Domestic Violence Awareness in South-Asian Households
by Eman Khalid
October is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Domestic violence is a widespread concern, especially in South Asian communities and it has substantially surged with the spread of COVID-19. Certain practices of domestic violence are prevalent within south-Asian communities such as forced marriages, acid attacks, financial abuse, honor killings, and normalization of patriarchal violence such as emotional or verbal abuse.
What Do the Statistics Say?
Several studies and reports prove that South Asian female immigrants are more likely to become domestic violence victims at the hands of their partners or in-laws. According to a report by the National Institute of Justice, 96% of the Pakistani and Indian victims reported facing physical violence by an intimate partner whereas 64% of the Pakistani and Indian victims reported facing sexual assault by an intimate partner.
Acid attack also falls under the category of domestic abuse and is used as a common practice of personal vengeance in India and Pakistan. There have been about 1,500 cases of acid attack victims in India between 2014 and 2018 (National Crime Records Bureau, 2020). The majority of these victims were women and they were attacked for many reasons including but not limited to; refusing a marriage proposal, seeking a divorce, dowry demands, and rejecting an individual’s sexual advances.
There were approximately 1,485 reported acid attack cases in Pakistan between 2007 and 2018 and the conviction rate of acid attackers dropped by 63.6% to 38.4% between 2016 and 2018.
Other than acid attacks, women in South-Asian communities have also fallen victims to physical violence at the hands of their husbands, or in-laws. A report by the National Health Family Survey revealed that 27% of females in India below the age of fifteen have experienced some form of physical abuse, and was most common in rural areas than in urban areas. The survey further revealed that the majority of the physical abuse perpetrators were husbands, who practiced emotional violence (13%) and physical violence (27%). According to an article by The Hindu, complaints of domestic violence were approximately 1,477 in amount between March 25 and May 31, 2020, in India. A report by the Sustainable Social Development Organization revealed that in the last six months of 2020, about 1,422 cases of domestic violence cases were reported in Pakistan.
Honor killings are also a common domestic violence practice in South-Asian communities. Many innocent women and men have been victims of honor killings at the hands of their loved ones, and family members. Honor killings are often caused when the victim supposedly brings “shame” to their family, either through irrelevant suspicions, false accusations, extramarital affairs, or being involved with the opposite gender romantically. This heinous act usually stems from the abhorrent belief that the men of a family are obliged to kill a woman if they suspect, or find out that she is involved with a man romantically. In some cases, women have also been murdered under the banner of an honor killing, solely for uploading videos on social media.
In 2016, a Pakistani social media star named Qandeel Baloch was murdered by her brother in the name of honor who believed that Baloch brought shame to the entire family by posting her supposedly obscene videos online. However, the honor killings did not stop there. According to a 2020 report by the Pakistan Human Rights Association, honor killings increased from 900 to 1,500 between 2016 and 2019. Whereas in Bangladesh, many females have fallen victims to honor killings under religious concerns.
According to a survey conducted by Raj and Silverman on a group of South-Asian women, only 3% of them obtained a restraining order against their abusive partners whereas 11% of those females indicted receiving services for counseling support for domestic abuse.
One of the most common practices against victims of domestic violence is that if they talk about the abuse they’re facing and share their painful experiences with a friend or family member, they are told to stay quiet or to put up with the abuse for the sake of their children. They are also discouraged to seek divorce from their abusive partners because in South-Asian communities, the word “divorce,” is associated with “dishonor,” and “shame.”
Also, many South-Asian female immigrants do not report the abuse they face due to language barriers, shame, fear of further abuse from family, and a lack of awareness against their available resources which further leads them to put up with the abuse for years and years. However, younger south-Asian women are less tolerant of abuse and are likelier to seek help if faced with an unfortunate incident of physical, or sexual abuse from an intimate partner or a family member.
What Can You Do To Help?
Are you or someone you know going through domestic abuse? Then you can help them by:
Learning about the warning signs which include but are not limited to black eyes, sprained wrists, bruises on the hands or the arms, anxiety, fearful, isolation from relatives, talking about suicide, etc.
Offering support, and resources such as hotlines to NGOs that help women who go through domestic violence
Listening to the victim and believe them
Asking them what you can do to help them. Do they need a place to stay after they leave their abuser? Do they need extra financial assistance to help them leave? Do they require emotional or mental support?
Encouraging the domestic abuse victim to create a safety plan for escaping the abuser
Your words, acts of support, and encouragement are more impactful than you think. Perhaps a single word of kindness or encouragement from you could inspire them to finally leave their perpetrator and start a pain-free and fear-free life for themselves. Every human being, irrespective of their gender, deserves to live life without the fear of being abused. A home is supposed to be a safe place. Unfortunately, many abusers have misused their power, and instead of making their home a safe abode, they’ve made it a hell on earth for their loved ones by abusing them emotionally, financially, physically, and sexually, on a daily basis.