What is it about?
This article describes the views of Tibetan women who have experienced physical violence from husbands or boyfriends. The women often felt the beatings they faced were relatively acceptable and non-abusive. The article explains why women described some of their partners' actions as acceptable and others as unacceptable.
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Why is it important?
When women felt they were beaten for transgressing widely expressed social norms, they tended to find beatings both more acceptable and less traumatizing. The article shows that victims' perspectives can be heavily influenced by social norms around interpersonal behaviour more generally, and that survivors' views are not always in line with common assumptions about domestic violence. Understanding this point is crucial if adequate services are to be provided to survivors.
Perspectives
This article also emphasizes that researchers should listen deeply to women's voices. The article demonstrates how to undertake this type of deep listening when the views expressed by women contradict some of the researcher's most basic assumptions and paradigms.
Hamsa Rajan
University of Oxford
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: When Wife-Beating Is Not Necessarily Abuse: A Feminist and Cross-Cultural Analysis of the Concept of Abuse as Expressed by Tibetan Survivors of Domestic Violence, Violence Against Women, November 2016, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1077801216675742.
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