfully theirs.

Turned away by those meant to protect

The women who sought help frequently found the state ranged against them rather than behind them. They described being pushed to reconcile with their abusers, blamed for the violence done to them, and exposed to retaliation once they reported it. Several said their husbands had connections to the police or local officials, which made speaking out more dangerous still.

Yvonne D., a 54-year-old data processor in Douala whose full name was withheld for her safety, went to the police expecting them to summon her husband. Instead, she said, the officer took no notes, “smiled, and just said: ‘Truly! Women!'” When her husband learned she had reported him, she said, he beat her in front of their children and threw her out of their home.

The pattern repeated elsewhere. Rosalind E., a 44-year-old hairdresser in Buea, said a female police commissioner advised her “to drop it because it is a family matter.” Even after her husband was briefly arrested, she said, the state prosecutor urged her to abandon the case. Such responses, the report argues, sustain a climate of impunity in which abusers face few consequences and survivors learn that reporting is futile.

Laws that entrench the harm

Underpinning all of this, Human Rights Watch says, is a legal framework that places women at a structural disadvantage. The law governing family relations still designates husbands as heads of household and primary managers of matrimonial property, weakening a woman’s say over where she lives, whether she works and what she owns, and making it harder to leave an abusive marriage.

A revised Family Code, the reform widely seen as essential to protecting women’s rights and meeting Cameroon’s international obligations, has languished in draft form for more than two decades. The country has no national policy or guidelines on domestic violence, and no coordinated system for collecting data on it. The true scale of the problem, including femicide, remains largely hidden from public view.

One party, one president, decades of inaction

Human Rights Watch is pointed about where responsibility lies. The Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement and its chairman, President Paul Biya, have governed the country for more than four decades. This, the report stresses, is not a story of successive administrations falling short. It is the same party and the same president carrying uninterrupted responsibility for the decades-long absence of meaningful action to end violence against women.

Cameroon is bound by the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and by the African Union’s Maputo Protocol, both of which oblige governments to repeal discriminatory laws, prevent violence and provide real remedies. Domestic violence, the organisation insists, is not a private family matter but a serious human rights violation the state has a duty to confront.

What needs to change

The report calls on the government to reform discriminatory family laws as a matter of urgency, to finally update and adopt the long-delayed Family Code, to build a coordinated national response to domestic violence, and to make support services reachable in every part of the country. It also presses for sustained funding for survivor-centred services and genuine accountability for those who abuse.

Nnoko framed the stakes in the simplest possible terms. “Being a woman in Cameroon,” she said, “should not mean having to experience discrimination and violence.”

MMI News has approached government officials for comment.

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