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Domestic Violence in Nusa Tenggara Barat, Indonesia: Married Women's Deﬁnitions and Experiences of Violence in the Home

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DOI: 10.1080/14442213.2010.547514

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Domestic Violence in Nusa Tenggara Barat, Indonesia: Married Women's

Definitions and Experiences of Violence in the Home

Linda R. Bennett , Sari Andajani-Sutjahjo & Nurul I. Idrus Published online: 06 Apr 2011.

To cite this article: Linda R. Bennett , Sari Andajani-Sutjahjo & Nurul I. Idrus (2011) Domestic Violence in Nusa Tenggara Barat, Indonesia: Married Women's Definitions and Experiences of Violence in the Home, The Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, 12:2, 146-163, DOI:

10.1080/14442213.2010.547514

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Domestic Violence in Nusa Tenggara Barat, Indonesia: Married Women’s Definitions and Experiences of

Violence in the Home

Linda R. Bennett, Sari Andajani-Sutjahjo and Nurul I. Idrus

This article contributes to cross-cultural understandings of gender-based violence by examining women’s definitions and experiences of domestic violence in Eastern Indonesia. The research was part of a larger study of human rights in maternal and neonatal health and involved a survey that integrated common anthropological practices in its development and delivery. This survey measured the prevalence of emotional and physical abuse, violence during pregnancy, unwanted sex and fear of violence among a sub-sample of 504 married Muslim women. Standard human rights definitions of violence were adapted to create locally appropriate definitions of economic violence, husband infidelity and unwanted sex within marriage. Survey responses indicated that the majority of women believed verbal abuse, threats of harm, economic violence, physical violence, control of women’s mobility and a husband’s public infidelity to constitute domestic violence. Our exploration of how Indonesian women understand domestic violence reinforces the salience of cultural specificity for different women’s definitions of violence, as well as the applicability of internationally recognised definitions of gender-based violence.

Keywords: Mixed Research Methodologies; Social Dialogue Techniques; Domestic Violence; Sexual Abuse; Human Rights; Muslim Women; Indonesia

Linda R. Bennett is a senior research fellow at La Trobe University and a visiting ARC future fellow at The University of Melbourne. Correspondence to: Linda R. Bennett, Nossal Institute for Global Health, The University of Melbourne, Carlton, Victoria, 3010, Australia. Email: [email protected]

Sari Andajani-Sutjahjo is a senior lecturer at the Department of Community Health Development, Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. Email: sandajan@

aut.ac.nz

Nurul I. Idrus is Professor of Feminist Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Hasanuddin University Indonesia. Email: [email protected]

ISSN 1444-2213 (print)/ISSN 1740-9314 (online)/11/020146-18

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Introduction

Gender-based violence and domestic violence in particular, have taken considerable time to find their rightful place within the agendas of the Indonesian Government and the Indonesian women’s movement (Blackburn 2004, p. 194).¹ It was only after the horrific mass rapes of Chinese women during the May Riots of 1998²that the Indonesian Commission for Anti-Violence Against Women was established.

These events, and the public outcry that eventually led to Government attempts to create an institution to prevent further abuses of this kind, significantly raised the profile of gender-based violence perpetrated in the public domain. Yet, it took until 2005 for the Indonesian Government to finally release its current Zero Tolerance Policy on domestic violence, which was the first coordinated nation-wide response aimed at ameliorating the problem. Integral to this policy was (one-off) training for public servants across numerous government sectors, support for the establish- ment of integrated crisis centres, and the development of police and medical guidelines for responding to rape and domestic violence (MOH et al. 2008). The Zero Tolerance Policy aimed to support the new national legislation on The Eradication of Domestic Violence, passed on 22 September 2004.³Still the official reporting of domestic violence remains low, prosecution of such crimes in the courts are even lower, safe accommodation for women living with violence is seriously limited, and the number of integrated rape crisis centres in operation is completely inadequate for the size of Indonesia’s population (Bennett & Andajani- Sutjahjo 2007).⁴

Despite the Indonesian Governments’ introduction of the Zero Tolerance Policy and the focus on eliminating gender discrimination in the national 200509 development plan, no systematic mechanism for collecting data on violence against women has been introduced, and no research into gender-based violence with nationally representative samples has been attempted. However, small-scale locally focused research into violence against women has produced important insights. Idrus has investigated the aetiology and impact of domestic violence and marital rape in Bugis society, exploring how hegemonic construc- tions of gender among the Bugis serve to encourage partner violence against women (Idrus 1999, 2001, Idrus & Bennett 2003). In Java, research into new mothers’ experiences of domestic and sexual violence has been conducted by Andajani-Sutjahjo, which has provided culturally specific insights into the ways in which poor urban Javanese women are particularly vulnerable to violence during pregnancy and early motherhood (Andajani-Sutjahjo 2003, Andajani-Sutjahjo &

Bennett 2008). In Jakarta and Yogyakarta, the staff of women’s crisis centres also gather data based on their work with women survivors, and have conducted small-scale surveys on violence against women (see Hakimi et al. 2001). The research on which this article draws involved a significantly larger sample of women (N1004) than previous Indonesian studies, and makes an important

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contribution to filling the enormous gap in our knowledge of domestic violence in Indonesia.

