PACIFIC MEDIA CENTRE

Nius beat

PNG:  New book confronts tough issues, repression facing women, 20 November 2007

By Christina Kewa: Pacific Media Centre

A Papua New Guinea journalist now living at Ruakaka, near Whangarei, Christina Kewa has written and published a new book about her homeland, Being a Woman in Papua New Guinea: From Grass Skirts and Ashes to Education and Global Changes

Christina Kewa … PNG journalist campaigning over women’s rights.

Being a Woman in Papua New Guinea confronts and challenges issues that are currently affecting women in Papua New Guinea, and yet the laws and society are doing less or nothing about it. I challenge our denial to education, our freedom of speech, and the fears we have of being rejected raped, abused, killed and much more as women in Papua New Guinea.

The book confronts the issues, and searches for solution avenues through government and the laws of PNG. The book does not aim to degrade the men in PNG, but aims to educate, inform, and position them all as loving, respectable and honourable.

Being a Woman was recently launched and presented to the Governor General of Papua New Guinea, who has also written the foreword.The book does give a lot of insight into what goes on in humans in one part of the world - especially social issues affecting women in PNG.


The book is written and presented very simply, as I use very simple English, targeting the average English speaker in PNG.

The book is a collection of my personal experiences and observations on the treatment of women in PNG during my many years of career as a newspaper journalist in PNG. It contains fact news cuttings, behind the scene stories by real women victims, and interviews and stories that I have collected which are very challenging for the development of women and PNG as a nation.

The book has been well received and much publicised. Recently, I made a presentation of the book to lone PNG female MP Dame Carol Kidu at the National Parliament.

On the same day, women in PNG marched to Parliament to petition the government for stonger laws and law enforcement after a pregnant woman was cut open and the baby was pulled out and killed by her husband.

This was yet another shocking case of abuse, yet Parliament said and did nothing. Our petition was slammed again.

So, it is on the basis of stories like this and hundreds more happening in PNG that made me write this book.

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