Women in Caribbean, Latin America subject to widespread sexual violence: WHO

Jan 31, 2013 News

Intimate partner and sexual violence against women is widespread in parts of Latin America and the Caribbean, according to a report published by PAHO, the Pan American Health Organization, a regional branch of the World Health Organization.
The report is titled “Violence against Women in Latin America and the Caribbean – a Comparative Analysis of Population-based Data from 12 countries”. It is actually a joint effort between the Pan American Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the United States – the CDC.
Alessandra Guedes, Regional Advisor on Intra-Family Violence at PAHO said. “We found, first of all, that unfortunately violence against women is widespread in the 12 countries that we studied and that were included in this report.
“We found that between 17 percent of men and 53 percent of women interviewed reported having suffered physical or sexual violence by intimate partner. In seven of the 12 countries, more than one in four women reported such violence.”
Adding that the organization also found very high levels of emotional abuse by a partner ranging from 17 to 48 percent of women who were interviewed. He said the key message is that this is unfortunately a very widespread phenomenon that affects a large proportion of women in the region.
These reports also ask women retrospectively about their experiences with physical and sexual abuse prior to the age of 15.
In all of the countries studied, women who grew up in households where their mother was beaten by her partner had a greater risk of suffering partner violence themselves as adults. “We also found that women who suffered physical or sexual abuse in childhood reported experiencing partner violence in adulthood twice as much as those who did not suffer violence in childhood.”
The organisation also found that children living in households where women suffer partner violence were significantly more likely than other children to be punished with hitting, beating, spanking – in other words, with harsher disciplinary practices.