RIGHTS-GENDER: Domestic Violence – No End In Sight

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

MEXICO CITY, Nov 23 2000 (IPS) - One of the best-kept secrets in this sprawling city of 22 million people is the address of the solitary shelter that offers temporary refuge to women who have been abused, battered or raped in their homes.

The need for such secrecy, say women’s rights activists, is to prevent male abusers hounding the women who have sought safety and security in this building – a small, pink-walled, single-storey affair. According to records maintained at the shelter, most of the 70 bunk-beds available for the violated women are often occupied.

And such compelling evidence about domestic violence here has been amplified further by the chilling details of a report released this week by Mexico’s Safe Motherhood Committee regards violence directed at pregnant women.

Research by the committee reveals that pregnancy does not protect women from being abused. It estimates that close to 50 percent of women 15 years or older who are married will “be abused and beaten”.

For a leading US women’s rights activist, the scourge of domestic violence against women is not restricted to one region of world. “It is a disturbing feature that prevails worldwide, in both developed and developing countries,” says Charlotte Bunch, executive director of the Centre for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers University, New Jersey.

And this week, as the world prepares to mark the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women on Nov. 25, Bunch expects the concerns over domestic violence to become a central issue.

The need for such a focus is understandable, moreover, given what two studies released this year have revealed. The United Nations Development Fund (UNIFEM) stated in a report, ‘The World’s Women 2000 Trends and Statistics,’ that “the abuse by a husband or intimate partner is the most common form of violence against women”.

And national surveys conducted by UNIFEM in 11 countries established that the number of women who had been abused by an intimate partner at some point in their lives ranged from a five to 48 percent.

In more localised studies done in Africa, Latin America and Asia, the numbers were much higher up to 58 percent of women reported to have suffered from physical violence.

According to the United States-based Human Rights Watch (HRW), in six countries – Jordan, Pakistan, Peru, Russia, South Africa and the United States there have been “alarming rates of violence against women”.

In Russia, for instance, HRW quotes official estimates which indicate that 12,000 women die every year as a result of domestic violence. While in Pakistan, “upward of 80 percent of women” are victims of such violence.

In Jordan, on the other hand, women have been victims of “honour killings,” where women are murdered by family members in the name of honour. According to HRW, one-third of Jordan’s annual homicide rate include such victims.

And in the United States, it states that “at least 1.8 million women are assaulted every year by their husbands or boyfriends”.

For HRW, such a gruesome reality indicates that the pledges made by 189 governments at the 1995 World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, to combat violence against women in all its forms have not been met.

Equally troubling, states HRW, is the manner in which the violence women encounter in their homes is perceived. “Domestic violence is almost universally dismissed as a family issue not of police concern.”

What is more, it adds, few police officers acknowledge the seriousness of crimes of “intra-family violence against women or their widespread and unchecked incidence”.

And that is demonstrated by evidence HRW unearthed in Peru, where the police not only “mistreated women filing complaints”, but even undermined their safety by “having them deliver police summons to the abusers, who then responded with another violent attack”.

According to Nata Duvvury, director of the Social Conflict and Transformation Team at the Washington D.C.-based International Centre for Research on Women, many developing countries are in dire need of stronger laws to combat such rights abuses.

“Such laws are necessary if we are to begin the more arduous task of changing norms about the acceptability of violence within families, communities and societies,” argues Duvvury.

However, laws alone will not change the violence women are subjected to, says Sonia del Valle, pointing to her own country, Mexico, as a perfect example. It has been three years since the government introduced tough laws to quell domestic violence, but little has changed, adds del Valle, a senior journalist working for CIMAC, a women’s news agency.

“Much more has to be done than just passing laws to effect change,” she adds. “Public policy needs to focus on sensitising officials and the people that such violence is wrong.”

For Bunch, equally important is the need to challenge the notion that “the woman’s body has to be controlled through abuse”.

And for that, she feels, men have to be convinced that it is an “unacceptable form of control”.

Such expectations from men, in fact, have not been lost on the women’s rights activists in South Africa. Included in their planned 16-day campaign to mark the International Day for Prevention of Violence against Women is a “Men’s March”.

“Men who don’t rape can show their solidarity by joining the Men’s March and erasing the perception that the majority of men in South Africa (where over 50,000 rape cases are reported annually) are rapists, child abusers and murderers,” declares a media release by the organisers, Women Demand Dignity.

“Showing their support shows a strong disapproval of violence against women and children,” it points out.

In addition, says del Valle, women, too, have to be convinced that domestic violence is not an “acceptable and normal practice”.

And in Mexico, that means challenging a popular belief among women who say, “If he doesn’t beat me he doesn’t love me”.