Intimate partner violence in the Kingdom of Bahrain

Abstract

Background and Objectives: Women can experience physical abuse, mental, sexual abuse, or even controlling behavior throughout their partnership lifecycle, which must be prevented and curtailed at the early stages. Therefore, this study explores intimate partner violence (IPV) prevalence among Bahraini women, predictors of IPV, and reliability of the Women Abuse Screening Tool (WAST) questionnaire in IPV against women. Methods: The current prospective cross-sectional study included 810 Bahraini women meeting the inclusion criteria, who were asked to share any IPV experience witnessed during their marriage. A questionnaire comprising of 25 questions, including those of WAST-short and WAST-long, was used. The reliability of the screening tools was determined using Cronbach's alpha test. Results: The prevalence of IPV among Bahraini was found to be 71.11%. During pregnancy, husbands' violent behavior towards family members, relatives or friends; escalation of violence; substance abuse; general antisocial behavior; criminality and mental health issues were significantly associated with IPV ( P < 0.001). Relationship problems with the husband, individual behavior of women supporting violence, and history of violence from other family members were significantly associated with abuse ( P < 0.05). WAST-short was shown to have a sensitivity of 100% and specificity of 18.8%. Cronbach's alpha coefficient for the full questionnaire, WAST-short and WAST-long were 0.82, 0.76, and 0.84, respectively. Conclusion: Determination of IPV is an outcome of the victim and abuser's psychosocial behaviors, and WAST-short must be complemented with WAST-long for accurate findings. Concerted efforts towards anger management and rehabilitation of the victim and abuser are imperative to end the IPV cycle.

Homelessness and Gender Inequality in the Middle East and North Africa Region

“…Regarding women aged 15 years and older who experienced physical or sexual violence from an intimate partner, the data indicate that Palestine and Iran's women experienced the highest rates of violence at 17.1 and 15.2 %, respectively in 2018 (SDG, 2022). Although there is no reliable data on this for most of the countries in the region, some evidence showed that 42-58 % of women in the MENA region experience IPV (Al Ubaidi et al, 2021). While some countries have laws prohibiting violence against women, there is a noted gap in laws regarding marital rape (Danon & Collins, 2020).…”