ABSTRACT
All the research participants of this study condemned the types of abusive behaviour and situations they named, excluding sexual coercion, which was not generally discussed. However, there was also a visible tendency among local people to rationalise certain forms of abusiveness by invoking the individual personality (bahri) and other personal parameters, as opposed to indicting the wider socio-cultural framework, and this could suggest a more implicit kind of tolerance. Within the local worldview, conceptualisations of the human personality were inextricable from ideas about human nature, and these intersected the biological, social and spiritual dimensions in complex and gendered ways. Chapter 10 presents the research participants’ invocations of bahri in their aetiologies of abusive behaviour and suggests how local metaphysics of humanity and personhood could underpin conjugal abuse attitudes, but especially women’s responses to husband abusiveness. While deeper aetiologies of abusiveness were informed by the research participants’ deeper beliefs about human nature and the individual personality, they also reflected empirical observations that perpetrators generally behaved in ways that socio-cultural, family or environmental parameters could not explain. The chapter thus proposes how some of the affirmed behavioural problems could be incorporated in a psychosocial framework of analysis to demonstrate that a gender-based or social norms aetiology cannot suffice to understand the deeper motivations of some expressions of conjugal abuse locally.