The data presented below was integral to an extensive study of human rights in maternal and neonatal health conducted in 2007 in the two eastern Indonesian provinces of Nusa Tenggara Barat (NTB) and Nusa Tenggara Timor (NTT).⁵ This project involved numerous collaborators, that include: the Indonesian Ministry of Health (MOH); the Provincial Health Offices (PHO) of NTB and NTT, the German Government development aid organisation (GTZ) through the Sikses Plus program targeting maternal and child health; the Reproductive Health wing of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Jakarta office of WHO; and a collective of community-based organisations in both provinces. The authors acted as technical advisors to the project and were responsible for research design, development and piloting of research tools, the training of the research team and data analysis. The overall human rights study was designed to produce two complimentary data sets, one constituted of secondary data and the other of primary data, collected across four field sites in the provinces of NTB and NTT. Due to space constraints, and the cultural, religious and geographical differences between NTB and NTT provinces, this article deals only with the primary data collected in NTB.

NTB province lies between the islands of Timor to the east and Bali to the west. It is constituted by the two main islands of Lombok and Sumbawa, where the vast majority of the population live, and hundreds of smaller islands dotted off their coastlines. The total population of NTB is approximately 4.1 million. Population density is greatest in West Lombok and steadily decreases the further east one travels.

Islam is the dominant religion in NTB and the two main ethnic groups, the Sasak and the Sambawanese are both Muslim. Local Islam and adat(customary law) play the central role in mediating social relationships, and key life events such as birth, marriage, divorce and death are more likely to be regulated by Islam rather than the Indonesian state. Consequently, people living in NTB tend to be relatively disengaged from the state, which is indicated by low levels of birth registration, poor literacy rates, and very high levels of unregistered marriages (Bennett & Andajani-Suhjatjo 2008). The human development index for the province is low and compares poorly with other parts of Indonesia. In 2007 the human development index for NTB was estimated to be 0.578, while the human development index for Indonesia as a whole was 0.697 (MOH et al. 2008). It is the combination of poverty, relative disengagement from the state, and the predominance of Islam and local customs in shaping daily life, that makes NTB an ideal location for researching human rights in maternal and neonatal health, and to examine domestic violence in that context.

This article is structured in three parts. Initially, we outline the research methodology, including the application of a human rights approach and the use of social dialogue techniques to administer the survey. We also discuss how a culturally sensitive research tool was developed through the exploration of appropriate terminology, definitions and measurements of domestic violence within the communities being researched. This section presents the two clusters of survey

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questions used to measure women’s definitions and experiences of violence. The second section explicates the key research findings regarding how women in the study defined domestic violence, and presents the prevalence of various abuses reported by women. We discuss the significance of the violence reported for the women in the study, and comment on how these findings compare with broader cross-cultural patterns of violence. Finally, we conclude by iterating the key methodological insights that can be drawn from the research.

Research Methodology

This research project was situated within and funded by the international development industry, and as such was driven by the empirical goals and research procedures of a broad range of stake holders representing the varied interests of community, provincial, national and international players. Thus, developing and negotiating the final methodology and research tools applied in the project was in itself a long and collaborative process. The result was a unique approach to investigating human rights in maternal and neonatal health within an international development context that integrated, where possible, useful practices and modes of inquiry which are instrumental in anthropological research. It is our hope that the following discussion of this methodology and the data it generated will demonstrate the benefits of cross-disciplinary approaches to research in international health and human rights. More specifically, the article provides practical examples of how popular anthropological practice can be applied in large-scale research consultancies by: identifying culturally specific definitions of key research terms; using regional and local languages when interviewing women; adapting existing research tools to ensure their cultural relevance; integrating social dialogue techniques into interactions with informants; the use of field diaries; and seeking to make the cross-cultural comparison of data possible.

As the primary goal of the larger project was to explore human rights in the context of maternal and neonatal health, this research applied a human rights approach. This involved developing survey questions to generate specific information that would indicate if, and to what extent, women’s human rights were being fulfilled or violated. The survey primarily included questions that could be coded into numeric data, and some open-ended questions that required qualitative analysis.

