Bilge Erten's presentation slides from the conference "Economic and Social Context of Domestic Violence".

1. The Causes and Consequences of Domestic Violence
Bilge Erten
Northeastern University and IZA
May 11, 2022
Economic and Social Context of Domestic Violence
1 / 36

2. Prevalence of Intimate Partner Violence against Women
Source: Sardinha et al. Global, regional, and national prevalence estimates of physical or sexual, or both, intimate partner
violence against women in 2018. The Lancet. 2022.
2 / 36

3. Prevalence of Intimate Partner Violence by Age Group
Source: Sardinha et al. Global, regional, and national prevalence estimates of physical or sexual, or both, intimate partner
violence against women in 2018. The Lancet. 2022.
3 / 36

4. Consequences of Intimate Partner Violence
• Women in violent relationships are more likely to report:
• injuries,
• 42% of abused women report having injuries as a result of violence
• long-lasting mental disorders,
• depression, post-traumatic stress and other anxiety disorders, sleep
difficulties, eating disorders, and suicide attempts
• alcohol and substance abuse,
• inability to work and loss of wages,
• sexually transmitted diseases and unintended pregnancies
• Abused women were 1.5 times more likely to have a sexually
transmitted infection and, in some regions, HIV, and twice as likely to
have an abortion.
(Campbell 2002; WHO 2013, 2017).
• In the most extreme cases, women’s exposure to intimate partner
violence can result in their death.
• Worldwide as many as 38% of all murders of women are committed by
intimate partners (WHO 2021).
4 / 36

5. Consequences of Intimate Partner Violence
• Children born or raised in such households are more likely to have:
• lower birth weights (Aizer 2010),
• difficulty in relating with their peers (Carlson 2000),
• delays in neuro-cognitive development (Huth-Bocks et al. 2001),
• lower IQ (Koenen et al. 2003),
• behavioral and emotional disorders (WHO 2021).
• Growing up in families where there is violence also leads to
intergenerational transmission of norms:
• Boys who witness domestic abuse are more likely to perpetuate
violence later in life.
• Girls who witness domestic abuse are more likely to tolerate and
experience violence later in life.
5 / 36

6. Costs of Intimate Partner Violence
• Given the consequences of domestic violence for mental and physical health,
economic capability, and child well-being, the costs of such violence are
staggeringly high.
• The global cost of intimate partner violence is estimated to be USD 4.4
trillion, or 5.2 percent of global GDP (Fearon and Hoeffler 2014).
• This cost exceeds the combined costs of civil wars, terrorism, and
homicides.
• In the United States, the cost of domestic violence exceeds $5.8 billion
annually, and more than $900 million of that cost is attributed to
productivity losses (CDC 2003).
• Consequently, societal rewards from understanding the determinants of
domestic violence and identifying policy interventions that can reduce it are
potentially substantial.
6 / 36

7. Sustainable Development Goal 5 (SDG 5)
• The 2030 United Nations Agenda for Sustainable Development was adopted
by countries in 2015.
• Target 5.2: Eliminate all forms of violence against all women and girls
in the public and private spheres, including trafficking and sexual and
other types of exploitation
• Indicator 5.2.1: Proportion of ever-partnered women and girls aged 15
years and older subjected to physical, sexual or psychological violence
by a current or former intimate partner in the previous 12 months, by
form of violence and by age
• Indicator 5.2.2: Proportion of women and girls aged 15 years and
older subjected to sexual violence by persons other than an intimate
partner in the previous 12 months, by age and place of occurrence
• Yet, progress in these indicators has been rather slow, and there is no
consensus on the underlying causes of violence against women.
7 / 36

