Bui Hien Dung said she didn’t know why her husband demanded she have an abortion, why he forced her to pay his gambling debts and why he beat her so often that she finally took their son and fled to a shelter for battered women.
But what really confused her, she said, was why the shelter staff told her husband where she was staying and pressured her to reconcile with him even after he threatened to kill her.
“I don’t understand,” Dung said in an interview at the offices of Paz y Desarrollo, a Spanish humanitarian group. “I showed the shelter all the police reports, the X-rays of my head showing he had beaten me. I don’t understand why they still advised me to go back.”
Vietnam’s government and international organizations have taken substantial steps toward addressing the country’s problem of domestic violence over the past year.
But efforts to prevent domestic violence are clashing with Vietnam’s traditional Confucian culture, in which the ideal of the harmonious family is often valued higher than the rights of individuals. Women face pressure to preserve their families by staying with abusive husbands.
It is hard to put a number on the extent of domestic abuse in Vietnam. The country’s Center for Applied Sciences in Gender and Adolescents, citing government figures, said it was a factor in 187,000 divorces from 2000 to 2005. Police figures show two to three people a day die as a result of domestic violence.
Vietnam put a new law preventing domestic violence into force in July, aiming to establish a reference system for the problem so that all the relevant social service and justice agencies can collaborate.
Together with foreign non-governmental and UN agencies, the government launched an awareness campaign last month.
“The Vietnamese government and those responsible for social policy have recognized that there is a problem of domestic violence, and that is the first step,” said Elena Ganan, a program officer at Paz y Desarrollo.
When victims seek help, they usually turn first to the Women’s Union, a national, government-affiliated organization. Local chapters are often highly active and genuinely concerned with women’s welfare.
“The law clearly regulates what kind of conduct will be considered domestic violence and what the punishment will be,” said Cao Thi Hong Van, head of the union’s Department of Social and Family Matters.
She said domestic violence often fell through the cracks between different laws.
But gender experts say Women’s Union staff share widespread prejudices that reinforce women’s vulnerability.
“They tend to choose reconciliation as the only route for women to follow,” Ganan said.
Battered women are advised “to give him another chance, think what you’ve been doing wrong — the man is violent because [she] did something. And that is a very old-fashioned approach,” she said.
Last year, the Women’s Union established the country’s first anonymous shelter for victims of domestic violence, the Peace Center in Hanoi. But while first-world countries keep the addresses of such places secret to prevent stalking by aggrieved spouses, the center’s address has been broadcast repeatedly by the Vietnamese media.
The Women’s Union follows legal guidelines recommending that women seeking divorce go through three attempts to reconcile with their husbands, supervised by police and social welfare staff.
Dung had only attended two reconciliation meetings, so the center sent her back for another try.
Meanwhile, the national awareness campaign against domestic violence has been assigned to the Ministry of Sports, Tourism, and Culture. Foreign NGOs had agreed with the government that the campaign’s signature image would show a newlywed couple, the bride displaying a bruised eye behind her white veil.
The day before the campaign launch, the ministry announced the image could not be used, as it was deemed to conflict with the national goal of promoting happy families.
In Dung’s case, a happy family was never an option. A cafeteria worker at a high school, Dung became pregnant after an affair with the school’s vice principal and was rejected by her own family.
The man demanded that she have an abortion seven months into her pregnancy. She refused, and after the birth, he relented and married her for the sake of the child’s legitimacy.
Dung’s husband and his grown children from an earlier marriage beat her in disputes over money. Dung says that when her husband learned she had filed for divorce, he threatened that if she demanded a share of his property, he would hire a hitman to kill her.
After fleeing to the center failed, Dung found a new place to live, which she has kept secret.
Some gender experts in Vietnam say Western techniques for preventing domestic violence by helping women flee to new lives do not work well in Vietnam’s tight-knit society, where information spreads rapidly and social connections are indispensable. They say Vietnamese efforts to stop domestic violence should focus on bringing witnesses and advocates to help women within their communities.
Dung had no other choice. Her family had cut her off, and her husband was a prominent member of the community.
Dung said she was not surprised a man with a high level of education would prove violent.
“My husband is just a special case,” she said. “Even a normal person with no education would never do the things he did to me.”
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