Domestic Violence in Urban American Muslim Women

Background

The U.S. Department of Justice defines domestic violence (DV) as a pattern of abusive behavior in any relationship that is used by a person to gain or maintain control over an intimate partner or family member. The abuse can be physical, verbal, or emotional. The Nonfatal Domestic Violence Report 2003–2012 by the U.S. Department of Justice reports one in three American women have experienced physical DV and half (48.4%) report psychological or emotional abuse (Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 2011).

There are 3.45 million American Muslims, 58% of whom are first-generation immigrants. They are ethnically and culturally diverse with South Asians (India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh), Arabs, North Africans, and African Americans being the largest groups. Converts to Islam make up 20% of the American Muslim population. American Muslims vary a great deal in education, socioeconomic status (SES), political beliefs and degree of adherence to Islam (Pew Research Center Report, 2017).

We did a LexisNexis review (Appendix A) for news stories on DV across all English language media outlets in the U.S. between 2006 and 2016 and found 121,696 stories on domestic violence of which 11,870 (9.7%) were related to Muslims. Since Muslims are approximately 1% of the U.S. population, the LexisNexis data shows a ten-fold overrepresentation of Muslims in media stories on DV than would be expected based on their percentage in the U.S. population. This disproportionality implies that either American Muslim women face a much higher risk of domestic abuse in comparison to American women as a whole or that there is a media perception of increased risk.

The two best quantitative studies on DV in American Muslim women date back to the 1990s and show that rates of DV in American Muslim women are not higher than in the general population. In 1995, Kulwicki and Miller studied 500 Arab women (98% of whom were Muslim) in the Dearborn, Michigan area, and showed that 18 to 20 percent of the women had experienced spousal abuse. In 1993, the North American Council for American Women (as cited in AlKhateeb, 1999) surveyed 63 Muslim community workers, leaders, and individuals in a study that showed physical violence against Muslim women and children to be around 10%. The survey did not query about verbal and emotional abuse. In 2007, Sound Vision conducted an online survey of 241 Muslims which showed 40% of the respondents had experienced verbal abuse and 31.5% physical abuse within their homes. However, because this survey had self-selection bias, it is hard to extrapolate the results.

A comprehensive review of literature on domestic violence in American Muslim women show most studies of DV in American Muslims are narrative driven and qualitative and do not offer conclusive data on rates of DV in this group. There are studies on Islamic interpretation of wife battery (Faith Trust Institute, 2007; Ammar, 2007), narratives of Muslim women leaving abusive relationships (Hassouneh-Phillips, 2001), and on women’s experiences with the police (Ammar et al., 2013). Abu-Ras (2007) examined the correlation between cultural beliefs and social services utilization by Muslim women facing DV and Kulwicki and colleagues (2014) have looked at DV, depression, and service utilization among Arab American women. More recently, Crabtree-Nelson and colleagues (2018) have looked at the experiences of Arab American women with intimate partner violence. There is, however, no recent study of rates of domestic violence in American Muslim women and any correlation with the age, educational achievement, income, or employment status of the women involved.

Certain academic frameworks offer a lens as to why domestic violence might be higher among American Muslim women. Almost two thirds (58%; Pew Research Center Report, 2017) of American Muslim are immigrants, mostly from countries with a patriarchal social structure where varying degrees of emotional, verbal, and physical abuse of women may be culturally acceptable and not considered out of bounds (Bhandari and Sabri, 2018; Ayyub, 2000; Adam and Schewe, 2007; and Johnson, 2015). Likewise, many Muslim immigrant men come from conflict-afflicted regions like Somalia, Syria, and Iraq where they may have experienced atrocities that create stressors which may translate into abuse toward the women in their families (Ward, 2002; Hynes et al., 2004; Horn. et al., 2014; Clark et al., 2010; and Gurges et al., 2017). The Culture of Violence theory (Wolfgang & Ferracuti, 1967) argues that within large, complex, and pluralistic societies, subgroups learn and develop specialized norms and values through differential associations that justify the use of DV beyond that which is regarded as “normative” for the society as a whole.

