Stigma, shame and women's limited agency in help-seeking for intimate partner violence

Abstract

In Tanzania, 44% of women experience intimate partner violence (IPV) in their lifetime, but the majority never seeks help, and many never tell anyone about their experience. Even among the minority of women who seek support, only 10% access formal services. Our research explored the social and structural barriers that render Tanzanian women unable to exercise agency in this critical domain of their lives. We collected qualitative data in three regions of Tanzania through 104 key informant interviews with duty bearers and participatory focus groups with 96 male and female community members. The findings revealed numerous sociocultural barriers to help-seeking, including gendered social norms that accept IPV and impose stigma and shame upon survivors. Because IPV is highly normalised, survivors are silenced by their fear of social consequences, a fear reinforced by the belief that it is women's reporting of IPV that brings shame, rather than the perpetration of violence itself. Barriers to help-seeking curtail women's agency. Even women who reject IPV as a 'normal' practice are blocked from action by powerful social norms. These constraints deny survivors the support, services and justice they deserve and also perpetuate low reporting and inaccurate estimates of IPV prevalence.

Physical partner violence, women’s economic status and help-seeking behaviour in Dar es Salaam and Mbeya, Tanzania

“…Women in both sites reported that they would like to receive more help, but when asked whom they would like to receive help from, many women stated members of their family rather than police or health centres. These preferences are likely to still exist as the qualitative study in Tanzania by McCleary-Sills and colleagues documented how women seek help from various informal sources first before approaching formal services [32]. Women’s first port of call was the family, at times the partner’s family, where the support given varied from assistance in mediation between the woman and her partner to advice including being told to tolerate the abuse.…”

“…Women’s first port of call was the family, at times the partner’s family, where the support given varied from assistance in mediation between the woman and her partner to advice including being told to tolerate the abuse. It is only if the issue remains unresolved that it is then acceptable for women to go to external sources of support such as local or religious leaders [32]. A qualitative study on health care worker perceptions about intimate partner violence, conducted in DSM, highlighted their frustrations at women’s reluctance to disclose abuse despite their being given evidence from the victims’ families or friends.…”

“…This study conforms to this finding and the reasons women gave for seeking help or leaving the relationship were because they ‘could not endure the violence any more’ or because they had received serious injuries. Many women who had never left said this was because they did not consider the violence that they experienced as serious; and underlying this may be the normative acceptance of wife beating under certain circumstances [32,40,41]. …”

“…Social pressures that place the burden of family harmony on women prevent them from seeking help because they fear either stigma, that they will not be believed or that they will jeopardise family honour [14,30–32]. …”

“…Despite the increasing numbers of studies exploring factors associated with partner violence against women in Tanzania [36–38], few have explored abused women’s help-seeking behaviour. To date, the most in-depth study analysed qualitative data from DSM, Mbeya and Iringa Regions gathered in 2009 [32]. From participatory focus group discussion and key informant interviews, the study explored patterns of help-seeking and highlighted how gendered norms around the acceptability of violence, fear of shame, stigma and/or an escalation of violence, and a lack of trust in the response system meant abused women tolerated violence and were prevented from seeking help [32].…”