Women and Domestic Violence in Bangladesh

Seeking A Way Out of the Cage

Laila Ashrafun

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367591250
• eBook ISBN: 9781351256629
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

After the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, the country has experienced large-scale transformations owing to national and international migration, urbanization, the development of many national and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and economic dynamism. Globalization and economic liberalization have created opportunities to develop sustainable social policies by strengthening the national economy of the country. Major progress has been made in closing the gender gap, and the Constitution of Bangladesh provides equality of status and opportunity to all its citizens irrespective of sex. However, domestic violence perpetuated against women is a common phenomenon in Bangladesh.

This book is a study about domestic violence against women in Bangladeshi society. It delineates, in particular, why and how some women become the victims of domestic violence in the changing socio-economic setting of Bangladesh. The author explores the multiple contexts in which domestic violence occurs by focusing on the everyday experience of women subjected to this violence. The book shows how changing socio-economic setting, urbanization and the growing demand for female labor influences the phenomenon and experience of domestic violence. It demonstrates that domestic violence is entangled in a complex web of institutionalized social relations that necessitates a structural and contextual understanding of the production of such violence in family, kinship and gender relations. Finally, it identifies factors that cause, perpetuate, and mitigate domestic violence or give strength to women to struggle and raise their voices or take shelter in the law against the perpetrators of domestic violence.

A novel contribution to our understanding of how gender relationships are differently constituted and contested in the everyday lives of Bangladeshi women, both in natal and affinal families, this book will be of interest to academics in the field of Sociology, Gender and Law and South Asian Studies.

1Approaching basti life and a counseling center in Sylhet

Research methods and the main sources of data

This section describes the research methods and data, explains how they were collected and analyzed and about the rationale of the choice of methods in this study. The most important data used in this research is qualitative, and my approach is descriptive. My aim in this chapter of this book is to provide an in-depth representation of family life and domestic violence perpetrated against young wives belong to lower socio-economic strata by their affines (husband, mother-in-law, father-in-law, sisters-in-laws and brothers-in-law) in Bangladeshi society. I have relied on a number of methods of data collection. For the in-depth study and in order to reach a certain extent of generalization, I have selected multiple sites as my study areas, what Miles and Huberman (1984) call cross-site analysis (they use the terms “site” and “case” interchangeably). According to Miles and Huberman (1984, p. 151), having multiple sites increases the scope of the study. By comparing sites or cases, one can establish the range of generality of a finding or explanation and, at the same time, pin down the conditions under which that finding will occur.

The fieldwork of this study is carried out in two bastis and in a non-governmental counseling center in Sylhet, Bangladesh. As my aim is to describe the everyday lives and domestic violence on lower socio-economic strata’s women’s life situations, I selected the two bastis to obtain in-depth information. In developing countries, populations have been rapidly shifted from rural to urban areas. These people are rapidly being absorbed into urban poor communities known as bastis. These urban poor communities often miss out on the benefits of urbanization – they lack most basic government services. Women in urban poor communities may be particularly affected, as they lack the safeguards of traditional kinship that are provided in rural communities (Patel and Burke, 2009). These women are more likely to become victims of violence. Of the various forms of violence against women, domestic violence in the marital home is most common and is a major contributor to poor physical and psychological health among women (Campbell, 2002; M. Ellsberg, Jansen, Heise, Watts and Garcia-Moreno, 2008). In the World Health Organization (WHO) Multi-country Study on Women’s Health and Domestic Violence Against Women, the prevalence of domestic violence against young wives is lower in urban populations than in rural populations among the investigated countries (Bangladesh, Brazil, Peru, Thailand and the United Republic of Tanzania) (Garcia-Moreno, Jansen, Ellsberg, Heise and Watts, 2006). But several studies represent that marital violence among poor populations in urban cities of developing countries, especially in South Asia, is remarkable. For example, more than 17 percent of the 751 women had experienced physical violence in the previous year in a slum in Calcutta, India (Pandey, Dutt and Banerjee, 2009). The prevalence of physical violence was up to 80 percent among 400 married women in a low socio-economic area in Karachi, Pakistan (Ali and Bustamante-Gavino, 2007). The Urban Health Survey, a population-based survey of 9,122 currently married women aged between 15 and 49, found that the prevalence of reported past-year physical spousal violence is higher in slums (35 percent) than in non-slums (20 percent) in Bangladesh. Various factors were also reported as risk factors of marital violence in urban poor population, such as low income, limited education, insufficient diet, overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, alienation, social instability and insecurity, physiological and psychological stress (Aekplakorn and Kongsakon, 2007; Ali and Bustamante-Gavino, 2007). However, the number of these studies is very limited and none have simultaneously investigated the situation of marital violence among urban poor populations. In this respect, I consider domestic violence against young wives by affines among women in the bastis is necessary to be studied to seek new ideas and information to stimulate new thinking about this violence.

