Violence against Palestinian Women

Resumo

The current study explored violence against women in the Palestinian society as a multidimensional phenomenon. An index of a 60-item scale (developed by the researcher) used to measure violence against women was administrated to three hundred and sixty-three randomly selected married women at Jericho & Al-Aghwar governate. The research revealed that Palestinian women are still subject to many forms of violence mostly, physical, psychological and sexual. Of the Palestinian women surveyed, seven in ten women (74.4%) reported partner violence. The study concluded that it is difficult for a battered woman to seek redress or help with any guarantee of privacy. Furthermore, the under-reporting of violence is widespread in a society of patriarchal patterns of kinship, legalized inequality, social subordination and ingrained male dominance. The implications of the findings and probabilities for future empirical research are briefly discussed.