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Colette JohnsonDr. Bettina Shell-DuncanAnthropology 399June 2, 2010

Combating Domestic Violence in Malaysia: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Legal Approaches Through the Lens of

Intersectionality

Abstract

Despite the enactment of the Domestic Violence Act in 1994, the concept of domestic violence and the enforcement of domestic violence legislation is still an area of contestation and debate in Malaysia. While international human rights based organizations such as the Women’s Aid Organization (WAO) work towards providing services to victims of domestic violence and lobby for legal reform to improve the position of women in Malaysia, many women remain in physically abusive relationships without seeking legal means of redress against their perpetrators. In fact, it has been estimated that while 39% of Malaysian women are physically abused by their partners, only 0.05% of these women make reports of this abuse to the police. This proposal advocates for the use of a feminist intersectional approach in the study of domestic violence law. By focusing on social positions and the complex intersections of identity experienced by Malaysian women, activists and governments can gain insight into why some women are more likely to file police reports than others. This insight is integral to effectively combating domestic violence, since government initiatives on violence are based largely on the under-representative statistics reported by the Royal Malaysian Police. Furthermore, evaluating how intersections of various social positions culminate in barriers to legal redress begs the question: how effective are police reports and current domestic violence law in combating violence women in Malaysia? Answering this question will allow the WAO and other participants in the women’s rights movement to better understand and improve on efforts to combat violence against women, both locally and worldwide.

Introduction

Domestic violence – or the abuse of individuals (primarily women) in the domestic sphere – is considered a widespread issue of concern in local, national, and international contexts because of the ills it inflicts upon individuals, families, and communities. It is cited to have adverse health affects in the form of physical ill health, sexual and reproductive problems, and psychological and behavioral problems. Socioeconomic impacts include lost economic productivity, increased social service use and emotional and behavioral problems amongst children living in households where domestic violence occurs (WHO 2006).

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The Women’s Aid Organisation (WAO) is an internationally recognized non-governmental organization (NGO) with the specific aim of eliminating violence against women in Malaysia. The WAO conducted the largest and only nationally representative survey on the prevalence of domestic violence in Malaysia in 1990, which concluded that 39% of all women over the age of 15 were estimated to have been beaten by their husband or boyfriend. Further analysis revealed 99.95% of these cases had not been reported to the police (Abdullah 1995; WHO 2006). Clearly, domestic violence can be considered an issue of epidemic proportions in Malaysia. However, no nationally representative sample of Malaysian women has been done in the past 20 years and the only definitive data that currently exists on numbers of women who experience domestic violence come from the Royal Malaysian Police incident report statistics and intake reports of agencies such as the WAO. This is problematic since domestic violence is so highly under-reported and little definitive work has been done to discover the nature of these “invisible” statistics. The WHO therefore concludes that “some efforts [must] be directed to enhance the quality of violence data and information collection in this country and develop a more coherent and better integrated set of data on interpersonal violence” (WHO 2006).

While restrictions of time, language and access to resources prohibit my ability distribute a nationally representative survey of such the WAO’s proportions, I aim to contribute to a qualitative exploration of possible barriers that exist to women filing police reports in cases of physical abuse. This will allow some of the women who choose not to make a report to become less “invisible.” I also aim to explore whether or not legal means of redress are considered by Malaysian women from various backgrounds to be a valuable form of attending to the issue of domestic abuse. Without data of this nature, government and NGO initiatives targeting women who have experienced domestic abuse may continue to bypass the experiences of women who do not file police reports or seek other means of legal aid.

Specific Aims

The broad long-term objective of this research is to improve the efficiency of the movement to combat violence against women, specifically in Malaysia but also worldwide. Further research in Malaysia should cover the concrete causes of domestic violence specific to this country as well as how the causes can be reduced, eliminated, or removed from the process of inducing abusive outbreaks. I will focus on exploring the reasons that women have for reporting or not reporting a case of domestic violence to the police so that the “invisible” populations of women who do not make police reports may be better seen, understood, and targeted by violence reduction initiatives. In order to gain a more complete and holistic understanding of the contextualization of women’s individual decisions not to report, I will use the lens of intersectionality.