Mediation or “dispute” resolution is nostalgically associated with grounding in local culture, as opposed to the forceful homogeneity of law. Depicted as being “away from judge – (and judgment) oriented accounts” and focused on actors’ “circumstances, goals, strategies and actions” (Comaroff and Roberts, 1981, p. 14), it offers the possibility to more fruitfully engage with why people acted in a certain way and to construct a satisfying resolution (Basu, 2015). I selected the non-governmental counseling center, which provides free legal support to victim women from both urban and rural areas. I attain the mediations (salish) to find out what strategies these women use to claim and obtain resources, protection, security and voice? How are rights and obligations of victim women understood and negotiated? In this study, the two sites help me greatly to understand the lives of women from lower socio-economic strata, the causes of domestic violence, their coping strategies and struggle against it. I collected data for the study from May 2010 to January 2011 and again revisited the research areas during January to March, 2016.

Mostly practical reasons drive me to select the research sites. I have been working as a faculty member at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology in Sylhet since 1999, and I know the area and local language. The bastis are near the university. A woman from the basti was working as a cook in the bachelor’s dormitory of the university teachers and she ended up being one of my main research informants. In finding a counseling center to study the influence of formal legal procedures on domestic violence, some lawyers in the Sylhet Judge Court with whom I am acquainted suggested to select the counseling center inside the court arena. Sylhet has turned out to be a very fruitful area for studying the changing pattern of gender relations in the family, community and society because of intensive internal and international migration, urbanization and modernization that can be observed there.

From the two bastis, I collected data through focus group discussions, participant observation, case studies and a survey. First, I conducted a household survey of 69 households – 42 households in Pirer Tila and 27 in Durga Bari basti – to map the socio-economic condition of the slum dwellers. I covered the following topics in the survey: the wife’s age, the number of children in the family, the wife’s occupation, her husband’s occupation, the wife’s and husband’s education levels, and their places of origin.

After surveying the bastis, I conducted focus group discussions. I considered focus group interviews to be a fruitful method, because they help to investigate generally accepted and shared views in a social group (Denzin, 1986; Frey and Fontana, 1993; Madriz, 1997). Using focus groups also enables the researcher to gather large amounts of information in a limited period of time. It emphasizes the collective, rather than the individual, fosters a free flow of ideas, encouraging the members of the group to speak up. More importantly, focus group discussions are an appropriate method to collect data from a lower socio-economic class of women (Jarrett, 1993; Madriz, 1998). My main purpose in using focus group interviews in the bastis was to learn about slum women’s perceptions and experiences on girlhood, gender relations, marriage practices, their views on the reasons for domestic violence and their coping strategies against domestic violence. In this regard, as a native researcher, I considered focus group interviews as a fruitful method that enabled the women of the bastis to unveil specific, sensitive and little-researched aspects of domestic violence.

The women were divided into focus groups according to age because age plays a significant role in the power relations among women and younger women would not have felt at ease to talk in front of women of the older generation. As far as I could tell, the groups managed to create an atmosphere of trust in which the women felt free to express themselves. I divided the women into two groups, one for those between 16 and 30 years of age and the other for those above 30 years. Because very few women had any formal education for more than a few years of primary school, dividing them according to their educational attainments was not necessary.

