Human Rights Enculturation and Conceptualizations of Abuse

Cross-national surveys indicate that people are increasingly likely to denounce heterosexual men’s physical violence toward their spouse but that support for women’s refusal to have sex with their spouse is declining or stagnant. What accounts for these divergent trends? Bringing together theories of enculturation and vernacularization, I contend that international organizations' vast initiatives to denounce gender violence are an important contributor to both trends. When implemented, their activities consistently condemn physical forms of intimate partner violence, but often are interpreted as strengthening the notion that sexual refusal within marriage is a neglect of one’s gendered relationship responsibilities and therefore a form of abuse. To develop the argument, I combine national surveys from Malawi between 2000 and 2016 with new measures I construct of how international organizations and their partners disseminated anti-violence cultural scripts in education curricula, media programming, and foreign aid projects. These efforts are positively associated with substantial increases in Malawians’ stated rejection of physical intimate partner violence. However, the direction of the association between such efforts and people’s expressed support for a woman’s ability to refuse to have sex with her husband hinges on whether the implementing intermediaries clearly promote sexual consent or reinforce the idea that sexual refusal is abusive. Assumptions that women’s physical and sexual autonomy are a linked package of human rights enculturation overestimate the prominence and clarity of individual rights principles in many people’s moral imaginations, while overlooking the importance they place on relationship duties.