Help-Seeking Behavior among Abused Women in Rural Bangladesh

Fengmin Zhao, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Stan Becker, Johns Hopkins University

Women’s help seeking behavior is very important for secondary and tertiary preventions to protect women from further violence and violence-related injury or death. This paper developed a new conceptual framework and tested the effect of the features of violence (i.e. perpetrator of violence, reasons of violence and severity of violence) on women’s help seeking behavior using a multilevel model. And 2854 currently married women from a baseline survey of an experimental study in rural Bangladesh were analyzed. The results showed that when the perpetrator was relatives of the women instead of husbands (OR=22.2, 95% CI 6.4-76.5), the reasons for the violence were not household work poorly done (OR=2.2, 95%CI 1.1-14.5), and the violence was more serious (OR=6.3, 95%CI 3.3-12.0), the abused women were much more likely to disclose the violence and seek help, after adjusting for women’s socio-demographic characteristics. Implications for prevention of domestic violence against women were discussed.