Abstract: Background: The United Nations Declaration on the elimination of ‘Violence Against Women (VAW)’, General Assembly in 1993 defined VAW as-“Any act of gender based violence that results in or is likely to result in physical, sexual, psychological harm or suffering to women including threat of such act, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty whether occurring in public or private life”.
Physical abuse such as slapping, beating, arm twisting, stabbing, strangling, burning, choking, kicking, threats with an object or weapon, and murder & also the traditional practices like female genital mutilation etc.
Aim and Objective: To find the magnitude of physical violence among the married females.
Methodology: A cross sectional study was carried out infield practice area under PHC. Thus total 776 married females were selected by systematic random sampling. Written informed consent was taken from the participants. A predesigned and pretested questionnaire was used and all the confidentiality was maintained. Statistical analysis was done using SPSS 21 software.
Results: Majority of respondents (79.12%) were threatened to hurt by their family members. That 64.94% of the respondents had history of slapping or things thrown at them in past. Rest of the respondents did not give such history.
Discussion: A study by Marine Chitashvili (Georgia-2010) et al. Showed that 3.8% of women said that their partners threatened to hurt her or someone she cares about. A study by Chakwana (Malawi 2004) showed that the most common forms of spousal violence are slapping and arm twisting (16 percent).
Conclusion: Physical violence ranged from moderate to severe violence; slapping, thrown something and Kicking/hit/bit was the most common type of physical violence encountered among women by their male partner. There is a need to create awareness about the adverse consequences of partner abuse through gender advocacy and formal and/or informal education, employing information education and communication was crucial.