Survey interviewers also kept diaries, in which they recorded additional qualitative data when women informants expressed the desire to speak at length about their experiences. Standard WHO guidelines on conducting research on gender-based violence were followed.⁶A risk management strategy was implemented to protect the safety of the research team and the women who acted as our informants. The risk of harm to participants and interviewers was also addressed through referral to appropriate services, the provision of a counselling budget, and regular group and individual debriefing for interviewers. Interestingly, our interviewers were most diligent in their attendance of group debriefings. The importance of Western-derived

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notions of individual privacy in research processes was somewhat disrupted when the interviewers asserted a clear preference for group dialogue and debriefing, as opposed to confidential one-on-one sessions. When we enquired about what made the group context preferable, the most common response was that there was greater sharing of experiences and more opportunities to learn from friends in the group situation.

Surveys were administered through one-on-one interviews that applied social dialogue techniques and were conducted either in women’s local language or the national language depending on women’s preferences. Social dialogue is an approach to communicating with research participants that utilises conversational style language, and is less formal and scientific, than would generally be the case when administering large-scale surveys.⁷ This approach encourages dialogue rather than using highly structured language that presupposes a yes/no dichotomy or one-word responses. By using conversational language to build rapport with informants our survey interviewers were able to demonstrate their commonality of experience and identity, which resulted in great eagerness on the part of women to elaborate on their lives. Survey interviewers reported that women informants often commented that the interviews were ‘tidak membosankan’ (not boring), which suggests that the space for greater participation through dialogue was appreciated.

To further build rapport with women, survey topics were ordered beginning with the least sensitive topics and worked up to topics that are typically more difficult to discuss.⁸ The survey then concluded with the topic of family planning, which is openly discussed in these communities, in order to avoid leaving women immediately after having asked questions about violence. Survey interviewers were trained to skip between topics if necessary to protect women’s privacy. This was an important strategy because interviews were conducted in women’s homes and although men are typically absent for work during the hours when interviews took place, the possibility of impromptu interruptions needed to be accommodated.

As discussed above, the key research instrument for generating primary data was an interviewer-administered survey, however, the way in which it was delivered drew heavily upon qualitative research techniques. The quality of interaction between the interviewers and survey participants was heavily emphasised in both the training and supervision of the research team. Interviewers were trained to use social dialogue techniques and active listening in their interactions with women. Interviewers also kept diaries of their experiences, and women’s stories when they were given consent to do so. These diaries assisted interviewers with debriefing and added another layer of qualitative data that could be used for contextual analysis. Excerpts from these diaries are included below to illustrate the kinds of experiences women shared.

All survey interviewers were married women with children, who spoke both the national language and at least one of the local languages used in the field sites.

Interviewers also had experience in community development and outreach work through their involvement with local non-governmental organisations. Interviewers participated in intensive training that focused on human rights, violence against women and researching sensitive issues, and all were involved in developing survey

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questions and piloting the survey. The NTB interviewers were all Muslim, as were the survey respondents. Women’s reactions to the survey were overwhelmingly positive and their willingness to answer questions about domestic violence demonstrates that the interviewers were highly skilled and that the research instrument was culturally appropriate. The full study sample included 1,004 women across the four sites and refusal rates were virtually non-existent, being less than 1 per cent. The only reason given for refusal to participate was that women with many children and no assistance with childcare did not feel they could spare the time. Following completion of the research, interviewers in NTB initiated their own community-based interventions targeted at providing support to women living in violent relationships.⁹

This paper discusses data from a subsample of 504 ever-married women with children. All women were from low-income families, half were living in urban Mataram on Lombok island, and half were living in rural Sumbawa. We included equal numbers of urban and rural dwelling women. The sample for this study was not, and could not have been, representative of the provincial population due to time and cost restraints. Thus, the sample was both purposive and practical. In selecting the communities to be included we focused on both the rural and urban poor, and selected communities that had typical levels of access to and utilisation of government maternal health services. Another factor determining the selection of the communities sampled was the ease of access by the survey interviewers who were members of local women’s groups. All the communities surveyed had previous contact with one or more of these women’s groups through their outreach programs.

The women who participated in the survey were aged between sixteen and forty-six years, with the mean age being 29.98. All women were Muslim and both major ethnic groups were represented in the sample, with 53.8 per cent Sasak and 44.6 per cent Sambawanese. Educational attainment among these women was low and typical of this province, with less than a quarter of women completing senior high school, and 22.4 per cent never having completed elementary school. Fifty per cent of respondents described themselves as housewives, and 48 per cent described themselves as farmers, domestic or seasonal labourers or as engaged in petty trade.

A further 2 per cent were public servants. Seventeen women (3.4 per cent of the sample) were pregnant at the time of the survey. Early marriage and child bearing was prevalent among these women, which is again reflective of the norms for the province. Forty per cent of women were married at age eighteen or younger, 23.4 per cent had become mothers at or before eighteen years of age, and the mean number of children was 2.21.

