Mental health perspective to domestic violence

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The World Health Organisation defines intimate partner violence as any behaviour within an intimate relationship that causes physical, psychological or sexual harm. In this context, violence refers to all physical, sexual, psychological or economic actions intended to hurt a person who is a family member or a person that has been an intimate partner/spouse, irrespective of whether the actor live together or not.

Domestic violence is often used synonymously with intimate partner violence, which basically refers to abuse occurring within a couple’s relationship as applicable in a marriage and cohabitation.

A lot of women and men have lost their lives to intimate partner violence. Epidemiological reports have it that over 38 per cent of murder cases involving women are committed by an intimate partner and six per cent of men in the United Kingdom.

The United Nations identified domestic violence as one of the three contexts in which violence against women occur. The UN describes it as “Physical, sexual and psychological violence occurring in the family, including battery, sexual abuse of female children in the house hold, dowry-related violence, marital rape, genital mutilation and other traditional practices harmful to women.”

Physical abuse in this context involves contact intended to cause pain or injury or other bodily harm. It includes hitting, slapping, punching, kicking, pushing, burning and other types of contacts that result in physical injury to the victim. This can take the form of acid being thrown at the victim, which can result in blindness and permanent scarring of the face and body. This also includes denying victims of medical care, sleep and forcing the victims to take drugs and alcohol.

Nigeria is currently having stories traceable to intimate partner violence. The newspapers are increasingly insinuating that the deaths of certain spouses are traceable to intimate partner violence.

Underlying domestic violence, especially in our marriages, many issues are never effectively addressed because reacting paradigms are employed. Gender activists or apologists take a strong parochial position against a certain gender and readily jump into conclusions without engaging the overall picture of the circumstance, while cultural ambassadors still maintain the conservative repressive male dominated stance, irrespective of the mental health consequences that their position inflict on their victims.

Unfortunately the rising incidence prescribes that certain systematic and effective preventive steps are taken to stem the rise in the incidence of domestic violence. Just as in clinical medicine; the actual cause of intimate partner violence and reasons for its epidemic rise in our society should be intelligently identified and addressed.

There are society-related factors, which include gender-inequitable social norms, especially those that link notions of manhood to dominance and aggression; low socio-economic status of women as the norm, weak community sanctions against domestic violence and broad social acceptance of violence as a way of resolving marital conflict. There must be a strategy to engage some of these issues creatively and resolve them towards mental wellbeing.

Against this background; newly married couples are experiencing new patterns of grave conflicts that never existed before now. Our modern wives are more independent, more self-aware and more empowered that they become unconsciously combative and provocative at the slightest observation of signs of dominance coming from their husbands. Our women are also coming from a modelling from mothers, who had possibly incited them against men who in their own experiences had repressed them by employing obsolete and repressive cultural values.

In my opinion, the ultimate goal of marriage is synergy, which is the sum total of two willing and sincere but selfish minds in a common project where neither of them could have ever achieved alone. The vulnerability to conflict and violence arises from the poor management of these inevitable but manageable conflicts in our modern marriages.

Our modern men retain certain attributes of healthy dominance that is universally human that he expects will be respected in a marriage. The modern woman, having been trained as a combatant by a mother or an auntie in a failed marriage or coming from a background of instilled hostility towards men, loses control and behaves badly.

However, there are certain psychological factors of predisposition to poor coping mechanisms to marital challenges in men, such as personality types, upbringing, and parent’s marriage, previous history of mental illness and abuse of drugs and alcohol, that can be identified in men before they marry and consciously engaged as a preventive strategy to domestic violence.

Source: Punch