The women formed focus groups of five or six participants. With the exception of a few women, most participants spoke spontaneously and usually with ease. I avoided using larger groups because of the difficulties of handling the discussion and keeping the conversation around the topic of research, as the women were quite vocal and even argumentative at times. Moreover, larger groups make it more difficult for all the participants to have their opinions heard. I acted as the facilitator in all the focus groups. My being a native of Bangladesh contributed to participants’ feeling that the facilitator was familiar with their way of thinking and understood their expressions and feelings. The sessions typically lasted for two hours or more. The focus group interviews were tape-recorded with the permission of the participants and later transcribed by me.

I had developed an unstructured interview guide to be used in the groups, although in many focus groups, the participants changed between topics spontaneously, which added a wealth of information to my research. The quotations that are used in this study are chosen from a variety of age groups and sessions. To express the exact feelings and perceptions some quotations have been minimally edited. The ages of the focus group participants are indicated in parentheses after each major quote. To include the differences between religious groups and beliefs, participant’s religion is also mentioned in some quotes. To add proper meaning and clarification of expressions, Bengali words, sentences and phrases are also used in some quotations.

The transcribed focus group discussions were analyzed by the contents analysis method, separating statements to the various topics chosen as the central themes to be reported in the study. Five major recording units (the smallest body of content in which the appearance of a reference¹ is noted) have been used in the content analysis research: words or terms, themes, characters, paragraphs and items (Nachmias and Nachmias, 1997, p. 327). In summarizing content analysis, the material is paraphrased, which means that less relevant passages and paraphrases with the same meanings are skipped and similar paraphrases are bundled and summarized. This is a combination of reducing the material by skipping statements included in a generalization while summarizing the material on a higher level of abstraction (Flick, 2006, p. 313).

Case studies have become one of the most common ways to do qualitative inquiry. They are seen as appropriate when the purpose is to “understand some special people, particular problem or unique situation in great depth” (Patton, 1990, p. 54) and where one can identify cases rich in information – rich in that a great deal can be learned from a few exemplars of the phenomenon in question (Patton, 1990). The aim of case studies is the precise description or reconstruction of a case. The case that is taken as a sample would be significant for the research question (Flick, 2006). In the slums, I conducted 12 case studies on particular women’s life histories and purposively selected eight of those cases to be represented here. I believe that these case studies will lead to a better understanding of the lives of women from the lower socio-economic strata. Data on the particular cases are derived from individual interviews, participant observation and informal discussions with a number of people and are reconstructed on the basis of these different sources of data.

Social scientists are observers both of human activities and of the physical settings (Angrosino and Mays de Perez, 2000, p. 673). In the fieldwork in slums, I observed the physical settings and human life situations, which are prevalent throughout the area. I described the slum sites as part of obtaining a prominent understanding of the women’s lives after migration to different environmental settings and socio-economic situations in the urban milieu.

In the counseling center, I conducted case studies of 20 women, and from the cases, I selected seven case studies to be presented in this dissertation. In the women’s cases, I have collected data on the victim women’s place of birth, education level, occupation, socio-economic condition of the natal family, story of marriage, relationship with their husbands and other in-laws in their affinal homes, and causes and incidence of domestic violence. I chose these cases to describe both what is common and what is particular about the cases, as each case has important atypical features, happenings, relationships and situations. These women were interviewed in private because of the victims’ feelings of shame and vulnerability. I did not use a tape recorder while I was talking with the victim women because the phenomenon of domestic violence is a very sensitive issue. Renzetti and Lee (1993, p. 6) stated that research on domestic violence is a sensitive research because it intrudes into the private lives or deeply personal experiences of the research participants. I talked with the women about their problem and the conversations were lengthy, lasting three hours or more. I made copious notes and transcribed the notes in more detail after the meetings with the women were over.

With the help of the counseling center’s advocates, I attended and observed ten mediations (shalish) to learn about the position of women in the legal arena. I have sketched out four of those mediations cases in this study. Documentation of the mediations is based on copious notes taken during the s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Fm
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Approaching basti life and a counseling center in Sylhet
• 2 Girlhood and marriage: perceptions and experiences of slum women
• 3 Liberating one’s own space: in quest of self-identity and agency in everyday life
• 4 Women’s married life and domestic violence in the slum
• 5 Unveiling domestic violence from the privacy of home
• 6 Legal battles at the counseling center: what do the women get?
• 7 Conclusions
• References
• Index