Human Rights Enculturation and Conceptualizations of Abuse

Jeffrey Swindle, Harvard University

I contend that human rights organizations’ initiatives to denounce gender violence vary in their portrayal of physical versus sexual forms of intimate partner violence, with sweeping ramifications. To develop the argument, I combine national surveys from Malawi between 2004 and 2016 with new measures of how anti-violence cultural scripts are shared in education curricula, media, and foreign aid projects. Exposure to anti-violence scripts is positively associated with subsequent rejections of physical intimate partner violence, but only when content is explicit in this regard. Intermediaries carrying out human rights initiatives, however, often interpret sexual refusal within heterosexual marriage as a form of abuse given norms about relationships duties. When this happens, people’s exposure to such messaging is negatively associated with their support for women’s refusal to have sex with their spouse. Understanding how people are enculturated to human rights messages, including what counts as “abuse,” is critical for human rights organizations.