ALMOST a third of women in Mpumalanga have at some point been physically abused by their partners, says a study published in the latest issue of the South African Medical Journal. The study, by the Medical Research Council’s gender and health group, also found that just over a quarter of women in the Eastern Cape had suffered the same fate. Almost one in ten women in the Eastern Cape reported physical abuse during a pregnancy. The first large-scale community-based survey in this field ever undertaken in South Africa, it was based on the responses of 1_306 largely rural and black women in those two provinces and the Northern Province. At one house researchers were told there was no-one at home because the woman had been murdered two weeks before by her husband.