Abstract
This paper explores how spousal violence varies with respect to women’s attitudes regarding acceptability of violence. This association is important to investigate because increased justification of marital violence by women can reduce their likelihood of seeking help or fleeing the violent marriage, which in turn could increase their risk of facing spousal violence in the future. Using nationally representative data from India and after controlling for the potential endogeneity of women’s attitudes, results suggest a strong positive link between attitudes regarding violence and the incidence of violence. The findings highlight the difficulties confronted in dismantling the problem of marital violence.
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Notes
Similar results are also obtained by estimating regressions using data from the 2005–2006 round of the NFHS. These are available from the author upon request.
To collect domestic violence data that were as accurate as possible, the sampling design used by the NFHS ensured that any woman answering the domestic violence module was alone.
Information from the past year is used for two reasons: (a) while the NFHS does contain information on whether the woman experienced such violence ever in her lifetime, we do not know when those incidents have occurred; and (b) to avoid measurement error arising from recall bias.
Unique to India is the caste system, which was historically based on occupational categories. All major surveys collect information about household caste since this stratification is intimately weaved into the social and cultural fabric of the Indian society. These surveys divide the caste groups into scheduled caste, scheduled tribe, other backward classes, and all other castes. Scheduled caste, scheduled tribe, and other backward classes are officially designated terms and are recognized in the Indian Constitution.
Lenze and Klasen (2017) have utilized a similar instrument to estimate the causal effect of women’s labor force participation on domestic violence in Jordan. They instrumented for women’s labor force participation status with a variable calculated as the PSU average of women’s labor force participation except for the woman being considered in each observation.
The sources of loss in sample size are: (a) the large percentage of women for whom the attitudes index value is zero (see Fig. 1); and (b) the relatively small fraction of women who have experienced inter-parental violence (19% of urban women and 20% of rural women). Thus, if every woman in a PSU had an attitudes index value of zero, the standardized variable would be indeterminate (since mean and standard deviation would both be zero), and subsequently dropped from the estimation.
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Acknowledgements
I thank the editor, two anonymous referees, Shreyasee Das, Santosh Kumar, Jermaine Moulton, and seminar participants at the 2017 Eastern Economic Association meetings, 2018 Midwest Economics Association meetings, and the 2018 International Association of Feminist Economics Conference for helpful suggestions and comments.
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Dasgupta, S. Attitudes About Wife-Beating and Incidence of Domestic Violence in India: An Instrumental Variables Analysis. J Fam Econ Iss 40, 647–657 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-019-09630-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10834-019-09630-6