The specific aims of my research are as follows:

1. Identify the complex intersecting identities of women who go to the WAO for help.

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2. Determine which complex identities of women tend to either inhibit or encourage the filing of a police report and why.

3. Determine whether or not women who file reports find them useful or effective.

By doing an in-depth qualitative study that focuses on barriers that women face to filing police reports, I will be able to provide the WAO and other Malaysian or regionally similar women’s rights organizations with a better understanding of both the benefits and limitations of current legal approaches and services, providing room for improvement or modification if necessary. 

Literature Review

International Women’s Rights

Women’s issues first began receiving higher priority on the international agenda in the 1970s and 1980s when the UN General Assembly promoted the International Decade for Women. In 1981, a convention for governing violence against women was adopted, called the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Violence Against Women (CEDAW). It articulated principles of gender equality and state responsibility and current CEDAW hearings explain how these international laws apply to countries under scrutiny. In 1993, the Vienna Conference on Human Rights led the General Assembly to adopt a Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (Vienna Declaration), which called member states to eliminate all forms of violence and discrimination against women without regard to differentiations in the public/private sphere. This declaration also led to the appointment of a UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women. Further influential international declarations for women’s rights include the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action of 1995 and the Beijing Plus Five review of 2000 (Amirthalingam 2003; Merry 2006).

The human rights framework is “a distinctive modernist vision of the good and just society” that emphasizes autonomy, equality, secularity and universality (Merry 2006 p. 220). It envisions the state as responsible for guaranteeing these conditions of life and the individual as responsible for making claims. In the field of violence against women, the rights framework challenges the idea that gender violence is normal and natural. While human rights ideas are often repackaged in culturally resonant wrappings in order to fit better with local contexts, the human rights core remains a strong challenge to customary gender norms (Merry 2006).

According to the proponents of international women’s rights, women can only be empowered if they are in possession of the fundamental liberties and freedoms that are inalienable and accorded to them by virtue of their dignity and value as humans. However, there continues to be systemic discrimination in Malaysia in the form of gender-based violence, practiced against women in both public and private spheres by state and non-state actors. There is a discrepancy between the rhetoric of women’s rights aims and the actual reality of women’s rights as experienced at the grassroots

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(Bong 2008). As stated in the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action, women’s realization of rights are sometimes curtailed by “their race, age, language, ethnicity, culture, religion, or disability, or because they are indigenous people” (United Nations 2006, p. 10). As such, some individuals and groups of women are denied actual substantive gender equality.

The Women’s Aid Organisation

The WAO is a non-governmental organization (NGO) founded in 1981 that lobbies for reform and the criminalization of domestic violence. It provides social services, public education, and administers survey research – all of which are initiatives considered to be part of the global response to domestic violence by feminist and international human rights standards (Merry 2006). The WAO claims its specific aim in advocacy work as the implementation of CEDAW in Malaysia (Abdullah 2007). The WAO vision is for a society that “upholds the principles of substantive equality where all women enjoy their human rights in every sphere” and their mission is to “promote and create the respect, protection and fulfillment of equal rights for women, in particular the elimination of violence against women” (WAO 2007, p. 4).

NGOs such as the WAO are expected to recognize the contested and shifting nature of culture. They “navigate the divide between the local and the global, translating global approaches into local terms and seeking to give local groups voice in global settings” (Merry 2006 p. 104). Organizations such as the WAO appropriate global human rights frameworks, transplanting institutions and programs into local settings. However, a variety of difficulties arise through the conflicts between the global international human rights discourse and local contextualities.

The WAO’s annual statistical report for 2007 indicates that 100 women used the shelter, 75 women used face to face counseling, and 1200 women used telephone counseling that year. The WAO maintains comprehensive statistical data on reasons for seeking shelter, length of stay, where women heard about the organization, residence, age, nationality, ethnicity, marital status, education level, occupation, and income level. There is also data on types of abuse, length of time in abusive situations, relationship with abuser, characteristics of the abuser, frequency of abuse, triggering factors for abuse and triggering factors that caused women to leave (WAO 2007).