Questioning Women about Violence in the Home

During the design phase of the research we debated over how best to speak about violence against women in the local context. We consulted with the interviewers, other stake holders, and participants who assisted with piloting of the survey. A consensus was reached that the term ‘violence in the home’ (kekerasaan rumah

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tangga) was the most familiar and culturally appropriate way to describe domestic violence. The team also agreed that it would produce more meaningful results, and potentially encourage more discussion about violence, if we asked women to reflect on what they believed violence in the home to be. Consequently, before women were asked to disclose any experiences of violence they were first asked whether they agreed with various definitions of what constituted violence in the home. We used the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women (1993) as a starting point to workshop questions related to Indonesian women’s understandings of what did, or did not, constitute violence in the home.¹⁰The result was four fairly standard questions that covered verbal abuse, physical violence, threats of violence and control of women’s mobility. Two other questions were also developed that were less standard. The team felt it was important to create a local definition of economic violence, to account for the endemic poverty that many families experience in this region, which means many men may have no income to share with, or to withhold from, their wives. The most unorthodox question, asking whether a husband’s publicly known infidelity was a form of family violence, was included on the insistence of interviewers. They were adamant that it was essential to include public knowledge of male infidelity as an explicit aspect of the question. This is because the stigma and humiliation women often feel when their partners are unfaithful is understood to be central to the suffering women endure in such circumstances.

The six definitional questions on violence in the home included in the survey are (translated from Indonesian):

(1) Do you think that yelling at and calling some one in the family bad names can be called violence in the home?

(2) Do you think making verbal threats to hurt someone in the family can be called violence in the home?

(3) Do you think when a husband has enough money, and he refuses to give his wife enough money to feed herself and provide the basics for her children, that it can be called violence in the home?

(4) Do you think hitting, slapping, kicking or biting someone in the family can be called violence in the home?

(5) Do you think if a husband stops his wife from going outside the home to see her family or friends, or to work that this can be called violence in the home?

(6) Do you think if a husband has affairs with other women, that the community knows about, this can be called violence in the home?

The inclusion of definitional questions in the survey proved to be highly salient for our analysis of women’s understandings and experiences of violence. It was also critical to avoid the assumption that popular Western (and non-Muslim) definitions of gender-based violence could simply be transposed onto the experiences of non- Western women. Additionally, this definitional exercise functioned as a warm up,

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allowing interviewers to introduce the topic of domestic violence in a less threatening way than if we had questioned women directly about their own experiences without prior warning. Asking women to first define violence in the home also allowed them to consider their opinions on violence before being questioned about their experiences.

Following the definitional questions, women were asked to comment on their experiences (or lack of) violence in the home, which involved answering ten questions. These questions were adapted from a well-tested tool called the Abuse Assessment Scale (AAS) (McFarlane & Parker 1992, McFarlane & Gondolf 1998). In earlier research with first-time mothers in East Java Andajani-Sutjahjo (2003) modified this tool in response to two key factors. The first was Indonesian women’s reluctance to call unwanted sex within marriage ‘rape’ or ‘forced sex’, due to dominant cultural notions of men’s right to sex within marriage and women’s obligation to comply.¹¹The second factor related to women’s desire to discuss their feelings about forced sex if they did disclose it to a researcher. In response to these two factors, we altered the wording of the original AAS tool from ‘forced sex’ to

‘unwanted sex’, and added an additional question about how women felt when they experienced unwanted sex.

The ten questions that measured the incidence and impact of violence in women’s lives were (translated from Indonesian):

(1) Have you ever been emotionally or physically abused by your husband?

(2) Within the last year, have you been hit, slapped, kicked, or otherwise physically hurt by your husband?

(3) If yes, what kind of violence occurred? And how often?

(4) Have you ever been hit, slapped, kicked, or otherwise physically hurt by your husband while you were pregnant?

(5) Within the last year, have you had unwanted sex with your husband?

(6) If yes, how did you feel when that happened?

(7) Are you ever afraid of your husband?

(8) Are you ever afraid of anyone else who lives in your home?

(9) If yes, who are you afraid of?

(10) If you are ever afraid of your husband or someone else who lives in your home, do you have anywhere you can go to be safe?

There was one glaring omission from the questions on women’s experiences of violence, and this was that we did not ask women if their husbands had been unfaithful, despite the fact that we asked whether women believed this to be a form of domestic violence. The decision not to question women directly about infidelity was based on the team’s feelings that to do so would very likely shame those women whose husbands were unfaithful. In the design phase of the research, there were many discussions regarding the issue of shame and how to avoid questions that would clearly cause respondents to feel shame.¹²Surprisingly, the inclusion of direct

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questions about unwanted sex were not deemed to be inappropriate, as women are not typically blamed, or do not tend to blame themselves, for unwanted sex within marriage. Conversely, women whose husbands stray are often further humiliated in public by popular assumptions (usually among men) that a man is unfaithful because his wife is in some way inadequate, unattractive or disobedient. Sadly, many women internalise this discourse of blame and hold themselves responsible for their husband’s actions.¹³

Research Findings and Discussion

For the most part, women’s definitions of what constituted violence in the home reinforced popular human rights definitions of domestic violence. As depicted in Table 1 below, 97.6 per cent of women believed physical abuse constituted violence in the home. The form of violence with the second highest score was publicly known infidelity, which was only slightly lower than physical violence at 95 per cent.

