A recent VicHealth publication (VicHealth 2006) reported on a survey of contemporary community attitudes among 2,800 Victorian respondents to violence against women. The Australian Institute of Criminology analysed and recently reported on the results (Taylor & Mouzos, 2006). There were 2,000 adults aged 18 years and older who were randomly interviewed by telephone for the main sample along with an additional oversample of 800 persons from Chinese, Vietnamese, Italian and Greek backgrounds. In the report this oversample was referred to as respondents from selected culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds (SCALD). As the following chart demonstrates, male and female respondents in the main sample were significantly more likely than the SCALD sample to say that forcing a partner to have sex is always domestic violence. Persons from the SCALD sample were more likely to answer 'don't know' than the main sample. The report shows that these differences in attitudes were reflected across a range of other questions.
Attitudes towards forced sex as domestic violence (percent) [see attached PDF for graph]
References
- Taylor N & Mouzos J 2006. Community attitudes to violence against women survey 2006. Canberra : Australian Institute of Criminology
- VicHealth 2006. Two steps forward, one step back: community attitudes to violence against women. Melbourne : VicHealth