Webinar on Faith, Human Psychology and Domestic Violence: Some Ethnographic Insights

How do religious beliefs, human psychology and domestic violence intersect? Numerous fields offer directions in thinking about this relationship, including the well-established field of spiritual psychotherapy in North America, studies in mental health and spirituality, research that links religious beliefs to attachment models, personality disorders and domestic violence, and studies that look at the role of religious values or Church attendance in marriage, primarily emanating from North America. And yet these three parameters are rarely addressed together in domestic violence interventions. More importantly, their study is disproportionately informed by the contexts and faith traditions of western societies and are not applied to or informed by ethnographic realities in non-western religious communities. There is a need to build evidence around how religious beliefs combine with personal and interpersonal, psychological parameters to influence human behaviour in intimate partnerships and responses to domestic violence in diverse religious communities.

This webinar will focus on key insights from a year-long theology-informed ethnographic study of domestic violence with an Ethiopian Orthodox Täwahәdo community in the countryside of Northern Ethiopia which embedded the study of domestic violence realities and attitudes in the local religio-cultural worldview and participants’ lived realities and life stories. The study demonstrated clear associations between individual rationalisations and attitudes towards intimate partner abuse and the participants’ belief systems, as well as the potential of Orthodox theology to counter perceptions of abusiveness conducive to its tolerance by a majority of the population. A closer look at the influence of spiritual parameters on conjugal behaviour suggested that faith was influential in many men’s and women’s married lives, although it was experienced differently and with different implications for each. The study also pointed to interconnections with psychological parameters of violence, suggesting the need for an integrated alleviation approach.

The PhD study was completed at SOAS University of London in 2018 and has since evolved in the project “Religion, Conscience and Abusive Behaviour: Understanding the Role of Faith and Spirituality in the Deterrence of Intimate Partner Violence in Rural Ethiopia” funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation (Research Grant 2019).

About Speaker:

Dr Romina Istratii is Research Associate to the Department of Development Studies and the Centre of World Christianity at SOAS University of London. She previously served as Senior Teaching Fellow to the School of History, Religions and Philosophies, teaching on Religions and Development in sub-Saharan Africa. She is a critical international development thinker and practitioner with decade-long experience in exploring and developing cosmology-sensitive and people-centred methodologies and approaches for analysing and addressing issues with gender dimensions in non-western religious societies. Since 2016, she has been working to decolonise research in domestic violence in the context of Africa, pointing to the need for grounding the analysis of domestic violence in the conceptual repertoires and languages of local communities and integrating better gender-sensitive and psychological theories of domestic violence. Dr Istratii’s research and approach is presented in her monograph Adapting Gender and Development to Local Religious Contexts: A Decolonial Approach to Domestic Violence in Ethiopia

This webinar series is organised by Partner Violence and Mental Health Network, funded by World University Network. Further information can be found here

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