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by. Endah Triwijati
Introduction
One of the issues of reproductive and sexual health is violence against women. The definition of violence against women is any acts or threats of coercion (controlling another’s behaviour), aggression (intent to cause harm to another), or violence (perpetration of damage or injury to another or to their belongings and property) that jeopardizes the life, body, or emotional integrity of women. Physical, emotional, and sexual violence/abuse, are forms of violence against women.
Domestic violence is a serious, pervasive yet invisible problem that adversely affects women’s physical and psychological health. Girl children as survivors of sexual abused are a much more invisible problem. A better understanding of the complexity that they face is one of the prerequisite to construct legal protection that really answers their cry for justice.
Some Notes to Ponder
· Enhancing our understanding of the construction of gender as a social category and its consequences.
· Scrutinizing our own biases in understanding and responding to cases of domestic violence, of sexual violence.
· Improving skills to provide a better legal service that helps stop violence against women, and helps the survivors to regain their self-respect.
Every abusive process involves three factors that relate to one another, i.e.:
1. The society at large: for example, sexism, cultural norms of marriage, patriarchal family structure, masculinity (violence and power), and myth about abusive relationship.
2. Predisposition factors of the abuser/perpetrator: e.g. experience/witness family violence, traditional sex role beliefs, perceived power imbalance, possessiveness.
3. Survivor’s position in society: e.g. stigma of divorce, lack of public assistance, low social support, insufficient child support, and economic insufficiency.
The Landscape of Adult Women Survivors
The adult women survivors experiencing cycle of violence, fear cycle and isolation will feel psychologically entrapped into the abusive relationship. This will make them have poor-self concept and lose self-respect and belief in one’s capabilities.
Cycle of Violence
1. Build-up Phase
It is characterized by verbal harassment, threat of abuse and minor incidents of battering. The dominant partner begins to dominate the situations, the other (victim) feels under stress and become compliant, or try to stay out of the abuser’s way. She believes that her passivity will prevent his anger from escalating. Anxiety and tension in the family builds up to reach devastating proportion. During this time she is likely to come to her physician with somatic symptoms, which is the characteristic of chronic stress.
2. Control Phase
The dominant partner seems determined to control the actions of the family and the victim that they are frightened to do anything which will precipitate his anger. If the perpetrator can achieve sufficient control during this phase, an outburst rarely follows. This phase can be long – the usual way of life in the family- or short. The survivor will have feelings such as confusion, afraid and anxiety while the perpetrator will be dominant and in control.
3. The Violence Outburst
This may involves extreme physical harm to the survivor, or emotional scarring which is not observable to the casual observer, but can have long lasting effects on the personality of the victim. The perpetrator does this to release his tension and get compliance from the partner and many feel especially close to their partners after the violence and attempt to ‘make it up’ with her by ‘making love’. As for the victim, she can feel guilty, blame herself and cooperate for the sexual contact to show that she is prepared to stay with him.
4. Pursuit Phase
In this phase the perpetrator attempts to ask for forgiveness, makes promises about the future and his behaviour; this may due to his feeling true remorse and sorrow for what he’ done, his being frightened about his perceived lack of control over his violence, and his being fearful of the possibility of being left by his partner.
5. Honeymoon Phase
The honeymoon phase is a time of great closeness for the couple. But as he is given the usual problem of daily life, his tension will arise again and this will lead them back into buildup phase.
Fear Cycle
This seems to be an un-ended chain/cycle. It may begin with the feeling of fear (actual/perceived), mistrust (people, surrounding, perception, judgment), control (activities, people, immediate environment) which may aggravate greater fear, and finally resettlement (toward everybody), which will also lead to the feeling of fear.
Cycle of Isolation
Like the cycle of fear, this one also starts with isolation phase which leads to be lack of realistic feedback and support. This may increase her dependency to the perpetrator. Feeling low of self-respect and belief in her own capabilities will make her shame and blame herself, which finally make her back to the phase of isolation.
Landscape of Girl Child-The Survivor of Sexual Abuse
Sexual abuse toward children is when a child of any age is exploited by an older person for his or her own (the perpetrator’s) own satisfaction while disregarding the child’s own developmental maturity and inability to understand the sexual behaviour.
In their process to understand who they are, the children will be more dependent to adult’s care. This can make them be much more prone to violence such as sexual violence by adult or same aged friend. Their innocent love and basic trust were then betrayed/violated.
These children are socially perceived as a sexual-being that their forced sexual experiences tend to be ignored by others and they are forced to act as ‘super’ human. They tend to be blamed by the society of what happened.
Aware of the sensation, yet cannot come up with a name or concept for what is being done to them is another problem to naming the problem. Trivial support such as medical, psychological and law support are needed in this case.
Coping Strategy
They try to cope with these problems by minimizing, rationalizing, denying, forgetting, splitting, chaos, self-mutilation, compulsive seeking/avoiding sex, eating difficulties, and sleeping problem.
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