In the absence of reliable data on the prevalence of DV and its drivers, and in the presence of certain academic frameworks indicating that the rate of DV among American Muslim women may be higher than in the general U.S. population, it is critical to accurately gauge the rate of domestic violence among Muslim women in America. It is not possible to develop an effective plan to allocate resources to alleviate this issue in the diverse American Muslim community without this data. Lack of this information also makes it difficult to discern whether disproportionate representation of American Muslim women in the U.S. media stories on DV is a reflection of their reality or part of a media narrative that asserts that misogyny and violence are inherent parts of the Islamic religion. The data our study seeks to gather is therefore a critical prerequisite for ameliorating DV in the American Muslim community and for countering this possible aspect of Islamophobia in the U.S. media.

Study Goals

The overall goals of our study were to assess the prevalence of DV and the educational and socioeconomic factors associated with it, in mosque-going American Muslim women and to compare these statistics with those of American women as a whole. More specifically, our goals were to:

1. 1.

   Estimate the rate of DV among mosque-going American Muslim women in greater Boston.

2. 2.

   To examine the educational, immigration, employment, and socioeconomic status as well as domestic living arrangements of our study participants for possible correlation of these variables with DV in this group.

3. 3.

   Compare the DV rate in our study group with that in American women as a whole while controlling for education and SES. We used the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (AddHealth) database as a surrogate for DV rates in overall American society as well as education and socioeconomic status of DV victims.

Methods

Results

A total of 332 women from five mosques in the greater Boston area participated in the study. About 10% of women approached by study team members either refused to participate or did not complete the survey.

The largest ethnic origin in the study population was South Asian (39%), followed by African American (19%), Arab (19%), and White (17%), with the remaining 6% being Hispanic or other. This reflects the ethnographic makeup of Muslims in greater Boston as seen in the study ISBCC had commissioned in 2014. The women in our study are diverse in their countries of birth with the largest group being American-born (26%), but significant percentages born in South Asia (24%), the Middle East (17%), Middle Africa (13%), and North Africa (10%) are present as well. (see Table V)

Thirty-six percent of women in our study reported some form of domestic abuse, in comparison with 33% in the AddHealth database. In total, 119 unique women in our study reported 165 incidents of some form of abuse (Table VI).

Of the incident reports, 115 (68%) were emotional or verbal abuse and 54 (32%) were physical abuse. Fifty (42%) women in our study had faced both. In AddHealth data, of 907 incidents reported, 526 (58%) were emotional or verbal abuse and 381 (42%) were physical abuse.

Domestic violence tends to be used interchangeably with intimate partner violence, but we found that parents, siblings, in-laws, and close friends were perpetrators in 37% of the incidents in our study. Being married or in a relationship protected against all types of DV (RR: 0.58, P: 0.000 for emotional/verbal and RR:0.42, P:0.001 for physical abuse). This could not be compared to the AddHealth dataset, because AddHealth did not track marital status. A breakdown of incidents of domestic violence by relationship with the perpetrator is shown in Table VII.

The AddHealth dataset shows a clear trend of increasing income and education being protective factors against domestic violence. This is not echoed in our data. We used Poisson coefficient transformed to relative risk (RR) for this analysis. In our study, the single variable with the highest risk for both emotional/verbal (RR: 1.43, P:0.042) and physical abuse (RR:1.90, P:0.02) was the educational status of high school only (HS). The average age of the HS/GED participants who were being physically abused (N=13) is 24.46, with the youngest being 18 and the oldest being 40. Their reported physical abusers in the nuclear family include spouse (n=1), father (n=5), mother (n=7), brother (n=5), and sister (n=4).

An analysis of employment status of victims of DV showed women with full-time work (RR:1.45, P:0.012) and those who were students (RR:1.47, P:0.024) were at risk for emotional/verbal abuse; and students were at highest risk for physical abuse (RR:1.77, P:0.041). Women with household incomes less than 20K and those who preferred not to share their financial status faced less emotional/verbal trauma (RR:0.38, P:0.041 for prefer not to say and RR: 0.51, P:0.039 for less than 20K). An analysis of which two-variable combinations increased the risk of DV showed that women who work full time and have incomes of more than 50K report more emotional and verbal distress (RR:1.49, P: 0.012). We did not see a difference in DV between women born in the U.S. and women born abroad, nor a higher rate of DV among Muslim women immigrating from war-torn countries, although the sample of immigrants from war-torn countries was small in our study.

