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Nayreen Daruwalla, head of Prevention of Violence against Women and Children Program at SNEHA in Mumbai, and David Osrin, Professor of Global Health at University College London, discuss their research to prevent violence against women and girls in India, published and peer reviewed on Wellcome Open Research.

Around one-third of women across the world survive violence. Often invisible to others, or unacknowledged as a problem, the toll is immense in the short and long term: injuries, sexually transmitted infections, pregnancy loss, harms to mental health, and continued violence in the next generation.

As a group committed to responding to the epidemic of violence against women and girls, we run community-based programs to support survivors and prevent recurrence, and to foster an environment in which it is less likely to happen. We work with communities in informal settlements (slums) in Mumbai, India, which make up about 40% of homes in the city.

Changing how people think

Researchers and activists think that, if we are to reduce the burden of violence, we have to consider changing the way people think about it. Violence by a partner or other family member is supported by social norms that actively or passively legitimise it.

As part of of research, we wanted to understand the social norms under which violence against women is committed, so we interviewed people about who they took their cues from, what they thought people around them did, and what they thought was socially appropriate.

Different kinds of norm

Three important terms in our work were: reference groups, descriptive norms, and injunctive norms. A reference group are the people around us who control or influence our behaviour, such as, the people we look to in doing something like choosing our clothes, going out, or disciplining our family.

A descriptive norm is a behaviour that we think other people follow, in other words, “what is”, like wearing conventional clothes or not being friends with people of another sex. An injunctive norm is a behaviour that we think our reference group prefers, i.e,“what ought to be”, like not having sex before marriage.

Showing people how reality differed from perception might be a way to change ideas that support violence

It’s important to understand that what we think may be wrong. For example, we may think that most people don’t value educating their daughters, when in fact they value it highly. Or that people think that disciplining one’s partner forcibly is a mark of manhood, when in fact people think it represents weakness.

What we wanted to do was find out if there were things that people thought were normal, when previous norms had changed or when lots of people were doing other things. We thought that showing people how reality differed from perception might be a way to change ideas that support violence.

Match and mismatch between what is and what ought to be

We interviewed people in groups and individually, women and men, older and younger. To understand what they thought, we asked them to respond to the story of a fictional woman’s life, including turning points like education, boyfriends, family planning, work, and infidelity.

For some behaviours, what people thought was right and proper was the same as what they thought people actually did. Good examples were the traditional division of household work between men and women. Even though men might help with the cooking, people might “make fun and laugh” because it was not the ‘done’ thing.

Most people disapproved in principle of violence against women and girls. The problem is that there were situations in which it was thought to be acceptable.

Most people thought that parents should have a hand in finding marital partners for their children, and that women really ought to get married and have children. An important finding was that most people disapproved in principle of violence against women and girls. The problem is that there were situations in which it was thought to be acceptable: “Men have to earn, take care of the family, keep the people around organized and united.” Shouting at or slapping one’s wife was a way of doing this.

Some perceptions of “what is” differed from traditional injunctive norms. In a situation in which many women now go out to work, they might wear different clothes and move around the city. Still other sorts of behavioural descriptive norms differed very clearly from injunctive norms.

For example, everyone we interviewed thought that girls should be educated, even if they thought that the traditional norm was for them not to be. Many people thought that women should manage their own earnings, which they often did. And there was widespread agreement that, even if premarital sex was frowned upon, so many people engage in it that the old injunctions were becoming meaningless: “All of them have sex. They don’t wait till 18, they start at 13.”

A path towards gender equality

Much of our work involves women, men, and young people discussing issues in groups. The first thing we need to think about is how to put across the differences between “what is” and “what ought to be” on the path toward gender equality.

How to put across the differences between “what is” and “what ought to be”.

We will make sure that people understand that women’s education is a social good and that mobility, work, and control of earnings are much more common than they used to be. The second thing is the importance of reference groups.

Our findings have made us think that our emphasis on group work, new social connections, and environments that don’t tolerate violence are ways in which we might be able to accelerate change. Perhaps disadvantageous norms might change if we can help women make connections with groups that are bigger, and have different norms, than the ones they usually follow.