The contact that women have with gender-based violence is varies greatly, both in form and severity, across the world. This violence, particularly through the mechanisms of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, influence how a woman experiences her body and health.
As students attending Michigan State in a rather troubling period of its history, I’d say we all have had some contact with the movement #GoTeal to support the survivors on campus, and are relatively well-informed about the different forms of abuse, sexual assault/harassment, and how to report it. This formal education about violent/abusive relationships and incidences, as well as the social support for women who have experienced sexual, physical, and emotional violence, is not universal; in many areas, the social stigma of being an individual who has been raped and the lack of legal action against perpetrators of violence prevents survivors from speaking out.
In Benin, laws against rape and contact sexual violence exist, but are not fully enforced. In addition, many cases of sexual assault go unreported, particularly among women in rural areas that must leave their homes and families to travel to other towns to report the incident. Others do not report for fear of being refused by their husbands, thrown out by their families, or ostracized by their community. Speaking out becomes even harder when the violence is domestic in nature. In regard to violence against women in the home, the Ministry of Family and National Solidarity found that 69% of Beninese women had suffered abuse at least once in their life (Alphonse Kpozehouen 2018). Gender-based violence as a whole remains ever present in Benin, and while it has such life-altering negative effects on such a large number of people, violence against women is reinforced through cultural norms of male dominance and expected female acceptance of inferior treatment. In a study that interviewed 21,574 people in Benin with questions relating to violence against women by an intimate partner, the prevalence of acceptance of intimate partner violence was 15.77%. In other terms, one participant out of six considered it justified for a woman to suffer abuse from her husband/partner for at least one of the following reasons: she burned the food, argued with her partner, went out of the house without notifying her partner, neglected the children, or refused to have sex with her partner. With the role of being submissive, along with an extreme lack of social support in both public and personal settings, Beninese women struggle to raise awareness and put an end to gender-based violence.
Reframing violence against women and trauma as health issues redefines gender-based violence and trauma, allowing it room in both a social justice and medicalized setting. In some ways, it challenges how we understand health and medicine; rather than simply focusing on biological variables, infectious diseases, and glucose levels, physicians must clinically address gender-based violence and (sometimes invisible) trauma, recognizing its lasting psychological effects on patients as ‘symptoms’ to the overarching disease of interpersonal abuse and assault. It gives medical professionals a reinforced role and obligation in local and global activism, and it expands the range of care that they must be able to appropriately address with their clients. By medicalizing violence against women, we are reiterating the responsibility of physicians to place the safety, health, and well-being of their patient first, and to uphold the Hippocratic Oath with renewed vigor. In Seng and Sperlich’s Survivor Moms: Women’s Stories of Birthing, Mothering, and Healing after Sexual Abuse, the authors show how multifaceted and complex the lens survivors see/experience the world through is and how many obstacles survivors face (due to their past and current trauma) in regard to their physical & emotion-based trust relationships with others, their health, and their everyday life. This book excerpt, in my opinion, represents an appropriate medicalization of violence against women, in the efforts to raise awareness in the health sector and shift the focus from the legal punishment for perpetrators to aiding in survivor healing. The medicalization of gender-based violence and trauma as a biomedical health concern could help reinforce the importance of supporting survivors and correcting legal and social systems that allow violence against women to continue, perhaps even in Benin.
However, reframing gender-based violence and trauma as health issues also could do its cause (and its survivors) a disservice. In the American biomedical system, illness and disease are addressed as immediate concerns with surgical or prescription-based solutions. Take this medicine, drink some fluids, and you’ll be good as new in a couple days. Unfortunately, trauma is not reversed in a day, and there is no quick healing for those of whom have experienced emotional, physical, or sexual assault. For a medical system that fails at long-term care (and perpetuates health disparities between men and women of diverse backgrounds), Western biomedicine may not be the best model to use when confronting gender-based violence.
Intergenerational trauma challenges this biochemical model of health further, suggesting that environmental or social experiences we have that shake us to our core can manifest in such a way as to become biological; while altering our bodies through the release of different chemicals and hormones, these external stressors must change form again to enable their spread to generations to come (via mechanical hereditary pathways and genetic vulnerabilities, mother-child transmission in utero through [mal]adaptive development to the womb, and stress resulting in poor parenting behaviors and ineffective coping strategies, etc.). More research is still being done examining the links between trauma, stress, and intergenerational effects, but these findings could reframe yet again how we view trauma and violence against women.
References
Alphonse Kpozehouen, Noël Moussiliou Paraïso, […], and Roger Salamon. 2018. “Perception of Beninese on intimate partner violence: Benin demographic health survey.” BMC Women’s Health.
I like that you tied this with the current social movement happening on MSU campus–#GoTeal. I think finding ways to connect the reading to things we can see in our local surroundings helps us to dig deeper into the concepts discussed in the readings.
In the U.S., the biomedical system in which we rely on and trust for treatment and care has attributed to and helps justify the medicalization of everything. As you stated in your post, even gender-based violence is reinforced in societies as a cultural norm and that it is something that women should adjust to because the society is male-dominated. The ways in which biomedicine has reframed violence against women as a form of trauma that needs treatment and should be solved by the ‘victim’ and is not addressed in the context of the situation is an example of how gender-based violence still happens to be present and almost reinforced. In the Biomedicine Lecture from Week 1, it was noted that the way in which the medical professionals of our society are not necessarily trained to produce empathetic doctors that look at the whole picture of the situation to treat an issue. They look at the ‘victim’ in their office and try to treat ‘their problem’. Which, in cases of gender violence and trauma, it is something that requires empathy and full context do address! If we could have a say in how we could suggest changes to medical professional education, how would you propose we address empathy and seeing context? Our society is always in a rush when it comes to appointments and seeing medical professionals, do you think empathy and context are not routine because of time constraints or because of a different reason?
Source Cited:
Lecture: 1.7. Deconstructing Biomedicine
GBV and survivorship is a hard thing to deal with and it is a hard thing to treat. I agree that the biomedical model may not be the best model to treat GBV, for the reasons that you mention. It also isn’t that great of a model because it focuses on biologic, chemical and physical ailments. Not so much on the social, which you have touched on, and there are models of healthcare and community care that do address this issue and are quite successful in treating GBV and intergenerational trauma.