Despite decades of advocacy and awareness, the scourge that is intimate partner (domestic) violence continues to overshadow the strides being made toward gender equity. This is 2024. The world has already embraced artificial intelligence, augmented reality, digital currencies and genetic manipulation, to name a few discoveries few of us might have hitherto imagined possible. Women have long been shattering glass ceilings and will clearly persist in making such strides; one was scheduled to go to the moon this month. Yet, this depressing statistic remains entrenched; about 1 in 3 (30%) of women worldwide have been subjected to either physical and/or sexual intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetime. According to the World Health Organisation, which published this information in the first quarter of this year, “Most of this violence is intimate partner violence”.
In-depth examinations of this data reveal a few uncomfortable truths. In various areas, the figures increase and decline based on women’s independence or lack thereof, their situations, mental and emotional health and their culture and education. This is not to say that the perpetrators of intimate partner violence (IPV) change their attitudes towards women owing to any of the attributes referred to above. Rather, it is the case that women in possession of those characteristics might faster escape abuse, sometimes before it starts, as they would be more likely to not only discern the presence of red flags, but have the means to successfully scarper. This is among the reasons why empowering women is seen as crucial in the crusade to stamp out this awful plague on our existence.
Among further harsh and bitter truths is the knowledge that there are places in the world where women find ways and arguments to justify IPV. Guyana is one such place. In its recent Americas issue, released on October 23, medical journal ‘The Lancet’ published the findings of “Women’s attitudes towards intimate partner violence in Guyana: a population-based study”. This research, the first ever to examine women’s attitudes towards IPV in this country, analysed data from nationally representative surveys done in 2009, 2014 and 2019.
For the purpose of this study, the researchers isolated the responses women gave to five relevant questions asked in the wider survey. One question was whether a husband who was annoyed with his wife for going out without telling him had the right to hit her. Another was whether he was right to beat her if she neglected the children. A third questioned his right to become angry and beat her if she argued with him. Women were also asked if a husband was right to beat his wife if she refused to have sex with him. The final question was whether a husband had a right to beat his wife if she burned the food. The researchers revealed that they only considered definitive yes or no answers and excluded those that responded: “don’t know”, “not sure” or it “depends”.
From a layman’s perspective, although those last three answer types possibly denote a lack of enlightenment, they could easily fall on the yes side, which is worrying. As an aside, it might be fair to posit here that if variations of these questions are asked of women with reference to why they physically abuse their children, there would be overwhelmingly ‘yes’ responses and the same would prevail in children’s answers.
While it found that between the first and last years there had been a 34.1% reduction in the number of women justifying IPV by answering yes to one or more of those five questions, the study stated that in 2019 the level of justification remained high. This was particularly the case “among women from the poorest households, and those with lower levels of education,” the researchers found. They added that this highlighted “significant disparities”. Some of the key factors associated with women’s attitudes about IPV, the study detected, were area of residence, sex of the household head, marital status, level of education, wealth index quintile, and frequency of reading newspapers/magazines.
The researchers recommended interventions at the policy level to reduce the incidence of women justifying IPV. Suggestions included effective use of media and community-based approaches. Further, as this newspaper has done ad nauseam, the report called for the implementation of school programmes to teach “children and adolescents about consent, respect, and healthy relationships”. It also noted the need for future studies to “understand the evolving beliefs and attitudes that might affect people’s safety and health and threaten any universal human right in Guyana”.
One of the obvious next steps ought to be a similar study targeting men, as it is absolutely important to measure their nescience on the issue in order to move forward. The entire world now frames IPV as a public health crisis. There is therefore a need to desist from boxing it off as either just a woman’s problem or solely the product of toxic masculinity; it is all consuming.
One hopes that the government considers, not just this new study, but all of the adjacent issues before it moves ahead with its proposed ‘Family Violence Bill’, the naming of which gives one pause for thought. The current use of IPV to describe gender-based violence is in recognition of the fact that it does not only occur within the confines of a domestic situation. Intimate partners in visiting or even casual relationships, both open and furtive, have perpetrated or been on the receiving end of violence.
That being said, the urgency of recognising the systemic failures in the approach to stemming violence against women and girls cannot be overemphasised. The entrenched attitudes toward IPV, including denial and lack of accountability, and the culture that allows it flourish have to be dismantled if there is to be any true progress.
