Sierra Leone’s statistics on violence against women is very interesting. Lifetime Physical and/or Sexual Intimate Partner Violence is 45%. Physical and/or Sexual Intimate Partner Violence in the last 12 months is 29%. Child marriage is 29%. Female genital mutilation is 90%. What makes it so interesting is the female genital cutting is the highest and that is often not men being violent towards women. It is women being violent towards women. It is surprising to me to find this on a violence against women statistic webpage. It is my chosen health topic as well. To me, I would have never doubted it is a huge health issue. But I was surprised that it was violence against women. I mean, it makes sense. I, however, assumed that violence against women would have been intimate partners or men. And yes, that is still an issue, but FGC is a bigger one. I feel naïve. It is a little comical that I am researching FGC and didn’t recognize is as this issue. This week, our assignments and my research have overlapped. Opening my eyes once again, as this class often does.
Reframing violence against women and trauma to view it as a health issue challenges a lot of our understanding of health, illness, and medicine. I think most of us think of health and illness as natural issues. Of course, we know that car accidents and traumatic injuries can happen, but it usually isn’t on person. Reoccurring violence against women is also an issue. There can often be broken bones, internal bleeding, and mental health issues. When we reframe violence against women, it puts more emphasis as the issue. To view it as an illness would help the system fight it more. There is research done to fight cancer and Alzheimer’s. Maybe, if biomedicine viewed violence against women as an illness, there would be research and more effort put in on how to end it. It’s prominent all over the world, so shouldn’t we try to stop it? Protecting the innocent women that are beaten and battered should be a priority.
Intergenerational trauma challenges biomedical, mechanical models of health. Traditionally, that type of thing was written off as nonexistent or fake. There was a belief that if it couldn’t be seen by some sort of visual, then it wasn’t real. This challenge is needed. There is a lot more the health than the physical anatomy. We need the biomedical system to expand its view on health and illness and treatment. How do we save these women? How do we help them?
There are programs and placements that help women in dangerous situations. But they only exist some places. They only help some women. There needs to be a movement to help more women. The violence needs to end. Those who are hurting them need to be served justice. Real consequences. More often. Safety for these women. Many times, if a woman comes forward about violence, she is ignored or told she made it up. Then, she has to face the wrath of whoever was reported.
It is a dangerous cycle. In Sierra Leone, if a woman doesn’t participate in female genital cutting, she is shunned and cut off from community. It is hard for her to find a job and make a living. Men would not consider her for marriage. Choosing to walk away from the violence creates a very difficult and, often, horrible life for the woman. So, women do not usually do that. They continue to go through with it so that they have hope to get married and to have a decent life.
Hi Sami. I agree with your view that reframing violence against women as a health issue could help us understand and put more emphasis on the issue. Like you stated, topic we currently view to be health related get much funding and are extensively researched on. Because of this, there are many treatments and preventative measures present to combat the issue. Using cancer and Alzheimer’s is a great example of this. Although I think that reframing violence as a health issue could be helpful, I think that the biomedicine approach to this would not be as helpful. As stated in one of the lectures, biomedicine is a mode of medicine which uses science such as biology or biochemistry to explain a medical problem (Lecture 7). Violence against women is more than just a biological problem. In order to fully treat this, the environmental, social and mental factors need to be taken into account as well. Violence against women could effect her “ autonomy, productivity, ability to care for herself” and additionally can led to her developing depression and chronic illnesses (Krantz 2002 ). Since biomedicine only looks at the biological factors, I don’t think that using this model would be as helpful. In the lecture ,Dr. Gabriel stated that, “ trauma is really a culturally determined thing… what is traumatic to you is not necessarily traumatic to me”.Trauma is caused by different factors and experienced differently by everyone . By not to look at the environmental , mental, social aspects of the women’s life, biomedicine does not fully understand the women’s problems in treat her accurately.
Hi Sami,
I found your blog post very interesting to read. I knew that in some countries that FGC is used as a ritual and it never came across my mind as violence against women. I guess because in America we use ours for pleasure. Now thinking about it I can see how it falls into that category. With the research you found about FGC in Sierra Leone, is it because it’s a ritual for the women? Also, do you believe this causes trauma for the females and causes intergenerational trauma as well?
I agree with you about how when we reframe violence against women it puts more emphasis on the ongoing issues. It’s something I never thought about and has changed my perspective on exactly what is health. Like you’ve mentioned before some people think of health as natural causes, but there are so many areas of health, not just physically but emotionally and mentally as well. And I think in other countries they may not think about health beyond the surface level (physical). When I was doing my research for my country on this week’s blog post in the scholar articles and journals I came across they all mentioned physical health but nothing about mental or emotional health. They also didn’t talk much about trauma but they mentioned how the cycle continues and continues (My country was India with a focus on sexual assault and rape against women).
To answer your question about how can save these women, I think a start to doing so is bringing awareness and shifting the perspective of GFC and how that affects women. There also needs to be training for health professionals on empathy, asking traumatic questions without retriggering the trauma and helping the patients like Dr. Sperlich mentions in lecture 4.1.
Your post was eye opening to me about the subject of FGC. After reading your blog, I did very quick research as well. To know that in Sierra Leone that 90% of the women there have been subjected to FGC is a bit of an overwhelming statistic. What age are the females subjected to this practice in Sierra Leone? I ask because you stated in your last paragraph that if a woman chooses not to go through with the procedure that they will have many societal or cultural consequences as a result. I was thinking it was happening to younger girls and that they would assume there wasn’t even an option to even have a choice in the matter. For example, in the United States (and many other cultures) it is common practice to circumcised male children within days of birth. Obviously, these children have no decision in the practice when it is done at that age. I am so curious as the continued cultural perpetuation of this practice. The practice is illegal in so many countries but that message that it is wrong doesn’t seem to be filtering down on a cultural level. Thank you for your post and really making me think about this matter.
FGM is unfortunately prevalent in significant number of cultural groups in Africa and the Middle East. It is often carried out as a way to ensure a woman’s virginity till marriage, and is viewed as necessary for hygiene and health. Biomedicine says that FGM is extremely harmful to women and can lead to problems, but at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century FGM was widely implemented for the sake of women’s health. It is an interesting overlap between violence against women and health problems for this reason.