E endured intimate partner violence in their lifetime - survey

All ten regions

According to one of the authors of the survey, Roxanne Myers, the survey was con-ducted in all ten administrative region in Guyana and some 2054 households were visited in 175 communities. She said that there were 1,498 respon-dents and those surveyed had to indicate their willingness by signing a consent form and the survey was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Ministry of Public Health.

The types of violence the survey explored were intimate partner violence (IPV), physi-cal, sexual economic, emo-tional, and the non-partner sexual violence.

Myers shared that as a child she witnessed her mother experiencing violence and she always tried to “grapple with why she didn’t leave with five children.”

She stressed that reports of domestic violence have to mean something in work-places especially to senior managers. She pointed out that the report indicates that half of the women in the workforce have experienced some form of violence over the course of their lives.

“So as senior managers, wherever we are, we have to be cautious of this fact, whether the stories of the eomen are known to us or not we have to be cautious and sensitive to what those experinces are,” she said while speaking on the report.

One of the strategic approaches while conducting the research was to use adviso-ry boards and committees and this resulted in a national coor-dinating committee and a research committee. The members included Danuta Radzik, Karen de Souza and Dr. Dawn Stewart and they provided critical advice to the research team in terms of the approaches to be taken and Myers described this as a “crit-cal aspect” of the report which also saw them review-ing the draft report and provid-ing inputs.

The methodology was culled from what the World Health Organisation has done globally and the Global Women’s Institute led the methodology and provided training for the 49 enumerators and six supervisors.

Most common

Meanwhile, the survey found that being slapped or having an object thrown at a woman was the most common act of physical violence reported by ever-partnered women with choking and burning being the least reported acts.

Most of the women reporting IPV reported having sexual intercourse with their partners because they were afraid to refuse. Three per cent of women reported engaging in sexual intercourse with their partners through force or fear in the past 12 months preceding the survey.

And among the women reporting violence more than two thirds reported experiencing severe violence over the course of their lives. Among those who reported violence in the last 12 months about one in ten experienced at least one act of severe violence during that time.

For the men who experienced physical and/or sexual violence, nearly two-thirds reported that the violence occurred more than once, for those who experienced violence in the past year, 83% reported more than one occurrence, with 80% reporting that it occurred with the same or more frequency than prior to the past 12 months.

Traditional roles

The report said that most of the respondents agreed with the “inequitable traditional gender roles having to do with family hierarchy.” Some 83% of them agreed that it is natural that men should be the head of the home and 78% agreed that a woman’s most important role is to take care of her home. However, some embraced the feminist perspectives in their responses to other questions on gender roles. For example 88% agreed that men and women should share authority in the household and 83% agreed that women should have economic autonomy, spending her own money according to her wishes.

“Fewer than half (44%) agreed that women should always obey their husbands, and only one in four (28%) believed that women had a sexual obligation to their husbands,” the report said.

Only 10% of the women surveyed agreed with the statement that a woman should tolerate violence to keep her family together while about 25% supported violence between partners being a private matter. And regarding violence from non-partners, 24% of women agreed with the statement that “it is not rape if a woman does not fight back” and 13% felt that a woman’s carelessness contributes to her being raped.

The report found that attitudes promoting acceptance and privacy surrounding intimate partner violence support perceptions of men’s “right” to physical chastisement and shields them from the consequences of enshrined laws and policies.

“They also reinforce stigma and acceptance of violence as a private matter for women when police