The elimination of IPV needs the work from everyone in the intimate relationships

Lixian Huang

Nov 8th. 2015

Week 8 Blog

ASA 2, A03

Yeon-Shim Lee and Linda Hadeed in the article “Intimate partner violence among Asian immigrant communities” examine critically the popularity of IPV among Asian immigrants. With an Asian background myself, IPV is familiar to me. In my point of view, IPV is a historical remain, which, in ancient Asia, was justified with a term “Family Disciplines”. According to “Family Disciplines”, males should dominate the whole family and the older the males, the more powerful they were in the family. Such “Family Disciplines” were written by the male ancestors in the family and passed one generation to another for the juniors to obey. Once someone in the family challenged the disciplines, the male dominators had the power to beat such person himself or with the help of others. If the poor person was beaten too severely to recover and died, the male dominator would not be blamed for the death. The “Family Disciplines” were so popular in Asian that even though the globalization has weaken such concept, some Asian, especially those in undeveloped areas, still believe in the Disciplines. The elimination of IPV needs not only the “dominators” in intimate relationships to respect the others, but also the others to respect themselves and to say NO to IPV.

Question: How can we spread the concept that women should stand for themselves and against the IPV?