Women’s strong conviction that public infidelity is a form of domestic violence no doubt reflects high rates of husband infidelity and the notion that men have the right to polygamy being used as a defence for male promiscuity, as well as gender norms that constrain women’s ability to insist upon marital fidelity and/or negotiate divorce (see Platt 2010). Women’s definition of public infidelity as a form of domestic violence is also reflective of the serious impact it has on women and their children, such as: emotional injury, public shame, loss of family income that is spent on other women, and the increased risk of sexually transmissible infections.

The case below was recorded in the journal of a survey interviewer and later discussed in a group debriefing session. It powerfully illuminates women’s increased vulnerability to STIs in violent and polygamous marriages.

A woman from Desa Anu often experiences physical violence perpetrated by her husband, who also has more than one wife. This respondent has observed that her husband’s genitals regularly omit a white discharge and blood. This woman is aware her husband has some kind of STI and also believes that he is unfaithful Table 1 Defining Violence in the Home

Type of violence

Agree that it constitutes violence in the home

Yelling at and calling someone in the family bad names 75.8%

Verbal threats to hurt someone in the family 82.3%

When a husband has enough money, and he refuses to give his wife enough money to provide food/basics for herself and her children

75.8%

Hitting, slapping, kicking or biting someone in the family 97.6%

A husband stopping his wife from going outside the home to see her family or friends, or to work

61.3%

A husband having affairs with other women that the community knows about

95%

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outside of his marriages. Because she fears her husband, she feels unable to refuse sex with him or ask him to seek treatment for the STI.

(Recorded by field interviewer, April 2007)

We suggest that male infidelity in marriage, and the ways in which it is experienced and perceived as a form of domestic abuse, may be more prone to cultural specificity than other forms of violence, and as such would be a fertile topic for comparative cross-cultural research.

The third highest score for the definitional questions was for threats to hurt someone in the family, with 82.3 per cent of women agreeing that this constituted violence in the home. Data recorded in interviewer’s diaries further substantiated that women in violent relationships often reported fears over their children being hurt by their partners (see the quote by a female informant below). Both verbal abuse and economic violence were also considered to be a form of violence in the home by three quarters of respondents (75.8 per cent).

Only one form of abuse was not considered to be violence by at least three quarters of women, and this was the social control and isolation of women. Only 61.3 per cent of respondents indicated that they believed a husband’s denial of his wife’s right to leave the home constituted domestic violence. We suggest that the lower score for this form of violence stems from local interpretations of Islam. Women often explained that according to religion (Islam), a husband’s permission is ideally required before a wife leaves the home. However, it is important to note that there is wide scope in how a husband’s permission to leave the home is interpreted. For many women this may be as simple as stating they are off to the market or leaving a note to specify their whereabouts if their husband is not home and they want to go out. For other women, who live with highly controlling men, actual verbal permission from their partner may be required. The issues of where women intend to go, when they leave the home and why, also impact on perceptions of whether a husband’s explicit permission is necessary. For instance, if a woman leaves her home with her children to return to her parents’ house after a domestic dispute, this would most likely be interpreted as an explicit act of defiance of male authority (Platt 2010).

As shown in Table 2, a total of 43.1 per cent of women reported that they had at some time been emotionally or physically abused by a partner, and 10.9 per cent (55 women) reported experiencing physical assaults by their husbands in the past year.

Those women who had experienced physical assaults were asked to describe the frequency, type and location of the abuse, and 44 women offered a description. Of these 44 women, the frequency of violence was between one and twelve incidents, with the mean being 2.7 incidents. Eighty per cent of the 44 women reported that they had been physically abused between one and four times, while the remaining 20 per cent of had been beaten between six and twelve times by their husbands over the past year. The types of physical assaults experienced included: being slapped (69.5 per cent), hit with a closed fist (18.2 per cent), kicked (9.1 per cent) and being pushed or hit with hard objects (6.9 per cent). Only three women reported that the location of the attacks was their head. The sites of all other physical attacks were less visible,

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which may indicate a conscious strategy by violent partners to hide the evidence of their abuse from others.

Nearly 6 per cent of women (5.8 per cent) reported experiencing physical abuse perpetrated by their partners while pregnant, which represents a serious threat to the health of both women and their unborn children. It also verifies that pregnancy does not protect women in NTB from violence. This finding is consistent with data from East Java, where Andajani-Sutjahjo (2003) found that 6.5 per cent of women in her study of new mothers had experienced domestic violence while pregnant. However, our findings on the prevalence of women who have ever experienced abuse perpetrated by a husband (43 per cent) in NTB indicate that lifetime rates in this province may be higher than those observed in elsewhere in Indonesia. In central Java, Hakimi et al. (2001) found that 27 per cent of women had ever experienced partner violence and in eastern Java Andajani-Sutjahjo (2003) found that 29.3 per cent reported ever experiencing domestic violence.