8. Empowerment of Women and Domestic Violence
• Empowerment of women is often considered a major tool in the fight
against domestic violence.
• However, the impact of women’s economic empowerment on the risk
of domestic violence is a priori ambiguous.
• Bargaining Theories: An improvement in women’s employment
opportunities and income transfers may increase the resources available
to women; improve their outside options and bargaining status in their
relationships; and decrease their exposure to violence
• Farmer and Tiefenthaler 1996; Stevenson and Wolfers 2006; Aizer 2010;
Hidrobo and Fernald 2013; Anderberg et al. 2015; Haushofer et al. 2019
• Backlash and Instrumental Violence Theories: Women’s
employment may undermine the breadwinner roles of their male
partners, triggering them use violence as an instrument to assert
dominance in the household. Men might also use violence to extract
resources from their spouses.
• Bloch and Rao 2002; Eswaran and Malhotra 2011; Bobonis et al. 2013; Erten
and Keskin 2018, 2021
8 / 36

9. Evidence on Empowerment of Women and Domestic Violence
• Women’s empowerment may be accomplished through different
means.
• Empirical studies have focused on several potential mechanisms
through which empowerment may be achieved:
1. Education
2. Employment and labor market outcomes more broadly
3. Income changes through (un)conditional cash transfers
4. Divorce law changes
5. Access to formal institutions such as police stations or legal services
• Findings are rather mixed, but the effects of these changes on
domestic violence generally depends on whether women at risk reach
a credible threat point as an outside option.
9 / 36

10. 1. Education and Domestic Violence
• Increasing women’s education can affect their risk of experiencing
domestic violence through several channels:
1. Attitudes: Additional years of schooling may alter women’s attitudes
toward domestic violence by improving their access to information and
helping them develop a new sense of self-worth.
2. Matching in marriage market: Higher educational attainment may
allow a woman to marry a “higher-quality” husband who may be more
educated and less likely to use violence in his relationships.
3. Labor market outcomes: More-educated women are more likely to
have better employment opportunities and to earn higher returns on
their education.
10 / 36

11. 1. Education and Domestic Violence
• The empirical challenge: Selection into education – women who are
more educated grow up in families with less violence and more likely
to match with less violent partners, and experience less violence.
• Studies document a negative correlation between domestic violence
and education (Ackerson et al. 2008; Altinay and Arat 2009; Vyas and Watts 2009;
Eswaran and Malhotra 2011).
• These studies fail to establish a causal relationship because they do not
account for reverse causality or omitted variable bias.
• Our strategy: Use the rollout of the 1997 Basic Education Program in
Turkey, which increased the compulsory years of schooling from 5 to 8 years,
to conduct a regression discontinuity (RD) analysis (Erten and Keskin, 2018,
AEJ: Applied).
11 / 36

12. 1. Education and Domestic Violence
Source: Erten and Keskin. For Better or for Worse? Education and the Prevalence of Domestic Violence in Turkey. American
Economic Journal: Applied Economics. 2018.
12 / 36

13. 1. Education and Domestic Violence
Source: Erten and Keskin. For Better or for Worse? Education and the Prevalence of Domestic Violence in Turkey. American
Economic Journal: Applied Economics. 2018.
13 / 36

14. 1. Education and Domestic Violence
• The education reform in Turkey led to an increase of roughly 1-1.5 years of
additional schooling of women on average, with strong effects on women grown up
in rural areas.
• The reform had an adverse impact on psychological violence and financial control
behavior experienced by women raised in rural areas.
• We find no evidence of a significant effect on physical or sexual violence for
these women.
• We find no evidence of a significant effect of the reform on domestic violence
attitudes, quality of the partner-match, or marriage decisions.
• However, women in treated cohorts are more likely to be employed, particularly in
non-agricultural sector, have higher personal income, and have access to social
security benefits.
• These results are consistent with instrumental theories of violence that predict an
increase in male partners’ incentives to use coercive instruments in order to extract
further rents as women’s income increases.
14 / 36

15. 1. Education and Domestic Violence
Source: Erten and Keskin. Breaking the Cycle? Education and the Intergenerational Transmission of Violence. Review of
Economics and Statistics. 2020. 15 / 36

