Understanding the domestic violence based on gender roles

Attitudes, emotions, behaviors and stereotyped social roles that society expects from women and men, depending on gender, are called gender roles (Dökmen, 2009). Sexism is fed from three sources patriarchy, heterosexuality, and sexism. Sexism manifests itself in an "ambivalent" manner, not as a one-dimensional negative discrimination of women, since it harbors the hostile and benevolent aspects of these three sources, and has the same hostile and benevolent nature (Glick, Diebold, Bailey-Werner and Zhu, 1997; Glick and Fiske, 1996,1997). Domestic violence is defined as the violence that a person who has been subjected to domestic violence is directed to discharge feelings of anger and tension, such as punishment, forcefulness, coercion, and humiliation towards another (WHO Raporu, 1998). The purpose of this research is to examine the relationship between hostile and benevolent sexism and violence against women in the context of gender roles. In the data collection process, a questionnaire battery consisting of Voluntary Participation Form and Demographic Information Form, Relationship Assessment Questionnaire (ILDA), Attitudes toward Violence against Women for Protecting Honor Scale (AVWPHS), The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory and Attitudes Towards Violence Against Women in Marriage Inventory and three violence-related pictures were selected from six Picture Cards developed for children. However, for this study, open-ended questions such as "What do you see here?" were asked to three men and three women to support semi-structured interviews in order to evaluate Attitudes towards domestic violence. The sample of this research consists of 243 people, 203 women and 40 men for the questionnaire and 6 people, 3 women and 3 men for the picture cards. The age range of participants varies from 18 to 65 years. As a result of the analyzes made, people with a high level of communication had less tolerance for violence than people with low level of communication. Parallel to this finding, interviews also show that people with a high level of communication had less tolerance for violence than people with low level of communication. Moreover, there is a positive relationship between hostile sexism and attitude toward violence. Interviews are also consistent with the result of analysis. There is no negative relationship between benevolent sexism and attitude toward violence. However, the first male participant, who has more benevolent sexist attitudes, stated that women should not be subjected to violence and should be protected when necessary. There is a positive relationship between hostile and benevolent sexism and tolerance to family violence due to honour. Besides these, women's tolerance to seperation who has high hostile sexism attitudes is not less than women who has high benevolent sexism attitudes. Also, women weree found to have less hostile sexist attitudes than men based on this research. However, contrary to expectation it has not been found that women have more benevolent sexist attitudes than men. Keywords: Gender roles, ambivalent sexism, hostile sexism, benevolent sexism, domestic violence, violence against women, sexual honour