The prevalence of physical partner violence reported in the last year and during pregnancy among women in NTB, are also comparable to findings in Western societies such as Australia, Canada and the United States (Helton & McFarlane 1987, Sorger 1994, Webster & Sweet 1994, McFarlane & Groff 2006) and in other Asian countries such as Bangladesh and Thailand (Garcia-Moreno et al. 2006). However, these rates of abuse are significantly less than those so far recorded in Middle Eastern Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia and less than those rates recorded in South Asian countries such as India (Rocca & Rathod 2009). In reference to the multi- country scale developed to assess relative levels of violence against women in the WHO Multi-Country Study on Women’s Health and Domestic Violence Against Women (Garcia-Moreno et al. 2006), we suggest that the prevalence of these two types of violence in NTB can be described as moderate.

An extremely high percentage of women (66.3 per cent) reported having unwanted sex with their husbands in the past year. When women were asked to share their feelings at the time of unwanted sex, all women did so. The most popular responses women gave to describe their feelings at the time of unwanted sex included: anger Table 2 Reported Prevalence of Abuse

Type of violence reported by women

% of women reporting violence Ever been emotionally or physically abused by a husband 43.1%

Been kicked, slapped or physically hurt by one’s husband the in the past year

10.9%

Been kicked, slapped or physically hurt by one’s husband during pregnancy

5.8%

Had unwanted sex with one’s husband in the past year 66.3%

Being afraid of one’s husband 16.1%

Being afraid of someone else in the home 3.2%

Having no safe place to go if threatened one’s husband or someone else in the home

10.0%

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(marah) 32.7 per cent; emotionally hurt (tersingung) 32.7 per cent; and numb (hambar) 21 per cent. The remaining 12.9 per cent of women reported a series of mixed negative feelings and less than 1 per cent of them described feelings of shame (malu). Women described the response of hambar as involving the process of separating their mind from their embodied experience, so as to numb themselves to the physical sensations of the abuse. While this hambar response requires further exploration, it does seem to parallel the Western psychological notion of disassocia- tion that is often experienced by women survivors of sexual abuse (Anderson et al.

1993, Taft et al. 2009, Zlotnick et al. 1994).¹⁴

We believe that the extremely high prevalence of unwanted sex in marriage is related to lack of awareness by both men and women that Muslim women are entitled to exercise sexual consent and to refuse sex in marriage.¹⁵ Our findings regarding the prevalence of unwanted sex in marriage in NTB are significantly higher than previously reported in Indonesia, and we believe this is due to the excellent rapport between interviewers and informants, reducing the tendency of women to underreport such violence. One newly wed respondent of twenty years shared her experiences of unwanted sex in the quote below. At the time of the research she was pregnant with her first child and was hoping that as her pregnancy progressed that her husband would become more understanding and less sexually demanding.

When he gets drunk with his friends on a Saturday night he always expects sex. He wakes me up very late and he smells bad and is clumsy and aggressive. The first time it happened I was very shocked, because he never drank alcohol when we were engaged and he had never been rough with me before. I tried to resist him physically and to leave the room, but it made him very angry and he shouted and called me very bad names and I was embarrassed because his parents were in the next room. I was sure they could hear everything.

Now I just try to avoid him, I sleep in the kitchen or hide in the bathroom when I hear him come home. But if I am asleep in our bed he will always wake me up if he wants it. When he is drunk he is very aggressive and it [intercourse] hurts inside, now I understand if I resist him he is rougher, even until I have bled.

The worst time was when he forced himself in from behind [anal sex], it really hurt and I cried. I think there must be something wrong with my husband but I am too scared to confront him and too embarrassed to make a scene in front of his parents.

Until now I have told no one about his behaviour but I feel so angry and depressed and I think it is ruining our marriage.

(Recorded by field interviewer, March 2007)

A total of ninety-seven women (19.2 per cent) reported being afraid of their partners or other members of their household. Sixteen women reported that they feared people other than their husbands, and the people they feared included both mothers-in-law and fathers-in-law. The fact that 83.2 per cent of women considered threats to hurt someone in the family to be a form of domestic violence, highlights the significance of

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the finding that nearly 20 per cent of our respondents reported fearing someone they lived with. Ten per cent of women also reported that they would have no safe place to go in the event that they feared their husband or someone else in their immediate family.

My husband is now behind bars because he often abused me when he got drunk. In April he will be released. He was sentenced to jail for a year and two months after he beat me until I became unconscious. I was used to living with his torture, but that last beating was the most severe one. After that attack my family and relatives actually suggested I divorce him. But I don’t want my children not to have a father and I’m worried about my financial survival.

