Woeful findings on gender issues

PETALING JAYA: A comprehensive prevention strategy must be adopted to achieve more impactful results from efforts to address Malaysian attitudes towards violence, especially against women, says the Women’s Aid Organisation (WAO).

It said more collective action rather than isolated initiatives should be carried out, with prevention strategies tailored to address specific niches in social ecology.

“A review of evidence should be conducted based on approaches and interventions that could work within Malaysia.

“Prevention programmes should actively challenge underlying violence-endorsing attitudes and societal norms.

“The government should also conduct public attitude surveys towards violence against women (VAW) every few years to track progression and regression of Malaysian attitudes,” WAO told a press conference yesterday.

The press conference was held to launch its report after surveying 1,000 Malaysians to understand their attitudes and perceptions towards violence against women as well as the impact of these attitudes on survivors through 16 in-depth interviews.

The result of the survey indicated a critical need for rethinking and strengthening the approach to prevention strategies for VAW.

Titled ‘A Study on Malaysian Public Attitudes and Perceptions towards VAW’, the study found that about half of Malaysians are likely to oppose violence-endorsing attitudes and support gender equality.

In a sharing session by WAO activitists Isabel Chung, Anis Farid and Shazana Agha, they said attitudes and perceptions likely to be held by Malaysians were undermining women’s independence and decision-making in their private life, with almost half (48%) of respondents having an outlook that was unfavourable to women.

“There is a disconnect between the respondent’s ability to identify violence when it is described, and how it looks in our everyday lives.

“There is a disconnect between knowledge and practice as 41.8% of respondents exhibit attitudes that excuse perpetrators for violence, or are complicit towards it.

“Some 53.3% believe that domestic violence is a normal reaction to everyday stress and frustration; 43% think that sometimes a woman can make a man so angry that he hits her when he didn’t mean to; and 30% believe that women who flirt all the time are somewhat to be blamed if their partner gets jealous and hits them,” they shared.

The trio further revealed that there was a disconnect between knowledge and practice as 37.1% of respondents believed that leaving an abusive relationship was not hard, and 44.9% were of the view that female victims who stayed with their abusive partners were responsible for the ongoing abuse.

“This suggests that an understanding of what constitutes VAW does not necessarily include an understanding of the inherent and unequal power relations between perpetrators and survivors.

“There is also complicity towards distrusting women’s reports of violence as 23.6% of the respondents agree that women who are fighting for child custody tend to create or exaggerate domestic abuse allegations to help their case,” they added.

The survey also showed that there was a high tendency in Malaysians to disregard women’s right to consent.

“Rape myths are pervasive and over 80% of the respondents believe that rape happens because men are not able to control their desires.

“Malaysians tend to deny that gender inequality is a problem as 30.9% think that many women exaggerate how unequally they are treated in Malaysia, whereas there are 23.8% who think that discrimination against women is no longer a problem in workplaces.

More can be found at wao.org.my.