Culture, Religion and Domestic Violence: Reflections on Working with Fiji and Tuvalu Communities

Abstract

While domestic violence (DV) has been understood as a form of gendered violence linked to patriarchal power, postcolonial and indigenous feminist criminologies have underscored that DV needs to be understood also in relation to the interactions and entanglements between colonialism, class, race, nation, gender and religion. Moreover, such interventions require questioning Western and secular assumptions and reductions of culture, tradition and non-modern (read ‘non-Western’) epistemologies and faith as reserves of mainly patriarchal power. This paper reflects within three practitioner spaces on efforts against DV in Fiji and Tuvalu and how these critiques and interventions are mobilised in practice and with community interactions. We draw on the varied experiences of the three of us (educator, counsellor and police officer) to explore how we are embedded in various forms of translation and border-crossing work, especially in relation to assumptions, practices and knowledge linked to culture, religion and rights in relation to DV.

Keywords

• domestic violence
• culture
• religion
• rights
• translation
• decolonisation