When my husband got drunk he would yell and scream and run after us holding a big knife. When he got drunk at night time, my children and I would stay outside afraid that he would kill us if we entered the house. Everyone in our neighbourhood knows about his behaviour, so I was very embarrassed in front of my neighbours when my husband got drunk. My kids and I are praying that when their father is free from jail he won’t hurt us anymore.

I am very uneasy knowing that soon my husband will be free and will want to live with us again. I am worried that my husband may hold a grudge because of his imprisonment and may take some kind of revenge against me. I want to look for a safe shelter for me and my children so when my husband is free and staying with us I have a place to run if he begins to torture me and my children again.

(Recorded by field interviewer, March 2007)

The significance of fear of violence in women’s lives is palpable in the quote above recorded by one of our survey interviewers at the woman’s request. Her words highlight the importance of providing shelter and adequate services for women living in violent relationships.

Our analysis also attempted to identify any statistically significant risk or protective factors in relation to the prevalence of different forms of domestic abuse. We found that age, urban versus rural residence, and number of children were not predictors of violence for this group of women. However, women’s level of education was a slight predictor of lower levels of violence, with women who completed secondary school being slightly less likely to have reported experiencing physical violence.¹⁶ The potential for a more thorough investigation of protective and risk factors for domestic violence in this study was limited due to our broad focus on human rights in maternal and neonatal health. It is hopeful that future, more targeted studies of domestic violence in Indonesia, will endeavour to explore a wide range of possible protective and risk factors such as: substance abuse by male partners and women themselves, male unemployment, women’s personal histories of violence, social support systems, residence patterns and marriage practices.¹⁷ Research into Indonesian men’s roles in and experiences of violence in the family is also needed to understand and address the problem of domestic violence in Indonesia in its full complexity.

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Conclusion

We have demonstrated the feasibility of cross-disciplinary approaches to research conducted within the sphere of international development. Domestic violence can be effectively researched when integrated into broader studies of women’s health and human rights. We have provided specific examples of the benefits of applying anthropological techniques in both study design and research execution. Clearly, social dialogue techniques can be successfully used when administering primarily quantitative tools. The successful use of a range of local languages in interviews, instead of the standard reliance on a single national language and scientific research terminology, also greatly enhanced rapport with respondents which we believe reduced refusal rates and increased the willingness of women to discuss their experiences of violence. The use of field diaries by survey interviewers also provided valuable contextual data and aided greatly in ensuring we were able to meet our ethical obligations to field interviewers in relation to debriefing. Establishing culturally appropriate definitions of key research teams was also fundamental to this project and reveals the imperative of such a process for ensuring the applicability and validity of research findings.

The inclusion of ordinary women, whose lives were the focus of enquiry, as key informants in this study deviated from typical approaches to analysing human rights in the development field that tend to rely on secondary data. This study illustrated how women’s everyday experiences can be collected as ‘data’ that is suitable for human rights analysis, despite the fact that women may not describe their experiences using formal human rights terminology. This is an important finding that opens up great potential for including women’s grass roots voices and experiences within research into human rights. This in turn can help to create a more participatory human rights dialogue that is not over-dependent on the views of, and secondary data available to, those in official positions of power. Finally, the article has highlighted how a more thorough human rights analysis of maternal and neonatal health can be achieved by combining both primary and secondary data.

The research that this paper stems from has involved the largest scale survey of human rights in maternal and neonatal health conducted to date in Indonesia. It has been a highly significant study not only due to its findings, but also because of its exploratory approach. We believe the high quality of the survey data collected, and of the supplementary data recorded in interviewer’s journals, was largely due to the extraordinary efforts of the project interviewers. Involving the whole research team in the process of developing, piloting and revising the survey instrument, also created a strong sense of ownership, which contributed to the quality of interaction between interviewer’s and women and the subsequent quality of the data.

This research has revealed that Muslim women’s definitions of domestic violence in NTB do strongly resonate with established international human rights definitions. It has also demonstrated how these women’s definitions of domestic violence reflect their specific cultural and religious identities and positioning within their society.

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From our discussion it is apparent that the definitional exercise allowed us to confidently include standard international definitions of domestic violence, which was highly useful in enabling cross-cultural comparisons. The creation of culturally specific definitions of economic violence, husband infidelity and unwanted sex within marriage, enhanced our confidence in the accuracy of women’s reports of violence, as well as improving our understanding of the meaning of domestic violence in the local context.

