Abstract
Violence against women is a major public health issue encompassing every corner of the world. Although various measures, such as international treaties, crisis centers, raised awareness on the issue exist, the prevalence of violence towards women still takes toll on healthcare. Nowadays, this issue mostly affects women from developing countries, where the laws preventing violence against women can be looser than in developed countries. Moreover, one of the prominent types of abuse is Intimate Partner Violence. The purpose of this study is to determine the additional risk factors in women who have been violated.
This study is performed by analyzing the existing data and using primary research on the topic of violence against women. The implied method gives an opportunity to better understand dynamics from different parts of the world and analyze differing data on the topic. The analysis can be used to derive useful conclusions and implications about the topic. Findings indicate that many risk factors are manifested on societal and cultural scales, rather than on individual level. As a result, the topic of violence against women in developing countries should be considered from a perspective of interconnected and complex solutions, rather than individualistic ones.
Background
The issue of intimate partner’s violence towards women is a highly acute one in the society. Statistics show that almost 25% of women face either physical or sexual violence from their intimate partners (Harvey et al., 2021). According to Reynolds (2022), “Intimate partner violence (IPV) can occur at varying levels of physical severity: from a slap to homicide, all are classified as intimate partner violence” (p.1). This, of course, leads to issues with both physical and mental health.
The global implications of such high rates of violence are the impediment of gender equality. Tesfaw and Muluneh (2022) state “compared to women who have not experienced intimate partner violence, women who have experienced intimate partner violence are feeling discouraged and hopeless” (p. 2). So, apart from obvious implications, such as harm for physical and mental health, there are long term implications of women becoming more desperate because of intimate partner violation. Furthermore, it can affect the future generations who have witnessed violence in their household (Tesfaw & Muluneh, 2022). The aim of this study is to determine risk factors and implications that violence against women has in developing world. This study has an important contribution to the field as it analyzes the multiple risk factors across different cultures and countries. Thus, it can provide a perspective on risk factors which are prevalent for most communities.
Methods
The aim of this study is to recognize repeated risk factors for violence against women across developing countries. The study is designed to analyze the primary and secondary research on violence against women in countries, such as Nigeria, Brazil, Tanzania, and Arab countries. The variety of countries can provide a useful pool of data and risk factors. The question for this research is: what type of factors can put women at a greater risk of violence from intimate partner in developing countries?
The criterion for inclusion is women who have experienced physical, mental, or emotional violence from their intimate partners or family members. This excludes women who have suffered violence from strangers or non-relatives. This study also does not consider violence against men due to the limited scope.
Results
Results of this study indicate that there are several layers of risk factors associated with violence by intimate partner. In Arab countries, the individual factors were younger age, lack of education, unemployment, fear, and alcoholism. On a more global scale, factors such as unplanned pregnancy and lack of societal condemnation act as risk factors in Arab countries for women suffering from intimate partner violence (Mojahed et al., 2020). Another risk factor was additional violence from mothers and siblings-in-law. The research conducted with Afghan women indicates that some women can suffer violence not only from their partners, but also their mothers-in-law and siblings-in-law. The most prominent risk factors here are associated with poverty, namely food insecurity and lack of earning (Jewkes et al., 2019). These results correspond with the aforementioned research paper, which indicates that unemployment can be a risk factor for intimate partner violence. Some research has also focused on interventions to save women from violence from intimate partner in Tanzania. The results were not significant, but authors have reported less emotional violence among spouses after the program (Harvey et al., 2021). These results indicate that there is an overlap between the risks factors for violence from intimate partner despite the geographic differences.
Discussion
The existing research mostly focuses on one country or a city, whereas there is a need of more global research to identify most common factors for intimate partner violence. Results of this research have shown that there are overlapping factors, which are not necessarily cultural, that can increase the risk of violence from the intimate partner. For example, unemployment is one of the most common risk factors, and it does not depend on culture.
There are several limitations to this study. As it is widely known, the topic of gender violence is complex and most research done on this topic includes women in fear, who are not ready to talk or give information due to possible reciprocation from their families. Next, the data on developing countries is not complete, due to individual factors like fear, and country-scale factors like war and inability to provide research for some dates.
Conclusion
To conclude, this paper has analyzed research focused on countries in different continents to understand the common risk factors for violence against women. More precisely, it has focused on violence from intimate partners and showed that risk factors such as low income and unemployment were most prevalent across countries. The common perception can be that violence against women arises because of cultural differences. While this might be true on some level, empirical data indicates that high-risk factors are not cultural in their nature. The argument of cultural differences can be deceiving because it eliminates the possibility of plausible solutions for the problem, whereas the empirical analysis helps to rethink the issue at hand. It is important to think more globally about those issues and understand that despite geographical and cultural differences, the risk factors are shared for most women in relationships across the world.
Reference list
Harvey, S., Abramsky, T., Mshana, G., Hansen, C., Mtolela, G., & Madaha, F. et al. (2021). A cluster randomised controlled trial to evaluate the impact of a gender transformative intervention on intimate partner violence against women in newly formed neighbourhood groups in Tanzania. BMJ Global Health, 6(7), pp. 1-13.
Jewkes, R., Corboz, J., & Gibbs, A. (2019). Violence against Afghan women by husbands, mothers-in-law and siblings-in-law/siblings: Risk markers and health consequences in an analysis of the baseline of a randomised controlled trial. PLOS ONE, 14(2), pp. 1-14.
Mojahed, A., Alaidarous, N., Shabta, H., Hegewald, J., & Garthus-Niegel, S. (2020). Intimate Partner Violence Against Women in the Arab Countries: A Systematic Review of Risk Factors. Trauma, Violence, &Amp; Abuse, 23(2), 390-407.
Reynolds, S. (2022). Do health sector measures of violence against women at different levels of severity correlate? Evidence from Brazil. BMC Women’s Health, 22(1).
Tesfaw, L., & Muluneh, E. (2022). Assessing the prevalence and association between physical, emotional, and sexual of intimate partner violence against women in Nigeria. Reproductive Health, 19(1).