Risto Harma
Tuesday 17th November, 2009, 12:02am

I agree with Fatima that the methods and results of violence against women require documenting. There is often a great deal of reference to violence against women and other types deprivation, but without clear explanations of what the consequences are for individuals and society. Reporting in generalised ways leads to the perpetuation of severe injustices by giving the impression through omission of the relevent facts that the situation may not be that bad. The often repeated word "resilience" in relation to the way "the poor" deal with extreme deprivation gives the false impression that while bad, the situation is survivable, and may even get better. It appears to be missed that an awful lot of "the poor" die, they don't "resilienate" in the face of extreme poverty.

This lack of careful documentation is something I have noticed for sometime, it falls under the heading of qualitative research. It maybe that less qualitative research is done due to the costs in terms of time and money required to do it properly, hence leading to a dependence on survey research. Survey research by its nature tends towards pre-decided topics, therefore making it unlikely for researchers to uncover unexpected issues, which is clearly an issue for external researchers coming into different cultural contexts who therefore cannot anticipate certain types of attitudes and behaviours. Survey results may therefore result to the drawing in conclusions that seem logical to the external researcher, but are wrong due to the existence of an undiscovered local set of behaviours linked to a locally held set of beliefs. For an HIV/AIDS prevention programme in Sub-Saharan Africa, what external programme staff could anticipate the specific beliefs that lead to widow "cleansing" practices, or the mutations of the practice under the pressure of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and unequal gender relations that has now lead to the existence of "professional" cleansers, (see work by Nancy Luke). Or for social deprivation in the United States, it will be difficult to understand the contexrt without knowing about abstacles to poverty eradication caused by the widespread belief that the poor are responsible for their situation, or the belief that healthcare is best provided by the market. Note that "belief" is defined here as an untested theory or set of assumptions and resulting conclusions, whether normative or empirically focused, which is nevertheless seen as valuable and/or true.

Also without proper documentation of such issues as fistula, it is difficult to plan effective programme interventions in terms of scope and scale. Action will only flow from what has been documented and enumerated.