16. 2. Employment and Domestic Violence
• The empirical challenge: Selection into employment – working
women might have different attitudes, upbringing, and matching with
higher-quality partners, resulting in a lower risk of domestic violence.
• Evidence from advanced countries supports bargaining theories.
• Using a shift-share instrument, Aizer (2010) shows that a reduction in
gender wage gaps across California counties improves women’s
bargaining power, resulting in less domestic violence.
• Using local labor demand shocks, Anderberg et al. (2015) find that an
increase in female unemployment increases the incidence of domestic
violence while an increase in male unemployment decreases this
incidence in the UK.
16 / 36

17. 2. Employment and Domestic Violence
• Evidence from developing countries is more mixed.
• Kotsadam and Villanger (2020) randomly assign jobs to women in
Ethiopia, and while job offers increase employment and earnings, there
is no significant change in physical violence.
• However, women with low bargaining power at baseline experience
increased abuse after the job offer.
• Bhalotra et al. (2021) exploit mass layoffs using registry and court
data in Brazil, finding that both male and female unemployment
increases domestic violence.
• Clerici and Tripodi(2021) similarly find that male unemployment during
Covid in Uganda increases physical violence.
• Sanin (2021) finds paid employment of women in Rwanda reduces
domestic violence.
17 / 36

18. 3. Income and Domestic Violence
• Several studies examine the effects of (un)conditional cash transfers
on the risk of domestic violence, with mixed findings.
• Examining the effects of the Mexican Oportunidades CCT program,
Bobonis et al. (2013) find that beneficiary women are less likely to be
victims of physical violence but are more likely to receive threats of
violence.
• These findings support instrumental theories of violence, which predict
that an increase in a woman’s income could lead to an rise in the
husband’s threats of violence in order to extract rents from her.
• Haushofer et al. (2019) find that unconditional cash transfers in Kenya
to both men and women reduce intimate partner violence.
• Using a model, they argue that husbands use physical violence to
extract resources, but dislike it, while sexual violence is not used to
extract resources, but is pleasurable.
18 / 36

19. 3. Income and Domestic Violence
• An evaluation of the flagship social protection program in
Mexico—which directs cash transfers to women—found that the
impacts on IPV varied depending on the amount transferred and the
husband’s cultural beliefs (Angelucci 2008).
• In households where women received small transfers, domestic violence
fell by 37 percent.
• On the other hand, large transfers increased the aggressive behavior of
husbands who held traditional views of gender roles.
19 / 36

20. 4. Divorce Laws and Domestic Violence
• Studies on unilateral divorce laws also have mixed findings.
• Exploiting the timing of unilateral divorce laws across states in the
U.S., Stevenson and Wolfers (2006) find that these laws reduce
domestic violence and the probability that women are murdered by
their partners by increasing the bargaining power of the abused.
• Using state-level variation on unilateral divorce laws in Mexico,
Garcia-Ramos (2019) finds that intimate partner violence does not
change in the short run, but it increases in the long term.
• These results are driven by women who remain married after the reform
and they are consistent with IPV being used to prevent women from
leaving the marriage.
20 / 36

21. 5. Access to Formal Institutions and Domestic Violence
• Using the staggered implementation of women police stations (WPS)
in Indian cities, Amaral et al. (2018) find that the opening of WPS
leads to an increase in reporting of crimes to the police.
• Exploiting the rollout of women’s justice centers (WJC) that provide
police, medical and legal services in Peru, Sviatchi and Trako (2021)
find the opening of a WJC reduces self-reported domestic violence
and female deaths.
• Martı́nez-Matute and Garcı́a-Hombrados (2021) show that the
opening of specialized courts increases the reporting of partner
violence in Spain.
• Durevall (2021) finds that implementation of IPV policies reduced its
self-reported prevalence in Colombia, and Amaral et al. (2022) find
that arrests deter domestic violence in UK through reductions in
repeat victimization.
21 / 36

22. Some Lessons for Policy-making
• When implementing economic interventions, policymakers should
carry monitoring and action plans to identify and protect women at
risk of experiencing more violence (e.g., counseling, prosecution, and
shelters).
• Further research is needed to identify interventions that minimize the
backlash effects of increasing women’s income.
• In some cases, there may be need for a gradual change in social
norms for the new status of women within the household to become
more socially acceptable.
22 / 36