Domestic Violence in Malaysia

Domestic violence is defined as battering in the domestic sphere, or repeated and habitual physical and mental abuse (Abdullah 2007). The main comprehensive source for data on domestic violence comes from the Royal Malaysian Police force. Police statistics provide information on victim and perpetrator characteristics, relationships, locations and causes. These statistics are the most widely used by agencies for violence prevention

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activities. However, cases that not reported to the police are not captured. Since not reporting is a common phenomenon especially in the case of interpersonal violence, the true extent of domestic violence is likely largely underestimated by current national statistics. Furthermore, existing national data focuses on domestic violence in traditional family settings, including amongst children and the elderly, but does not include violence that occurs between partners outside of marriage. Data of this nature is consequently unknown (WHO 2006). The most recently available statistics of the Royal Malaysian Police force indicate that in 2007, there were 3756 total cases of domestic violence reported. However, only 62 cases (1.6%) resulted in formal charges (WAO 2007). The WHO claims that the under-reporting problem and the invisibility of domestic violence as a social problem is “mainly due to stigmatization and the belief in the sanctity and the privacy of the family and the intimacy of the marital relationship” (WHO 2006, p. 35).

The largest community survey ever conducted to determine the actual national prevalence of domestic violence was done by the WAO in 1990, involving 1221 respondents. This survey determined that approximately 39% of Malaysian women over the age of 15 had been battered by their husband or boyfriend in the previous year, yet a startling 99.95% of these cases had not resulted in a police report. No survey this comprehensive has been conducted since. The WHO currently advocates for the production of more nationally representative surveys since these provide an opportunity to measure the actual extent of violence by accessing women who would otherwise not report their case to the police (WHO 2006).

Domestic Violence Law

In Malaysia, family law matters such as domestic violence are governed by a combination of Civil, Syariah (Islamic), and Adat (customary) laws. Acts of violence against both Muslim and non-Muslims are punishable in Malaysia via the Penal Code, which subjects offences such as rape or voluntarily grievous hurt to criminal action. The Domestic Violence Act (DVA), enacted in 1994, is attached to the Penal Code and provides protection for all victims of violence in a domestic setting – including spouses, former spouses, children, incapacitated adults, and other family members – pending investigation by the Royal Malaysian Police or during criminal proceedings in court. The law provides the possibility of battered family members to file for interim protective orders (IPOs) against the batterer. This order prohibits the alleged batterer from inflicting any further domestic violence during the investigation of a violent offence or during the course of any proceedings before going to court (CEDAW 2004; Malaysia 1994; Abdullah 1995). Muslim women may also apply to the Syariah Court for a restraining order or a divorce on grounds of cruel treatment by the husband.

Intersectionality

The term “intersectionality” was coined in 1989 by Kimberle Crenshaw, who used the term to discuss issues of black women’s employment in the

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United States. The idea has since been employed in feminist work on how women are positioned in terms of their gendered status, as well as along lines of ethnicity, class, sexual orientation, colonial subjectivity, etc. Intersectionality aims to make visible the multiple positions occupied by individuals, revealing the positions that constitute everyday life and the power relations central to it. The acknowledgment of multiple interacting categories is a rich and more complex approach than those that attempt to reduce people into one category or another. The U.S.-based approach of “systemic intersectionality” considers structural power dynamics that place the human subject in systems of domination and marginalization, whereas U.K.-based “constructionist intersectionality” considers the ways in which people choose to identify themselves (Phoenix and Pattynama 2006).

Nira Yuval-Davis (2006) claims that social divisions are both constructed by and intertwined with historical conditions, with specific historical situations frequently placing some social divisions as more important than others in constructing intersectional positionality, though all these divisions do ultimately interact to create unique circumstances. Consequently, political dialogues using the intersectional approach should be led by those whose needs are judged to be the most urgent.

