ABSTRACT
Wife abuse among Indo-Fijians must be located and analyzed within the wider context of gender relations within the family in order to explain and understand the nature, reasons, experience and acceptance of this violence. The patriarchal, patrilineal and patrivirilocal North Indian family pattern and ideology has generally established hegemonic influence among Indo-Fijians. Purdah ideology is integrally related to and supports a familial ideology that vests ultimate authority in the father or, in his absence, the eldest male in the household. Women's increased participation in paid employment and education, combined with increasing Western modernist influences, has meant that traditional familial ideology is slowly being undermined. The vast majority of both men and women accept, seldom question, and even positively sanction men's right to control "their" women by the occasional slap, punch or push. The threat and use of physical violence is a powerful mechanism by which husbands exercise and assert power and control over wives.
