Implications of culture on domestic violence and intervention
How do culture and social context affect women's experience of domestic violence? How should culture and social context inform both clinical and institutional interventions? These were the questions posed by Amrapali Maitra, clinical assistant professor of medicine, at a recent Faculty Research Fellows talk at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research.
Challenging the current universal language of domestic violence and intervention, Maitra's work advocates for new clinical and institutional vocabularies and responses that can better reflect variegated experiences. The typical framework for understanding domestic violence, as Maitra explains, assumes the following: 1) a heterosexual dyad; 2) violence that is episodic; 3) a binary between staying or leaving; and 4) a victim-to-survivor pathway. Maitra's research reveals that such universal assumptions don't align with the experiences of women in Kolkata, India.
An anthropologist and clinician, Maitra's ethnographic research in Kolkata examines how culture informs women's experience of and response to domestic violence. Calling for greater attention to "local forms of gendered violence," Maitra explains how Sita, the female protagonist of the ancient Hindu epic, the Ramayana, became idealized as the paradigmatic Hindu wife in post-colonial India. While the literary Sita did not experience the domestic violence that is the subject of Maitra's ethnographic research, she was, Maitra explains, a victim of a gendered form of oppression that has fundamental implications for understanding women's contemporary experience of domestic violence in India.
Maitra's two years of ethnographic fieldwork consisted of participant observation. Working at a clinic in Kolkata, she spoke with women who were experiencing domestic violence and who had not yet sought institutional intervention. Many of the women whom Maitra interviewed were domestic workers. There existed, Maitra discovered, a "continuum of harm" between women's homes and their work environments. She also learned that in intergenerational households, women could also be enablers or perpetrators of domestic violence. Deprivation, too, could be "a hidden tactic of domestic violence."
As Maitra explains, the women whom she interviewed had high thresholds for seeking clinical or institutional intervention. At the same time, to say that these women simply "stayed" with their husbands would be flattening the reality. As Maitra shows, many of the women sought greater safety by rearranging their domestic situations. This could take the form of living in a separate floor of the same house, or it could involve moving back in with their parents. Their personal interventions – beyond a binary of "staying" or "leaving," outside the realm of clinical or institutional intervention, and beyond a strict victim-to-survivor pathway – demonstrate the insufficiency of a universal approach to domestic violence, and highlight the need for culturally specific frameworks.
Maitra argues that clinical and institutional responses to domestic violence must therefore "contend with historically contextual forms of violence" if clinicians and organizations are to support women on their own terms. This research, as she shows, has implications not only in Kolkata, but also in the United States, where culturally informed practices can help clinicians and advocates better respond to diverse experiences of domestic abuse, particularly among immigrant communities.
