[update 28/2/11 - this post was since followed up with a supplementary post exploring the survey questions involved: to read it, click here. The text of this post has not changed]
This statistic comes p.219 of the Timor-Leste Demographic and Health Survey 2009-10 (DHS) which came out in December. It was carried out by the National Statistics Directorate of the Ministry of Finance, with funding from various donors, you can get it from www.measuredhs.com, click here and download the PDF. There's a useful 3-page summary at the beginning which gives you the headlines.
Many governments now carry out a DHS every 5 years or so. As WaterAid’s resident data nerd, I’ve had the joy of reading about 20 different DHS from various countries over the last few years. Like any survey, it has its flaws. Judging by some of the data on sanitation and diarrhoea there have been some serious translation issues (sympathy due here – Timor-Leste has 30+ local languages, check out my language post). However, of all the types of surveys I’ve worked on, DHS is the strongest: large nationally-representative sample, well-tested questions, and a consistent methodology.
So, 1 in 6 Timorese men think it’s OK to rape your wife if she refuses sex. That’s just one of the depressing statistics in the section on gender equality and domestic violence. Over a third of women have experienced physical violence since the age of 15, and this rises to over half of women in Dili.
64% percent of women (yes, women) believe that a husband is justified in beating his wife if she goes out without telling him. The figures for men are similar and, in fact, women seem to be more willing to sanction domestic violence than men. There’s no space to go into detail on this here – look at p.213-14. Even more depressingly, these views don’t appear to change much in younger women.
Clearly, a lot more work needs to be done on both stopping violence against women, and changing social attitudes so that women themselves see such violence as unjustified. Of course this will take time, but we can be sure that changing social attitudes will take more than posters of Horta and “hapara violensia kontra feto”. Not having much knowledge in this area, I will let the data do the talking and leave the solutions up to the experts (if you work in this area, please leave a comment).
These were the most shocking statistics I read in there, but it’s not all bad news. It’s also worth noting that most of the data is more hard facts than attitudes. For example, under-5 mortality has gone down a lot. It declined from 83 per 1,000 live births during the in 1999-2003 to 64 per 1,000 live births during 2005-2009, which is a decent chunk out of MDG 4.
Less welcome is the data on undernutrition (anecdotally, one reason why publication was delayed for so long…) – 58% of under children under 5 are stunted and 45% are underweight. That’s high compared to similar countries, and is one reason why Timor urgently needs to sort out its food security problems. Of course, nutrition is about far more than food, and I’ll take the opportunity to bang the drum for sanitation here, which is strongly linked to undernutrition, both through its impacts on diarrhoea and on acute respiratory infections – for more see p.6 of this report
I’ve obviously been poring over the DHS data on water and sanitation in a lot of detail and comparing it to previous surveys – a full post on that to follow later. So, I’ll end with a link to a bizarre article on DHS from Tempo Semanal. Often I like TS articles, but this one was a desperate attempt to add political intrigue, headlined with a year–old unrelated quote from Horta complaining about donors always spending money on reports. They evidently failed to notice that (i) this survey was led by the government, (ii) without these surveys the government wouldn’t be able to target resources and policy responses.
In conclusion, I urge you to read the 3-page summary at the beginning of the new DHS (again link here). It really contains a wealth of statistically solid and nationally-representative information about development in Timor-Leste.
