Cultural Transformations and Gender Violence: South Asian Women’s Experiences of Sexual Violence and Familial Dynamics

Abstract

South Asian victims, survivors and perpetrators have been largely neglected in conceptualisations of gender violence. As a result, cultural stereotypes regarding South Asian men and women and the demonisation of Asian community relations can circulate without qualification in the wider public sphere. Such stereotypes include representations of South Asian women as ‘passive’, compliant’, pressured by family and subservient to the needs of men. Yet the women we spoke to through this research were brave enough to confront not only their abusive partner, but also extended family and often the community. They had struggled hard to escape situations where they were being harmed and had begun to rebuild their lives under difficult circumstances. Our aim in this chapter is to reveal the complex set of relations that define and shape these women’s experience of gender violence¹: to argue that existing feminist and psychological accounts of gender violence must broaden their discursive fields to acknowledge the specific manifestations of gender power relations, interpersonal dynamics and gendered identities, as they are found in different communities. In particular, we discuss two themes that are often discussed in the literature as generalisable to all episodes of gender violence — the idea that gender violence largely operates in the private space of the home, outside of the public gaze, and the reliance on the traditional victim (female partner)/perpetrator (male partner) story to conceptualise power relations.