Religion, Conscience, and Abusive Behaviour: Understanding the Role of Faith and Spirituality in the Deterrence of Intimate Partner Violence in Rural Ethiopia

Romina Istratii, SOAS, University of London

Research Grant, 2019

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The current project was informed by previous long-term research in Ethiopia (Istratii 2019). Year-long, theology-informed anthropological research on conjugal abuse in the local religiocultural system revealed concrete mechanisms through which theology, clergy discourses, and personal faith intertwined with sociocultural norms, gender ideals, and psychological states and dynamics to maintain harmful situations affecting the conjugal relationship.

These findings simultaneously demonstrated the resourcefulness of theology-informed religious discourse to serve as a remedial tool for certain forms of abuse and the need to integrate psychological factors in the analysis of and response to conjugal abuse. 

The current project sought to build on this research and apply it to the alleviation of conjugal abuse in Ethiopia. The study (a) investigated intersections of religious discourse and spirituality with human conscience and abusive behaviour engaging a larger number of communities in Ethiopia and working primarily with the male population; and (b) incorporated a series of culturally adapted participatory workshops with clergy to explore their understandings of conjugal abuse in their communities and the nature and influence of their own mediation in conjugal conflict, as well as to train them to respond with more preparedness to conjugal abuse.

The study engaging the male population integrated an innovative methodological approach by combining an oral and interactive survey with visual methods, showcasing drawings of conjugal abuse in Ethiopia and invoking participants’ reactions and thoughts about the same.

[The clergy] believed that religious teachings were influential in the community and could help in the deterrence and alleviation of conjugal abuse in the community.

The trainings with clergy combined presentations by equipped trainers with interactive, group, and pair activities to elicit discussions around conjugal abuse and mediation practices among the clergy. These activities were integrated in the larger UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)–funded Project dldl/ድልድል (https://projectdldl.org/).

Results from (a): The male participants found the visual methods approach of the study to be pioneering and effective in leading them to reflect on and reconsider their own attitudes towards conjugal abuse.

The study showed that the male participants had some understanding about women’s abuse in marital relationships. In their minds, abuse related more to physical violence (beating), an unequal division of labor, and an unequal power dynamic in the relationship, and to a lesser degree to sexual violence.

An important finding was participants’ belief that the Orthodox Tewahedo faith and church had an important role to play in battling women’s abuse, although it proved challenging to explore the precise mechanisms by which religious norms and values influenced male rationalizations of conjugal abuse as the participants did not directly or explicitly relate the two.

Policy implications: Men need to be engaged more substantively in awareness-raising campaigns about conjugal abuse, and their involvement could be facilitated by the church. It is likely that religious values could be invoked to condemn abusive behavior and motivate more positive male role models in marriage, but this merits further research.

Results from (b): The participatory workshops with clergy resulted in the training of 155 clergy of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church. The participatory workshops showed that while the clergy tried to respond to conjugal abuse in the best ways they could, they often lacked the theological acumen and means to support victims required to mediate such situations effectively.

They believed that religious teachings were influential in the community and could help in the deterrence and alleviation of conjugal abuse in the community. The training content included explanations of the church’s teachings on gender relations, marriage and domestic abuse, the psychological states of victims and perpetrators in situations of domestic violence, how to respond with confidentiality and victim safety in mind, and the legal framework and referral services available in the country to communicate to victims and survivors.

All the training sections were found to be useful by the participants, but they reported that the most useful section was the combination of a theological and a scientific perspective to build clergy preparedness.

Policy implications: Clergy-centered programs need to engage with theological teachings more substantively to ensure that they are culturally appropriate. The contribution of theological components could be more robustly evaluated to differentiate its effects from effects of other components in the training content.