THE ROLE OF IN-LAWS AS PERPETRATORS OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN IN MUMBAI

Year 2018, Volume: 3 Issue: 1, 4 - 20, 01.01.2018

Abıgaıl Bentley

Abstract

Background: Globally, one in three women experiences intimate partner violence IPV in her lifetime. This is also true in India, where 30-40% of cases also involve members of the wider household, particularly female in-laws. We identified the main perpetrators of household violence against women within a study assessing violence against mothers living in informal settlements of Mumbai. Methods: We examined experiences of violence in a cross-sectional follow-up of a previously established cohort of 601 mothers. We compared the characteristics of women who most frequently identified their in-laws as the main perpetrators of emotional and economic violence to those of women who most frequently identified their partner as the main perpetrator. We used independent two-sample t-tests for means and Pearson’s chi-square tests for proportions to investigate differences between groups. Results: We collected data for 484/601 81% mothers with a mean age of 28.5 years SD 4.6 . 40% had experienced at least one act of violence at some point after marriage, and 23% had experienced at least one act in the 12 months prior to the survey. After marriage, in-laws were the main perpetrators of emotional or economic violence 77% , while husbands were the main perpetrators of physical 86% or sexual 84% violence during the same period. Women who most frequently identified their in-laws as the main perpetrators of emotional violence had spent more years in education and fewer years in the city than women who identified their partner as the main perpetrator 6.8 years versus 5.2 years of education, p=0.04; 17.1 years versus 19.6 years, p=0.03, respectively . For economic violence, the same pattern was seen for education 6.5 years versus 4.3 years, p=0.02 and number of years spent in the city 15.2 years versus 20.4 years, p

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