WASHINGTON — Domestic violence against women abroad is prevalent across economic classes and cultures in rapidly urbanizing communities.
Rising violence against women is not limited to poorer, war-torn countries according to a panel of scholars with expertise in international gender-based violence. The group met Tuesday at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.
Factors such as rapid urbanization, political strife and high male youth unemployment are all pieces in growing violence against women.
According to Alison Brysk, a professor at the University of California Santa Barbara — and a study released Saturday by The Lancet, a leading medical journal — 14.8% of women in India reported being sexually assaulted in their home in 2010.
Brysk conducted her research in India, South Africa, Brazil and Mexico and acknowledged that these countries are quite different. Yet they suffer from the same issues of violence. “They’re not war zones and are not the poorest or most patriarchal,” said Brysk. “This isn’t traditional patriarchal violence against women on their own.”
Brysk said social change can o cause conflict and act as a tipping point for violence. Swelling populations, the migration of women to urban centers and well as economic and gender inequality are all factors that are causing higher cases of violence.
In Santiago, Chile, where Alfred Omenya, principal researcher and architect for Eco-Build Africa, conducted part of his research, domestic violence was widespread across economic classes. Yet little research has been devoted to it, he said.
“We are interested in shifting the study from public spaces to the private spaces,” Omenya said. “We are thinking of developing tools to do such studies in the private domain.”
Omenya also found that in countries such as Chile, India and Africa domestic violence was a constant factor across classes.
“We initially only wanted to look at it in lower-class communities. In Santiago we wanted to look at the middle class as a control [group] with what is happening in the low-income classes. When we got in there, there was so much violence,” Omenya said.
Going forward Omenya and Brysk plan on doing additional research into domestic violence in developing urban centers.
