DOMESTIC violence is increasing in many parts of the world, although there are huge amounts of funding, legislative changes, and a growing understanding associated with it. There are people who say that when you take a hard look at Guyana some years back, you would be hard-pressed to point to some serious and frequent domestic violence in communities with which they are familiar. And it is not that domestic violence was on the missing list; probably to a large extent, the family system was able to hide it from the wandering eyes of the public. Nonetheless, it is difficult to say that there was a lower or higher prevalence of domestic violence then compared to now.
What I can say is that then the popular family system was largely the extended family which saw blood ties as important, and where a group of blood relatives dwelt within a single household.
Perhaps, the daily presence of many blood relatives within the household prevented domestic violence; but, on the contrary, the total numbers also could induce a female to accept her violence in silence. In theory, presence of an extended family could reduce domestic violence, but in practice, this is far from the truth.
Look at how in extended family systems, mothers-in-law add to the violence that husbands inflict on their wives (Fernandez, 2011).The nuclear family, on the other hand, comprising of husband, wife, and children, and being physically away from blood relatives, may provide plenty opportunities for violence against the wife, in the absence of the extended family; even so, the saying that there is safety in numbers may turn out to be untrue, when you look at how the extended family perpetrates violence against the wife.
While both the extended and nuclear family systems could be harbingers of family violence, they are more the means and not the causes of violence against women. There are many different types of violence against women. One that is growing in intensity is intimate partner violence (IPV) as forced sexual intercourse, among others.
The United Nations General Assembly sees violence against women as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual or psychological harm or suffering to women” (United Nations, 1993). The WHO Multi-Country Study on Women’s Health and Domestic Violence showed that among 10 countries, there was a range of IPV from 6% to 59%.
Earlier studies on IPV including that of forced sexual intercourse talked about empowerment as a protective measure, meaning that the way to reduce IPV could involve raising women’s empowerment levels; nonetheless, ways to eliminate IPV also could look at the possible link between forced sexual intercourse and husband’s unemployment and low wealth (Kaplan, Khawaja, and Linos, 2011).
In the American Public Health Association group, I recently had a discussion on domestic violence with Yasamin Browne, A Yale University graduate who said:
“I’m interested in global intimate partner violence. I just returned from Nicaragua last month on a service mission with my alumni association where, as in other parts of the globe, IPV is rampant.
“There were a number of signs encouraging women who were victims of IPV to go the police station or a centre. And I didn’t see it but 1 of the volunteers saw a woman with a bruised face and blood going into the police station, carrying a baby in her arms. It’s an under-addressed, silent pandemic. Do you think the approach to address the AIDS pandemic can be used as a model for IPV?”
I responded as follows:
“It is possible that we can apply an HIV/AIDS model to address domestic violence. Gupta et al. (2008) in the Lancet argued that the basic goal of HIV prevention is to transform people’s risk behaviours; and that there has been a dominance of individual-level behavioural interventions for the previous 25 years that influenced knowledge, attitudes, and behaviours.
“Nonetheless, Coates, Richter, and Caceres (2008) in the Lancet found that the impact of individual-level behavioural interventions to reduce risky behaviours is enhanced when HIV prevention relates to the structural factors that influence individual behaviours; these factors are social, political, economic, and environmental that attempt to transform individual risk and susceptibility to the HIV infection. Nevertheless Rao et al. (2008) concluded that this approach will have to include other prevention options and treatments to reduce risk and susceptibility to HIV. I suspect that this approach can be utilized to address the troubling and growing issue of domestic violence.”
And while it is important to target the social, political, economic, and environmental factors to reduce violence against women, this action would still be inadequate for the short term; these factors have a stronger bite in the long run. But we need to address the short term now. And we can do this by appreciating that these women are knowledgeable about their culture of violence and have the capacity to act. And there are women who make such active responses to their violence; they should give the lead with trained and committed professionals providing a reliable and viable support structure; but not those (not all) so-called professionals in Guyana who seem to exploit every social problem for their political mileage. And just that we know, forced sexual intercourse is violence against women.