Rural taboos hinder family planning

Rural taboos hinder family planning

JAKARTA (JP): Despite the overall success of the national family planning program, most workers in rural areas have to contend with prevalent social taboos and traditions.

Anthropologist Subyakto Atmosiswoyo, a lecturer at the University of Indonesia's School of Psychology, on Saturday identified the widespread reluctance among villagers to discuss human reproduction as one of the main problems facing workers.

"Male workers encounter even bigger problems ... as it is often unacceptable for them to visit a prospective female participant or to talk about intimate matters ... in the absence of her husband," he said in a doctoral dissertation he defended before a panel of professors at the university campus in Depok, West Java.

"The sex of the extension workers significantly affects their success in recruiting new participants to the program," he said.

Villagers attempt to fill the void of information on the subject left by their reluctance to join the program and the taboos by establishing their own grapevines. "Exchanging confidences through gossiping among themselves is the usual communication pattern, resulting in a poor image for the family planning program," Subyakto said.

He also found, for instance, that traditional values about children persist despite the government campaign calling on families to have only two children.

"Villagers still believe the more the merrier, that every child brings his own luck, that the more children they have, the richer they will be, and that sons are more favorable than daughters," he said.

For his dissertation, Subyakto studied the role of family planning extension workers in several villages in Serpong district, West Java. Their main duty is to explain the program and convince people to join.

He attempted to determine the factors that contribute to the workers' success and failure, and examined their communication styles. He found that many other people recruited to "assist" the extension workers creates a "chain communication pattern" which is inefficient.

"The content of the message gets lost in the process," he said. In addition, many of the extension workers are inadequately informed about the contraceptives they are supposed to promote.

On the other hand, Subyakto found that some extension workers successfully built such a rapport with the villagers that they became more of a confidante. Those workers were able to control the rate of people dropping out from the program to a minimum, he said.

"About one third of the people living in villages with a low success rate in the program consult religious leaders when they encounter problems regarding birth control, while 78.3 percent of people in villages with a high rate of participation go to extension workers," Subyakto said.

He found that a large number of women in some villages have temporarily dropped out of the family planning program, citing that they wished to have more children.

Without elaborating, Subyakto said there are also women who stopped using contraceptives because of faulty devices.

Earlier this year, the government figures revealed the family planning program had reached 24.6 million or 71 percent of the total fertile couples as regular users of contraceptives in comparison to 66 percent in April 1994. (31/swe)