The intersectional ideology is placed in the context of the international women’s movement and the development initiatives that first gained momentum in the 1970s with the United Nations Decade for Women. This was when the current hegemonic framework for Women in Development (WID) was developed. WID, however, has been criticized by Third-World and postcolonial feminists for assuming homogeneity amongst female subjects and a universality of all women’s needs, not taking into account the often-times conflicting needs of different women in a racial or post-colonial context. In response to this criticism, intersectionality aims for a more complex, contextual and nuanced approach to viewing gender issues by taking into account the varying complex identities and issues that women face alongside their gendered status (Beneria & Sen 1981; Kabeer 1994).

Intersectionality has furthermore become increasingly recognized internationally as an important aspect for study in women and development. At the 58th session of the UN Commission on Human Rights in 2002 the resolution on the human rights of women stated in its first paragraph that it “recognized the importance of examining the intersection of multiple forms of discrimination, including their root causes from a gender perspective” (Resolution E, quoted by Nira Yuval-Davis).

Intersectionality is a particularly useful approach for viewing the position of women in Malaysia since this highly segregated, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious society puts women from various historical-political backgrounds in different systems of oppression and marginalization. Each of these identities on their own (gender, class, ethnicity, nationality, religion, marital status, geographical location) cannot determine the entire range of issues that an individual woman faces; all these factors interact and cause women to react to circumstances in different ways.

Ethnic and religious figures in Malaysia indicate that the ethnic composition of Malaysian citizens (23 million in total, in 2000) to be: 65 percent Malay, 26 percent Chinese, and 7 percent Indian. Ethnicity is highly correlated to religion and 65 percent of the population are Muslim, 19

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percent are Buddhist, 9 percent are Christian, 6 percent are Hindu, and 2 percent are traditional Chinese religions such as Taoism and Confucianism, along with other indigenous spiritualities (Population Census 2001). Consequently, it is interesting to note that despite the significantly larger population of Malay women in Malaysia, more Indian and Chinese women than Malay women use the WAO’s services (WAO 2007). Is this because battering happens more often in Indian and Chinese households? Or is it because different cultural attitudes towards battery cause Indian and Chinese women to be more receptive to seeking help? Or do the geographical locations of these women render them more likely to intercept media aimed at encouraging women to seek aid after physical abuse? Or do these women tend to lack resources that Malay women generally have to deal with battery in ways other than through the NGO framework? These questions, in other words, deal with issues of intersectional identities: ethnicity and customs, geographical location, and access to resources (or class).

This also appears relevant in consideration of international studies that indicate that how a community perceives partner violence frequently affects the magnitude of abuse. Communities that prohibit partner violence through legal means or in the form of moral pressure for intervention by neighbors are reported to have positive influences in combating partner violence. Availability of help in the form of shelter and family support is similarly influential (WHO 2006). Therefore, if a Malaysian woman finds herself identifying as a member of a particular community that prohibits rather than sanctions domestic violence, she may either experience less physical abuse or may choose to seek support (either through the community or through legal means) to decrease the incidence of abuse. On the other hand, the reverse may also be true and membership to some communities may instead increase incidences of domestic violence.

Research Questions

1. In what way, if at all, does the local practice of women’s rights in a Malaysian context take intersectional identities into account, particularly regarding individual women’s decisions on whether or not to report cases of domestic violence to the police?

2. Are police reports and current laws on domestic violence an effective means of combating violence against all women in Malaysia?

Methods

Study Design

I plan to use a multi-method approach to study how the WAO staff members and relevant individuals answer my research questions, gathering data through participant observation, observation and individual semi-structured interviews. My analysis will focus on predetermined themes as governed by my research questions, though I will also use extensive grounded theory and coding to inductively discover other relevant concepts.

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I hope to gain access to the WAO’s raw demographic in order to explore statistical correlations between identity markers and services used.

Subjects

Due to issues of access and ethics, I do not plan to interview battered women on their intersectional identities or their attitudes towards police reports. Instead, I will focus on staff members at the WAO and their contacts. I also hope to interview at least one member of the Royal Malaysian Police.

