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Silence For The Sake of Harmony : Domestic violence and health in Central Java, Indonesia

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Emotional, physical and sexual violence aginst women is the most pervasive yet least recognize human rights violation globally. Unfortunately, no population based data on domestic violence exist, to aid the implementation of activities to stengthen women's rights in the domestic sphere. So, the aim of he study in this book was to generate population based information about the prevalence, risk factors and health consequences of domestic violence among women in Central Java, Indonesia. Indonesia has the fourth largest population in the world. Few studies have identified the risk factors of Indonesian women for domestic violence. Such research will be useful for the development of prevention programs aiming at reducing domestic violence. Our study examines associations between physical and sexual violence among rural Javanese Indonesian women and sociodemographic factors, husband's psychosocial and behavioral characteristics and attitudes toward violence and gender roles.
Methods
A cohort of pregnant women within the Demographic Surveillance Site (DSS) in Purworejo district, Central Java, Indonesia, was enrolled in a longitudinal study between 1996 and 1998. In the following year (1999), a cross-sectional domestic violence household survey was conducted with 765 consenting women from that cohort. Female field workers, trained using the WHO Multi-Country study instrument on domestic violence, conducted interviews. Crude and adjusted odds ratios at 95% CI were applied for analysis.
Results
Lifetime exposure to sexual and physical violence was 22% and 11%. Sexual violence was associated with husbands' demographic characteristics (less than 35 years and educated less than 9 years) and women's economic independence. Exposure to physical violence among a small group of women (2-6%) was strongly associated with husbands' personal characteristics; being unfaithful, using alcohol, fighting with other men and having witnessed domestic violence as a child. The attitudes and norms expressed by the women confirm that unequal gender relationships are more common among women living in the highlands and being married to poorly educated men. Slightly more than half of the women (59%) considered it justifiable to refuse coercive sex. This attitude was also more common among financially independent women (71%), who also had a higher risk of exposure to sexual violence.
Conclusions
Women who did not support the right of women to refuse sex were more likely to experience physical violence, while those who justified hitting for some reasons were more likely to experience sexual violence. Our study suggests that Javanese women live in a high degree of gender-based subordination within marriage relationships, maintained and reinforced through physical and sexual violence. Our findings indicate that women's risk of physical and sexual violence is related to traditional gender norms.
Although violence against women has been increasingly recognized as a significant international human rights and public health problem, most of the research on the subject conducted prior to 2000 did not use standardized methods and tools allowing findings to be compared across settings. The WHO-Multi-Country Study on Women's Health and Domestic Violence against Women represented a milestone for the field, because it used a common research design and a standardized questionnaire validated for various cultural settings. The first stage of the study involved over 24,000 women in 10 countries: Bangladesh, Brazil, Ethiopia, Japan, Namibia, Peru, Samoa, Serbia and Montenegro, Thailand, and Tanzania. The study addressed the prevalence of physical, sexual and emotional violence experienced by women aged 15-49, sociodemographic risk factors, health outcomes, women's responses to violence, as well as gender-related norms. The WHO study showed that lifetime and current prevalence of physical violence against women by an intimate partner ranged from 12.9-48.7% and 3.1-29%, respectively in the participating countries, while the corresponding range for lifetime and current prevalence of sexual violence was 6.3-49.7% and 1.1-29.0% [1].
A cross-sectional survey of violence against women based on the WHO study methodology was conducted in rural Indonesia. The report on the study's findings entitled "Silence for the Sake of Harmony" revealed that the lifetime and current prevalence of physical violence among reproductive age women by an intimate partner were 11% and 2%, and the lifetime and current prevalence of sexual violence were 22% and 12% [2]. The Indonesian figures for physical violence were thus lower than in the WHO sites, although the ones for sexual violence fell in the middle range. Similar to the other south Asian sites of the WHO study (Thailand and Bangladesh), the prevalence of sexual violence was higher than physical violence [1].
Indonesia has the fourth largest population in the world. It is rich in cultural differences, is spread across several islands and 88% of its population is Muslim. The cross-sectional study's report [2] was used to advocate for policy changes in Indonesia, and resulted in the endorsement of the Domestic Violence Act in 2004. However, a national study performed by Rifka Annisa Women's Crisis Center indicated a weak implementation of this Act [3]. Using the existing cross sectional data, our study examines the associations between women's domestic violence experience and sociodemographic factors, husband's psychosocial and behavioral characteristics, as well as women's attitudes toward gender roles and the use of violence within marriage.

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Availability

.KP.IV.1-00017

INA.VII.49 HAK s

My Library

Available

Detail Information

Series Title

-

Call Number

KP.IV.1 HAK s

Publisher

Yogyakarta Indonesia : CHN-RL GMU, Yogyakarta., 2001

Collation

xvi, 98 hlm. : ilus.; 22 cm.

Language

English

ISBN/ISSN

979-95562-6-0

Classification

KP.IV.1.

Content Type

-

Media Type

-

Carrier Type

-

Edition

First edition,April 2001

Subject(s)

Perempuan Jawa
Kekerasan terhadap perempuan

Specific Detail Info

ada versi bilingual-cetakan ke 2 ( KP.IV.1-00010 )

Statement of Responsibility

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