23. Violence as Instrumental vs. Expressive Behavior
• Instrumental behavior: Domestic violence is instrumental behavior
that domineering men use to control their partners or extract
resources from them.
• Expressive behavior:
• Some men derive positive utility from exerting violence on their
partners, e.g., as a way to assert dominance, or in the case of sexual
violence (Tauchen et al. 1991, Haushofer et al. 2019).
• Violent behavior might arise unintentionally when an argument
escalates out of control, or when certain emotional cues precipitate
violence (Card and Dahl 2011).
• The emotional triggers of violent behavior suggests that mental
health interventions that improve the ability to regulate emotions may
play an important role in reducing domestic violence.
23 / 36

24. Evidence on Emotional Triggers and Psychological Interventions
• Card and Dahl (2011) find that football upset losses–an unexpected
negative emotional shock–lead to higher intimate partner violence in
US.
• Ivanic et al. (2021) show that the consumption of alcohol during
football games leads to domestic abuse after the games in the UK.
• There are also studies that examine the effects of psychological
interventions on intimate partner violence.
• In Liberia, a program that combined psychosocial therapy (counseling
and CBT) and vocational skills training substantially reduced domestic
violence (Park and Kumar 2022).
• There is also a large health literature that focuses on counseling
programs to address conflict resolution in developing countries.
24 / 36

25. Evidence on Counseling Programs
• Key idea: Can we promote gender-equal norms such that men resort
to violence less?
• Activities: Training, counseling, and family dialogues to encourage
participants to actively challenge unequal gender norms that justify
violence
• These activities aim to address power imbalances within relationships
and build skills for healthy, nonviolent, equitable relationships
25 / 36

26. Evidence on Counseling Programs
• Evidence is mixed, depending on curriculum, length, frequency of
meetings, and whether they involve women, men, or both.
• In Burkina Faso, South Africa, and Tanzania, economic interventions
reduced IPV when paired with gender-sensitive programming (Ismayilova
et al. 2018; Kim et al. 2009; Kapiga et al. 2019).
• Evidence from Afghanistan, Colombia, Côte d’ Ivoire, DRC, Peru, and
Uganda show that adding gender-sensitive components to economic
interventions did not lead to reductions in IPV (Gibbs et al. 2020; Tankard
et al. 2019; Gupta et al. 2013; Noble et al 2020; Agüero and Frisancho 2018; Green
et al 2015).
• In Ethiopia, treating men with a participatory counseling intervention
had the largest effects in reducing partner violence (Sharma et al.
2020).
26 / 36

27. Violent Conflict, Sexual Violence, and Domestic Violence
• Violent conflicts have been experienced by more than half of all the
nations in the world over the last half century (Blattman and Miguel
2010).
• While several studies aim to understand causes of conflicts, less work
has focused on different types of violence employed in conflicts.
• Violent conflicts can heighten the risk of:
• Sexual violence such as rape, sexual slavery, and sexual mutilation by
non-partner men,
• Domestic violence by women’s own partners.
27 / 36

28. Conflict-Related Sexual Violence
• One of the most pervasive and brutal forms of wartime violence is
sexual violence (Guarnieri and Tur-Prats 2022).
• Rape occurred in 62% of the civil wars around the world fought
between 1989 and 2009 (Cohen 2013).
• Rwandan genocide (1994): more than 500,000 women were raped,
• Bosnian war (1992-1995): 50,000 women were raped,
• Bangladesh liberation war (1971): 200,000 women were raped (Meger
2016; Sultana 2018)
• The Ukrainian ombudsman received 400 reports of rape committed by
Russian soldiers in the first two weeks of April (Kyiv Independent,
NPR).
• Besides rape, sexual violence includes sexual slavery, sexual mutilation
and torture, forced pregnancy, and abortion.
• Sexual violence produces long-lasting negative effects on physical and
psychological wellbeing for victims, their families and communities.
28 / 36