Procedures

Participant observation will be procedurally fairly straight-forward as it will consist of routinely showing up for work at my internship 40 hours a week at the WAO office in Selangor. For all semi-structured interviews, I will arrange by email, telephone or verbal exchange a specific meeting time after working hours in a relatively private café or library. I expect interviews to take 30 minutes to 1 hour in length. I will ask the interviewee if it is acceptable to audio-record the interview with a digital recorder and take simultaneous handwritten notes in a notebook. My interviews will be semi-structured and based on the interview guide provided in Appendix A. The benefit of the semi-structured format is that it ensures that each of my questions will be covered by each interview subject, yet there is space for flexible maneuvering, allowing the interviewee to exert some control over the interview and talk about what they find interesting and relevant (Bernard 2006).

Sampling Technique

Due to the small-scale and intensive case-study nature of this project, my sampling techniques will be primarily purposive and snowball sampling. I aim to conduct at least 20 semi-structured interviews in total and I will use purposive sampling to select key informants that fulfill predetermined functions (Bernard 2006). I wish to conduct interviews amongst long-time staff members who are well versed in the organization’s functions, history and theoretical framework and fulfill each of the various functions within the WAO: administration, research, telephone counseling, face-to-face counseling, legal counseling, lobbying, outreach, workshops, and child care (WAO 2007).

I will then use snowball sampling to allow previous interviewees to direct me to other knowledgeable staff members, members of other organizations, and hopefully a member of the Royal Malaysian Police force. The snowball technique consists of find relevant informants based on the recommendations of previous informants and is considered “an effective way to build an exhaustive sampling frame” in small populations (Bernard 2006, 193). It is also useful for finding informants who might otherwise be uninterested in my research.

Data Management

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My data will be managed in three separate computer (Microsoft Word) journals: methodological notes; descriptive/observational notes; and analytical notes (Bernard 2006). Audio recordings from my digital recorder will be uploaded onto my computer after each interview and I will then use InqScribe to assist in the process of word-for-word transcription into the descriptive journal. I will also type my handwritten notes from the interview to compare what was said with what I felt was important during the interview process. All this information will be saved in a specific folder on my computer and backed up onto an external hard drive every week.

Analytical Methods

Qualitative data in the form of interviews and participant observation field notes will be analyzed according to grounded theory, as developed by Glaser and Strauss (1967), Strauss and Corbin (1990) and iterated by Bernard (2006). I will produce transcripts of the interviews and read through samples of the text, identifying potential analytical categories/themes. Then I will pull all the data from those categories for comparison and think about how those categories are linked with one another. Finally, I will use relations amongst categories to build theoretical models and present the results of my analysis using “exemplars” or quotes from interviews that illustrate the resulting theory (Bernard 2006, p. 492).

My codes will be self-developed topical codes that I will add at the top of each journal entry, with the # sign plus a word that signifies the code. I will use some “open” coding in order to gain a more holistic sense of key concepts, but I will also follow the intermediate inductive/deductive methodology of Willems et al. (1990) and Miles and Huberman (1994) as described by Bernard (2006). My general themes will at first be derived from my literature review and questions – focusing on gender, ethnicity, religion, class, geographical location, feminism, human rights, domestic violence law, prevalence and police reports. However, I will be open to and proactive in adding more themes and sub-themes as I go along in the data analysis process. This approach is similar to that of Sharon Bong, a women’s rights activist who generated data with in-depth, semi-structured interviews with other activists, using previously established themes as well as grounded theory to develop a primarily inductive theory on faith-rights-based activism in Malaysia (Bong 2008).

If the WAO allows me to access raw statistical data on client demographic profiles, I will enter it into an Excel spreadsheet profile matrix, providing tables of cases and their associate variables (Bernard 2006). Then, upon returning to the United States, I will use the SPSS Statistical Analysis Program to run experimental analyses on whether possible correlations exist between identity categories and types of help sought (legal, shelter, counseling) through the WAO. Finally, I will compare the results of this quantitative data with the qualitative data gleaned from the interview process.

Timeline

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June – August 2010: I will use this time to continue gathering documents and articles relevant to the literature review aspect of my research. I will also prepare for my stay in Malaysia by working out budget issues, finding a place to live for the course of the internship, reading traveler’s tips and teaching myself basic conversational Malay.

