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Gender wage gap and male perpetrated child abuse

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Abstract

Given that child abuse and intimate partner violence often co-occur, intra-household bargaining models provide a useful framework to investigate the relationship between macro-economic factors and child abuse. Non-cooperative bargaining models predict that labor market opportunities that benefit women improve their bargaining power and lower the risk of intimate partner violence against them. We posit that this protective effect extends to children as well. We examine the impact of gender specific wages and employment on police reported child abuse using incident level data from South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. Our results show that narrowing the gender wage gap leads to a decline in child sexual abuse reported to the police. While effects on physical abuse are similar in direction, they are not statistically significant. The findings underscore important spillover benefits of policy solutions directed towards narrowing the gender wage gap.

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Data availability

The data used in this study is publicly available from sources mentioned in the manuscript.

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Code is available upon request.

Notes

  1. Child support payments can represent disutility for stepfathers if they have biological children with their partners and risk relationship dissolution.

  2. All three states included in our analysis require a waiting period for couples with minor children seeking divorce. NIBRS does not include narratives from police reports; therefore, it is not possible to tell whether the victim’s parents are married or not.

  3. We are unable to replicate the analysis for sexual abuse as the average number of CSA perpetrated by stepmothers in all the counties is 0.042. Of all the CSA incidents perpetrated by stepmothers, nearly half (48%) involve more than one perpetrator and the additional perpetrators were men in most (70%) of the cases as opposed to 95% of the CSA incidents by stepfathers that involved a single perpetrator. While the annual average of CSA by mothers is higher, so is the proportion of incidents involving more than one perpetrator (65%), with a similar percentage of additional perpetrators being men. Isolating incidents where only mothers are listed as perpetrators leads to too few observations and models fail to converge.

  4. It is not clear how crimes against the child of non-cohabiting dating partners are coded by some jurisdictions. For instance, Nashville Police Department sometimes codes the relationship category for child abuse committed by a parent’s non-cohabiting dating partner as acquaintance rather than “Child of Girlfriend/Boyfriend”.

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Acknowledgements

We are deeply grateful to Dr. Paul Allison for his assistance and feedback.

Funding

Research reported in this publication was supported in part by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number T32HD108054. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Firearm Injury Prevention, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Zainab Hans

  2. Department of Economics, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA

    Michael H. Belzer

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  1. Zainab Hans
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Zainab Hans conducted the empirical analysis. Both authors contributed to manuscript writing and review.

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Correspondence to Zainab Hans.

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Appendix

Appendix

Tables 6–11

Table 6 Descriptive statistics for child sexual abuse incidents
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Table 7 Rotemberg weights
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Table 8 Impact of wage ratio on proxies for unobservable confounders
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Table 9 Impact of wage ratio on CSA by fathers—ratios fixed at baseline year
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Table 10 Impact of wage ratio on child physical abuse by mothers
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Table 11 Impact of wage ratio on living arrangements and family structure
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Hans, Z., Belzer, M.H. Gender wage gap and male perpetrated child abuse. Rev Econ Household (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11150-024-09693-x

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