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Background
In July 2021, CARE Bangladesh and its local partner GBK launched the Prohori project to prevent intimate partner violence (IPV) and respond to survivors of violence through safe spaces, behavior change communication and capacity building approaches that address gender norms and practices. The 12-month project was generously funded by Voices Against Violence: The Gender-Based Violence Global Initiative, a public-private partnership led by Vital Voices and funded with support from the State Department and the Avon Foundation. The project targeted female garment workers and their male partners in Gazipur District, and female agricultural workers and their male partners in Rangpur District. CARE implemented activities in four locations in Gazipur, a peri-urban industrial area in central Bangladesh, and GBK implemented activities in five locations in Rangpur in northwest Bangladesh.
Prohori used a blend of community-based, participatory approaches to prevent IPV, improve IPV survivors’ linkages to post-GBV referral services, and strengthen the capacity of first responders to respond empathetically to people who disclose they have experienced GBV. The project built 9 Women and Girls’ Safe Solidarity Spaces (WSSSs, adding to the 18 that CARE had already established in Gazipur) and strengthened GBV services through capacity building and referral service coordination.
Bangladesh is a conservative, traditional country with gender-related norms, attitudes and practices handed down over generations. Open discussion, equitable decision-making, and joint problem-solving by husbands and wives is not common. Women are socialized to be submissive to men and to obey their decisions, limiting their autonomy and agency. In most homes, women disproportionately assume unpaid labor in the home such as cooking, cleaning and childcare. Women’s lower social status is reinforced and reproduced by low literacy, rural residence, lack of economic independence, abusive in-laws, and disempowering sociocultural practices such as child marriage and dowry, handed down through generations.
Especially in marriage, masculinity is attributed to men’s power over their wives. Marital disagreements are often used to demonstrate masculinity by reassertion of power over wives, often through IPV. Men who try to transgress these norms through more equitable power-sharing, decision-making, and tasksharing with their wives risk ridicule and social stigma by their families and the community. This constrains men from exploring non-violent and more gender-equitable expressions of masculinity. Transforming practices of IPV requires commitment and action from both partners, yet many couples in Bangladesh lack the space to communicate openly and share expectations, since most women live in extended families, women are often much younger than their husbands, and prevailing gender norms dictate that women defer to male authority.
It has always been seen that during any natural disaster, public health emergency, war, or other emergency, women and girls face more gender discrimination, exploitation and violence than in normal times. The COVID-19 pandemic creates unique challenges with regard to the provision of GBV prevention, response and risk mitigation programming, as the risks of GBV have increased, yet the process of responding is more challenging than ever—both in terms of the ability of survivors to seek support, as well as capacity of actors on the ground to respond.
Bangladesh was hit hard by the COVID-19 epidemic in 2020, exacerbating IPV and reducing survivors’ access to services. This created what some have called an “epidemic within an epidemic” of IPV. Before the outbreak, Bangladesh already had some of the highest rates of IPV in the world, with 2 out of every 3 Bangladeshi women experiencing IPV in their lifetime. COVID-19 further entrenched Bangladesh’s patriarchal structures by disproportionately burdening women with additional unpaid work and caregiving.
Lockdowns caused further constraints on women’s mobility, autonomy, and decision-making power, which gave unequal power to their intimate partners in many cases. Manusher Jonno Foundation (MJF) conducted a series of surveys during the first lockdown of 2020. They found that 84% of new victims of violence were women, and that 97.4% of this violence was domestic violence.12 Additionally, 34% of the total female and child GBV survivors had never been sexually assaulted before the pandemic. Many of the women who sought support had experienced IPV from immediate family members. Adult survivors highlighted that loss of employment, delay in wages, and loss of economic independence have increased during the pandemic. Rangpur, in particular, is one of the districts with the highest prevalence of child, early and forced marriage, (CEFM) which increases the exposure of girls and adolescents to IPV.
UNFPA and the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics’ Violence Against Women Survey 2015 found that 73% of ever-married women in Bangladesh experienced any kind violence by their current husband, 55% reported any type of violence in the past 12 months, and 50% reported physical violence in their lifetime.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), IPV can lead to a range of outcomes not limited to homicide, suicide, disability, depression, anxiety, PTSD, substance abuse, miscarriage, low birth-weight babies, HIV and other STIs, traumatic fistula, and chronic pain. It can also lead to women and girls missing school and work, costing countries up to 4% of GDP per year.
CARE conducted a Rapid Situation Analysis in Bangladesh prior to the project in April 2020 to assess the impact of COVID-19 on female factory workers in the Ready-Made Garment sector. Eighty-eight percent of respondents said they are experiencing more conflict and tension in their household than before the pandemic. The Analysis found that up to 9% of women factory workers not only experience IPV from their partners, but also in the workplace male supervisors, co-workers, and local officials. Women highlighted that their unpaid household work had increased by an average of 52.5%, and also reported a loss of employment, delay of wages, reductions in household income, needing to take on new loans, and a loss of economic independence. Eighty-eight percent of women reported that they are facing family conflicts more now than before the pandemic. Only 53% respondents who experienced GBV reported that they sought support. The rapid analysis suggests that most women only sought support from immediate family members. This indicates that GBV services may not be known, functional, accessible, reliable, trusted, and/or useful to women.
CARE found there is a widespread lack of services for GBV survivors in Bangladesh, particularly in rural villages. What services exist are typically not survivor-centered or are of poor quality. Key gaps in services include an absence of health and psychosocial services, legal and counselling support, shelter and safe spaces, and social and economic support for reintegration. Most services are available at only the district level, which are often inaccessible for rural women who may not have permission to leave the home, money for transport, or time away from household duties to seek services. In the absence of these services, women often must rely on local mediation by community leaders and elites who often fail to provide justice to women. Most women do not understand the impact of IPV on their long-term health and psychological well-being, or that of their children, and therefore only seek immediate medical support for injuries.
The Prohori project complemented CARE’s ongoing COVID-19 response activities such as providing subsistence allowance, water and sanitation services and basic medical care including facilitation of COVID-19 testing and public, facility-based isolation centers. The project also complemented CARE’s work on economic empowerment of women and the prevention of CEFM through the Tipping Point Initiative.
Central to CARE’s approach was the development of women’s agency, allowing them to critically look at IPV, its root causes and consequences to their own well-being and social well-being; and develop the inner strength to reject violence and/or seek services. The project created safe spaces for women that not only provided opportunities to offer information and services, but also provided a venue where they could enjoy private time, unwind from stress, share their experiences with peers, and use the space for self-reflection or overcoming trauma. This kind of safe space for women was almost non-existent in Gazipur and Rangpur prior to the project.