Discussion

We set out to estimate the rate of domestic violence in Muslim women in greater Boston. We found it to be similar to the DV prevalence among AddHealth participants and lower than the U.S. Department of Justice numbers for all American women. Our study indicates that the American Muslim community in greater Boston struggles with the same scale of domestic violence as the rest of the U.S. We need more data from more regions of the U.S., but it is safe to say our study results, in combination with the work done by Kulwicki and colleagues in Michigan in the 1990s, suggest that disproportionate representation of American Muslims in DV focused news stories may reflect an Islamophobic bias in the U.S. media. Despite its limitations, our data offers a foundation to counter this media bias.

Increasing education, income, and employment status are protective factors against DV for the women in the AddHealth database. Our study did not reflect these results. About 70% of participants in both AddHealth and our study had a college degree. Thirty-seven percent of all American women have college degrees (Statista.com, 2020), so both AddHealth and our study are not representative in this variable. Our study is, however, representative of the educational status of Muslims in the greater Boston area, since data collected by Islamic Society of Boston Community Center (ISBCC) shows Muslims in greater Boston have college education rates that are higher than the national average for this variable.

Our outcomes show marriage as a protective factor against abuse, with parents and siblings perpetrating significant proportion of incidents reported (Table VII). Non-Intimate Partner Violence (NIPV) is often not studied in DV studies and needs further work. It also implies that civic and mosque-based efforts to reduce DV need a whole family rather than intimate partner focus.

We report verbal and emotional abuse to be higher in fully employed women with higher than 50K in household income. In AddHealth data, full time employment and higher income are protective against physical abuse. AddHealth does not ask questions about verbal abuse. We need further study to determine if there are specific reasons why higher income women with full-time jobs in our study population experience higher levels of emotional and verbal abuse or if AddHealth data underreports verbal abuse because it does not screen for it specifically.

High school students have the highest rates of being physically abused in our study. A more granular examination of this sub-population reveals that these are mostly young high school students who are being hit by parents or siblings. This goes back to our earlier assertion that measures to ameliorate DV need to expand beyond husbands and intimate partners and involve the whole nuclear and extended family.

A major limitation of our study is the need for women to be able to read and understand English to take the study-survey. The women in our study, therefore, are more likely to be integrated into the mainstream American society compared to non-English speaking women. There is a need for follow-up studies with questionnaires in a variety of languages to render a more complete picture.

We administered the questionnaires exclusively in the greater Boston area. Boston is an metropolitan city with higher than national rates of education which may not be representative of Muslim women in non-urban parts of the U.S. Additionally, while our sample size of 332 is relatively large for a study of DV in Muslim women, 74% of the responses came from the two urban mosques in the study. Further studies focused on other urban centers and more suburban data can supplement the results of our study.

Underreporting of DV is a known limitation of work on this issue. The mosque is a place of community, and for some women, revealing their experience of domestic abuse even with privacy and anonymity reflects on their community as a whole. Most mosque leaders in the U.S. are men, and though all the questionnaire administrators were women, the fact that they were in a place run by men may promote underreporting. It would therefore be useful to come up with study designs that allow DV data to be gathered in places other than the mosque for American Muslim women.

Conclusion

Our study suggests Muslim women in greater Boston face similar or lower domestic violence rates than their non-Muslim peers. In comparison with the American population, rates of physical abuse in Muslim women in greater Boston are lower, making verbal/emotional abuse the dominant form of aggression in our study population.

Rising levels of education and income protect women against domestic violence in a linear relationship in the AddHealth dataset. This trend is not seen in our study; instead, marriage was shown to be a protective factor against abuse. Our study shows perpetrators of abuse are more likely to be parents and siblings than spouses and intimate partners, unlike trends seen in the general population. While more research is needed to explore the nuances of this finding, our data suggests ameliorative interventions need to involve the whole family rather than intimate partners only. Our study was not able to reach non-English speaking women and may not be representative of Muslim populations in non-urban America. However, our study provides a first of its kind, relatively large snapshot of domestic violence in both urban and suburban mosque-going Muslim women in a major American city with a sizeable Muslim population.