29. Motivations for Conflict-Related Sexual Violence
• Strategic use of sexual violence:
• “rape as a weapon of war,”
• commanders mandate its use to achieve their military goals.
• Expressive use of sexual violence:
• Soldiers’ private motivations,
• Desire for power, sexual gratification or release frustration.
29 / 36

30. Conflict-Related Sexual Violence
Source: Guarnieri and Tur-Prats. Cultural Distance and Conflict-Related Sexual Violence. Working Paper. 2022.
30 / 36

31. Cultural Distance and Conflict-Related Sexual Violence
• Guarnieri and Tur-Prats (2022) create a novel dataset that contains
information on the ethnic identity of all the actors involved in ethnic
civil conflicts between 1989 and 2019, and their use of sexual
violence. They find:
• Gender-unequal armed actors are more likely to be perpetrators of
sexual violence.
• The cultural distance in gender norms between the combatants matters:
• Sexual violence increases when the perpetrator is more gender-unequal
than the victim.
• When confronting a more gender-equal society, soldiers might perceive
the relatively better position of women as a threat to their own norms,
and resort to sexual violence to alleviate these negative feelings.
31 / 36

32. Conflict and Domestic Violence
Source: La Mattina. Civil conflict, domestic violence and intra-household bargaining in post-genocide Rwanda. Journal of
Development Economics. 2017
32 / 36

33. Conflict and Domestic Violence
• Studies document that greater exposure to conflict increases the risk
of domestic violence women experience and worsens attitudes towards
violence.
• La Mattina (2017) finds that women who married after the 1994
Rwandan genocide experienced significantly increased domestic
violence and reduced decision-making power relative to women who
married before.
• These results are driven by local sex ratios: fewer surviving men gives
greater bargaining power to those who remain in the marriage market.
• La Mattina and Shemyakina (2017) find that exposure to armed
conflict between ages 6 and 10 increase the likelihood of internalizing
surrounding violence and expressing more acceptance of domestic
violence later in life.
33 / 36

34. Forced Displacement and Domestic Violence: Spillover Effects to
Neighboring Countries
• One of the consequences of large-scale conflicts is forced
displacement of population into neighboring countries.
• During the Syrian civil war of 2011, more than 4 million refugees fled
to Turkey, the largest refugee host country.
• We looked at the effects of Syrian refugee inflows across Turkish
provinces on labor market outcomes and domestic violence in Turkey
(Erten and Keskin 2021).
• The refugees did not have work permit until 2016, and were willing to
work for very low wages in the informal sector.
• This led to the displacement of native population in informal sector,
with larger effects on less educated women.
• The findings also showed a reduction in women’s risk of domestic
violence in more affected regions, consistent with instrumental theories
of violence.
34 / 36

35. Conclusions and Policy Implications
• There is need for more research into understanding the drivers of
violence against women, specifically in conflict and post-conflict
situations.
• Could there be effective local policy solutions to reduce the risk of
sexual violence from non-partners as well as domestic violence
experienced by women?
• We need to also understand better the ways of identifying at-risk
households and targeting them with additional interventions,
including:
• Engaging the community members to improve partners’ stress-coping,
anger management, and communication skills,
• Providing mental health support through local providers and call
centers,
• Information campaigns to raise awareness about violence issues, and
issues faced by refugee communities.
35 / 36

36. Conclusions and Policy Implications
• Women’s economic empowerment through different mechanisms is an
important goal on its own right, but it can trigger more violence in
contexts where women’s bargaining power is low and social costs of
divorce is high.
• No single empowerment mechanism is the answer to violence against
women – we need a combination of many changes, and we need gender
norms to change over time across generations.
• Social movements can play an important role in creating changes in
gender norms.
• The Me Too movement has been effective in shedding light into ways
in which sexual harassment occurred in workplaces and other public
areas.
• Other movements that remove stigma around the public discussions of
gender-based violence can go a long way toward creating sustainable
solutions.
36 / 36