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Intimate Partner Violence Against Women in India: Is Empowerment a Protective Factor?

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Abstract

This paper explores if women’s empowerment is a protective factor against intimate partner violence (IPV) using a nationally representative, cross-sectional sample of 45,211 ever-married women in India. Descriptive statistics were used to examine women’s empowerment, and differences in individual-level and household-level characteristics among the sample. Logistic regression analyses were conducted to assess the contribution of the indicators of women’s empowerment in predicting past-year and lifetime physical and sexual IPV. Women who possessed a secondary education or higher, owned property, and had high intrahousehold decision-making power were less likely to experience IPV. Implications for practice and research are discussed.

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Availability of Data

The analysis was based on the datasets collected for the India Demographic and Health Survey. Information on the data and content can be assessed at http://www.dhsprogram.com/data/available-datasets.cfm.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social Work, College for Public Health and Social Justice, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO, USA

    Vithya Murugan, Yit-Mui Khoo & Mirvat Termos

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  1. Vithya Murugan
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  2. Yit-Mui Khoo
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  3. Mirvat Termos
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Correspondence to Vithya Murugan.

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The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

Ethics Approval and Consent to Participate

NFHS surveys in India were reviewed and approved by the IIPS Institutional Review Board and the ICF Institutional Review Board. The protocol was also reviewed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). We used de-identified publicly available dataset from DHS website for this analysis. Therefore, no separate ethical approval was required for this analysis. In NFHS-4, the interviewers pursued informed consent from the women before interviews. Privacy and confidentiality were ensured during interviews by trained female interviewers who received special training to administer the domestic violence module. Permission was obtained from Measure DHS to use the data for further analysis.

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Murugan, V., Khoo, YM. & Termos, M. Intimate Partner Violence Against Women in India: Is Empowerment a Protective Factor?. Glob Soc Welf 8, 199–211 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40609-020-00186-0

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