UN study asks men about violence against women in Asia and the Pacific

One of the first large studies to focus on male perpetrators rather than female victims of intimate partner violence and non-partner rape has been carried out by the UN.

The quantitative regional study, Why do some men use violence against women and how can we prevent it? Quantitative findings from the UN multi-country study on men and violence in Asia and the Pacific, interviewed more than 10,000 men in six countries: Bangladesh, Cambodia, China, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Sri Lanka. In four sites, women were also interviewed.

The study's aims included:

• to generate knowledge on how masculinities relate to men’s perceptions and perpetration of violence against women
• to deepen the understanding of the meaning and causes of men’s violence against women in order to prevent it
• to ascertain men’s own experiences of violence as victims and/or as witnesses and to assess how that may be related to men’s perpetration of different types of violence.

 The study found:

• Nearly half of men reported using physical and/or sexual violence against a female partner, ranging from 26% to 80% across the sites studied
• Nearly a quarter of men reported perpetrating rape against a woman or girl, ranging from 10% to 62% across the sites.

The report explores factors associated with the use of men's violence against women. Men who reported using violence were significantly more likely to:

• have gender-inequitable attitudes and try to control their partners
• have experienced physical, sexual or emotional abuse as a child, or witnessed the abuse of their mother
• have practices that reflect idealized notions of male sexual performance, such as having multiple sexual partners and engaging in transactional sex.

The report found gender inequitable attitudes contributed to rape, with men citing a common belief that men have a right to sex with women regardless of consent. "The acknowledged motivations for rape highlight its foundation in gender inequality: men reported that they raped because they wanted to and felt entitled to, felt it was entertaining or saw it as deserved punishment for women" it says. The report also notes "The absence of legal sanction is important because it reinforces the socialization that a woman’s body belongs to her husband upon marriage".

The authors note the variability across the sites studied, saying "The rates of violence perpetration varied dramatically across sites. Across all sites a number of factors and environmental drivers appeared to be consistently related to violence, including factors related to gender inequality, violent masculinity and experiences of child abuse. However the sociocultural, economic, political and historical contexts varied widely and thus the specific factors we see as being related to violence understandably varied across sites and need to be addressed through site-specific interventions."

The study was led by Partners for Prevention, a regional joint programme of the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Population Fund, United Nations Women and United Nations Volunteers.

The report and corresponding Lancet publication are available electronically through the New Zealand Family Violence Clearinghouse library.

Image: Traditional cultivation in Bangladesh by Balaram Mahalder. Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0) via Wikimedia Commons