September – December 2010: This is the time frame for my internship with the WAO and when I will be doing all my data collection. The first two weeks I will spend developing rapport through participant-observation. After I feel that I have established sufficient rapport and found informants I will begin conducting semi-structured interviews with staff members and other relevant individuals. I will be performing concurrent analyses during the course of data collection. By the tenth week I will have wrapped up the majority of my data collection, though I will also procure contact information from staff members in case I wish to contact them with more questions by phone or e-mail.

January – March 2011: During this time I will begin writing my methods section as well as doing any further relevant documentary research to complement my findings. By the end of the March I should have completed the majority of my analysis.

April – June 2011: I will spend the last three months working on the written component of my thesis.

Ethics

In order to guarantee fully informed consent I will verbally explain to every person with whom I interview, or have extended interactions, who I am and the basic purpose of my research study: “a senior thesis on domestic violence law in Malaysia” with more details when asked. I will immediately contact the head of the organization upon arrival in Malaysia to explain my research goals and methods, though I will not provide my exact research questions since this could skew the accuracy of my data.

I will ask for the verbal consent of interviewee(s) to audio-record them and use their words and opinions in my thesis. I will provide any interested parties a written consent form and a written copy of their interview transcript if they request it. If parties wish to make changes to the transcript, I will discuss it with them. I will guarantee subject anonymity through the use of code names (“Staff Member A” or “Police Officer Q”) in both my field notes and in the final report. Participants will be informed that they have no obligation to be a part of my research study, that they can opt out of participation at any time, and any information can be retracted or removed from my notes or final report. All information provided in confidence will remain in confidence.

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I aim to remain mindful of potential adverse effects my analysis could have on my subject participants. While I will not compensate WAO staff members by monetary means, I trust that my contribution as an unpaid intern in the organization will be sufficient. However, if I am in need of a translator, I may offer compensation for services in the form of a small sum, a meal or a culturally appropriate gift. Finally, since my presence represents the University of Washington and the discipline of Anthropology, I will strive to comport myself in a professional manner at all times.

Significance

Essentially no current data or academic literature exists on whether or not women are influenced by their own positionality or sense of belonging within a particular social class/set of classes when determining whether or not to make a police report in a case of domestic violence. Without an understanding of the identity politics associated with the decision to make or not make a police report, little headway can be made in understanding who and who does not make these reports. Women who choose not to report continue to be excluded from statistics on domestic violence and consequently their issues continue to be ignored by initiatives that combat violence.

Furthermore, evaluations on the actual effectiveness of making police reports from the standpoint of battered women across the identity spectrum are lacking. It is altogether possible that while making police reports helps some women, it does not for others. In order to understand which approaches to combating violence against women are useful to women in general and whether or not the method of filing police reports is useful for under-reported Malaysian women in specific, we must gain an understanding of who police reports help and who they do not. The goal of this research is to assist feminist human rights activists and government officials with answering the question: are police reports and current laws on domestic violence the most effective means of combating violence against all women in Malaysia? What is working, what isn’t, and what can be done better?

Appendix A – Interview Guidelines

Section 1: Perceived changes to prevalence of DV

1.) Do you think the prevalence of domestic violence in Malaysia has changed since the administration of the WAO’s 1990 community survey, which indicated that 36% of women over the age of 15 have been physically abused by their husband or boyfriend?

2.) Do you think the passing of the Domestic Violence Act in 1994 has impacted the frequency of reports, the willingness to report, or the overall prevalence of domestic violence in Malaysia?

Section 2: Barriers to reporting

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1.) Why is domestic violence so consistently under-reported to the police?

2.) What kinds of barriers do you think exist to women making reports?

3.) Which reasons do you think women tend to choose when deciding whether to report or not?

Section 3: Relationships with intersectionality

1.) Do you think a woman’s identity, defined in terms of her ethnicity, class, geographical location, marital status, and religious background, is related to her decision to make a police report?

2.) Do you think women from different backgrounds seek different types of solutions in cases of domestic violence?

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