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)