An examination of women of different ethnicities in Turkey in terms of domestic violence

Aim: This study was conducted to examine the domestic violence on women in Turkey and its variation in relation to women's ethnic backgrounds and geographical locales. Material and Method: A survey form was prepared for this cross sectional study. This survey included questions related to women's socio-demographic characteristics and a scale for "Domestic Violence toward Women". This survey was implemented during face-to-face interviews with women over 15 years-old and who sought services from family health clinics in Batman, Diyarbakir, Istanbul, Konya and Mardin. The SPSS 15.0 for Windows was used to conduct the statistical analyses of the data. While scale results were reported using mean and ± standard deviation (SD), results from categorical outcomes were reported using percentage (%). Chi-square test was conducted to examine the differences across ethnicity and geographical locale. For all statistical analyses, p<0.05 was considered as statistically significant. Results: The sample included a total of 880 women. To the question of "To which ethnicity do you feel you belong?", 40.6% of the participants responded as Kurdish, 40.1% as Turkish, 10.7% as Arabic, and 8.6% as other. The percentage of women who experienced at least one or more types of domestic violence was 32.8%. The percent of women under the risk of domestic violence was 21.5. While women of Arabic descent experienced statistically significantly more violence (40.5%) compared to other ethnicities, women who lived in Istanbul also reported statistically significantly higher levels of domestic violence (50.0%) compared to the other locales. Conclusion: All of the women of various ethnicities in both eastern and western Turkey experience violence. As any woman can experience a form of violence, monitoring all women who seek health services will increase the awareness of domestic violence towards women.