Violence against women in intimate relations: Insights from cross-cultural analysis

This paper presents a broad overview of the cross-cultural lit-erature on the abuse of women by husbands or partners with emphasis on cross-cultural patterns and variations in the extent of violence against women in intimate relations, the effects of such violence, factors that place women at risk for abuse and the routes available to women to address such abuse. Implications for clinical and social responses to violence against women in intimate relations are discussed. Since the 1970s, male violence against women and children has received a dramatic and rapid increase in public and professional attention. Broadly speaking, such violence includes &dquo;any act of verbal or physical force, coercion or life-threatening deprivation, directed at an individual woman or girl that causes physical or psychological harm, humiliation or arbitrary deprivation of liberty and that perpetu-ates female subordination&dquo; (Heise, Raikes, Watts & Zwi, 1994, p. 1165). Violence against women takes many forms: rape, battery, sexual harassment, sexual and physical abuse of children, prostitution and pornography. In Central Africa and parts of the Middle East, clitorid-ectomies, excising and infibulation are instances of &dquo;social violence which women have to bear in silence&dquo; (Heise,1993, p. 180). Across al-most all states in India, rape, wife battery and abduction are viewed as violence against women, as are bride burning and dowry murders rec-ognized by some not as &dquo;suicides&dquo; but as intentional injuries to women