Our findings verify that domestic violence is present in the communities surveyed, and cannot simply be dismissed as an outside ‘Western’ phenomenon, as conservative community leaders sometimes suggest. The prevalence of violence in the family also confirms that it is violence in the private realm, and not the public sphere, that is the most pervasive form of gender-based violence in Indonesia. This research demonstrates that women in NTB are willing to disclose their experiences of violence if asked in an appropriate manner, and thus there is great potential for increasing public dialogue about domestic violence within these communities. Our successful use of the adapted ASS screening questions also validates that screening tools can be successfully applied in Indonesian communities, and could be adapted in health care settings if health providers were given adequate training and support. Extensive recommendations on the actions required to further address violence against women at national and provincial levels, and across the interconnected areas of law, policy and health services provision, can be accessed in the report of the larger human rights study (MOH et al. 2008).

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge all the women who participated in the survey, the entire research team, the government and community stakeholders, Gertrud Schmidt-Ehry, Jane Cottingham-Girardin and Ezster Kismodi. The research was made possible by financial support from GTZ through the SISKES Program, WHO, the Ford Foundation, UNFPA and UNICEF.

Notes

[1] For additional insight into the role the Indonesian women’s movement in addressing domestic violence in Indonesian society see Martyn (2004) in reference to the immediate post colonial era and Robinson (2010) for the post New Order era.

[2] During the period of civil unrest proceeding the fall of the New Order Indonesian Government, known as the May riots, 168 ethnic Chinese Indonesian women were raped by male Muslim activists. This was the first time that sexual violence against Indonesian women in the context of civil conflict was made highly visible both within Indonesia and internationally.

[3] A major gain in this law reform was the explicit naming of sexual violence committed against any person living in the family home as a punishable crime. This meant that the long struggle to have marital rape recognised as illegal had finally been fruitful. However, the fact that

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marital rape is now technically illegal according to the state is not widely known in NTB province.

[4] There are currently a total of 41 women’s crisis centres and 42 integrated service centres dedicated to violence against women across Indonesia (Krisnawaty et al. 2009).

[5] The findings of this larger study are summarised in the following report: MOH et al. (2008) Measuring the Fulfillment of Human Rights in Maternal and Neonatal Health using WHO tools: Report on Provincial and District Laws, Regulations, Policies and Standards of Care, GTZ, Jakarta.

[6] These guidelines were developed by Ellsberg and Heise (2005).

[7] See Bickmore and Cassel (2000) for more details on the benefits of this technique.

[8] The seven priority health issues addressed in the full project report were identified by the GOI and WHO. These topics were: pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum; family planning; low levels of birth registration; STIs and HIV/AIDS; violence against women;

unmet need for safe abortion services; and adolescent reproductive health. Each of these issues were also analysed in relation to issues of non-discrimination, equality and vulnerable groups.

[9] NGO-initiated activities to support women living with domestic violence have been ongoing since the completion of fieldwork in 2007. In August 2009 the formal recommendations of the project, that had been ratified at central level in 2008, were accepted and integrated into the regional plan of action by the NTB Commission on Reproductive Rights.

[10] The United Nations definitions of domestic violence were used as a starting point due to their centrality to the policies and work of key stakeholders in the project including the Indonesian Government and the various international donors.

[11] In the first study of marital rape in Indonesia, Idrus (2001) also found that many women were reluctant to use the term rape to describe their experiences of sexual violence in marriage.

[12] The salience of shame as an emotional trope in the lives of Indonesian women has received considerable attention by anthropologists working across the archipelago. The insights of Lindquest (2004) that women are expected to feel more shame than men, and that shame often arises when women have failed to realise ideals of femininity, are particularly salient in the context of women’s responses to their husband’s infidelity.

[13] While women’s experiences of their husband’s infidelity and of polygamy were not documented in this study, there is a recent study that deals with these topics in great depth on the Island of Lombok, see Platt (2010, Chapters 5 and 6). For recent inquiry into Indonesian women’s experiences of polygamy in Java also see Nurmila (2009).

[14] Dissociation occurs along a continuum and is a means of strengthened psychological defense in response to repeated and prolonged sexual abuse (Anderson et al. 1993, Zlotnick et al.

1994). The continuum of dissociative symptoms includes feelings of vagueness and passivity, physical numbness, to reported amnesia of sexual abuse experiences.

[15] Interpretations of the Qur’an and hadithby progressive Indonesian Islamic scholars assert women’s right to refuse sex within marriage and men’s obligation not to coerce or pressure their wives to have sex within marriage. See Haysim (2006, pp. 99102) for a thorough exploration of these more progressive interpretations in the context of Indonesian Islam.

[16] Higher education for women has been found to be a both protective factor and a risk factor for domestic violence in different societies. In some instances, male jealousy over a wife’s higher educational and financial status within marriage has been found to compound domestic violence (Idrus & Bennett 2003), while improved educational attainment for poor women in the United States has been linked to a greater capacity for women to avoid and leave abusive relationships (Jackson 2007).

[17] In exploring domestic violence in the Maldives, Fulu (2009) provides an excellent example of how different protective factors in society can be identified, and specifically she identified the

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positive impact of fluid marriage practices and open living arrangements on protecting women from domestic violence.

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