CONTENTS
- The World Takes Notice
- Intimate Partner Abuse
- Sexual Coercion
- Impact on Reproductive Health
- Threats to Health and Development
- Health Providers Play a Key Role
- An Agenda for Change
HIGHLIGHTS
- What lies behind violence?
- Culture: a double-edged sword
- Child sexual abuse is widespread
- Violence harms women in many different ways
- *Pullout guide: What Health Providers Can Do
- Responding to violence: Lessons learned
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The Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE) is a research and advocacy organization that seeks to integrate concern for gender equity and social justice into international health policy and practice. CHANGE staff can be reached by e-mail at change@genderhealth.org or at http://www.genderhealth.org.
December, 1999
Series L, Number 11
Issues in World Health
Raising the Costs to Abusers
Although such legislation varies, most laws include some combination of protective or restraining orders and increased penalties for offenders. Protective orders allow judges to remove an abuser temporarily from the home and to order him to seek counseling, to get treatment for substance abuse, to pay maintenance and child support, or some combination of these. If a man violates a protective order, he can be arrested and jailed.
In most countries, however, procedural barriers, gaps, and biases undermine the law's ability to deter violence and to protect women and children (91). Laws are enforced by male judges, prosecutors, and police officers, many of whom share the same victim-blaming attitudes of the society at large. Thus, as well as passing laws, it is crucial to sensitize police officers, lawyers, judges, and other members of the legal system and to help women know enough about the legal system to be able to insist on their rights.
In addition, many communities have explored other means to raise the costs to individual abusers of their violent behavior, such as public shaming, picketing an abuser's home or work- place, and requiring community service for offenders. Such practices presume that community disapproval can help deter domestic violence. As a Cambodian activist notes, “If a man feels that he will be severely 'looked down on' for battering his wife..., it is likely that domestic assault will decrease” (488).
In the US state of Texas, for example, an innovative judge is sentencing batterers to “shame sentences,” ordering one abusive man to apologize to his wife publicly on the steps of City Hall, for example, and another to carry a sign around a local shopping mall that read, “I went to jail for assaulting my wife. This could be you” (173). Similarly, Indian activists often stage dharnas, a form of public shaming and protest, in front of the house or workplace of abusive men (305).
