The Effects Of National Development On The Position Of Married Women In The Third World: The Case Of Wife-Beating

Abstract Until recent years, wife-battering probably was not considered to be a social problem anywhere in the world. But during the past decade or so, it has become an area of investigation for a small group of social scientists in the United States, Canada, and Europe. Although empirical data on wife-beating in the Third World is not generally available (at least not in the English language), it is possible to make some tentative predictions about the effect that national development will have on wife-beating incidence rates in these nations. The author argues that wife-beating is a unitary phenomenon of oppression worldwide, and that data about family violence developed in the United States will have some utility in predicting the incidence of wife-beating in developing nations. The paper concludes with a set of tentative propositions about the effects of national development on wife-beating in the Third World.