Abstract
Intimate partner violence (IPV) against women is widespread, but its implications for their economic and non-economic activities are understudied. Leveraging new data from 564 ever-married women aged 22–65 in rural Minya, Egypt, we estimated logistic regressions and zero-inflated negative binomial regressions to test spillover, compensation, and patriarchal bargaining theories about the influences of women’s exposure to IPV on their engagement in and time spent on market, subsistence, domestic, and care work. Supporting compensation theory, exposures to lifetime, recent, and chronic physical or sexual IPV were associated with higher adjusted odds of performing market work in the prior month, and exposures to recent and chronic IPV were associated with higher adjusted odds of performing subsistence work in this period. Supporting compensation and patriarchal bargaining theories, exposures to recent and chronic IPV were associated with more time spent on domestic work in the prior day. Supporting spillover and patriarchal bargaining theories, exposures to lifetime IPV of all forms were associated with lower adjusted odds of performing mostly nonspousal care work in the prior day, and this association was partially mediated by women’s generalized anxiety. Women in rural Minya who are exposed to IPV may escalate their housework to fulfill local norms of feminine domesticity while substituting economic activities for nonspousal care work to enhance their economic independence from violent partners.
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Notes
In 1995, the prevalence of lifetime physical IPV was estimated from one question about being “beaten” by one’s husband. In 2005, this prevalence was estimated from several questions about a husband’s perpetration of acts of physical, sexual, or psychological IPV.
The 2005 EDHS sample was estimated to be age 15–49, but the 2012 follow-up sample reported ages from 22 to 65. In 2012, 22 women reported ages over 56 (the highest age that should have been reported based on data from the 2005 EDHS). We used women’s ages as reported in 2012.
Of those who received the IPV module in 2005 and were located, interviewed, and had no missing data that would exclude them from our sample (227 of 328), chance-corrected agreements for any lifetime IPV and any lifetime IPV by type by 2005 were .02–.06. Low statistics likely resulted more from higher disclosure in 2012 than recall bias. Namely, of the 102 women with discrepant responses for exposure to physical or sexual IPV before 2005, 85 reported in 2012 but not in 2005 exposure to physical or sexual IPV by 2005; comparatively, 17 reported in 2005 but not in 2012 exposure to physical or sexual IPV by 2005. Higher disclosure of IPV in 2012 likely occurred because (1) IPV-focused surveys like that in 2012 yield higher disclosure than multipurpose surveys like the 2005 EDHS (Ellsberg et al. 2001); (2) repeated interviewing enhances disclosure (Covington et al. 1997); and (3) adding more items (three more in 2012 than 2005) tends to increase disclosure (Straus and Douglas 2004).
Behavioral measures of IPV may capture acts of aggression but not their severity.
The presence of young children, more than the total number of living children, may more strongly affect women’s engagement in market and care work.
Results pertaining to the covariates are available upon request.
Results pertaining to the covariates are available upon request.
We also asked about IPV before 2005 for the 2005 EDHS sample that did not receive the IPV module in 2005.
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Acknowledgments
The parent study on which this analysis is based was funded by the United Nations Development Program and the Gender Economic Research and Policy Analysis Program of the World Bank (PI Dr. Kathryn Yount). We thank Dr. Ray Langsten and Dr. Rania Roushdy for their outstanding management of the field activities. We also thank Ms. Tahra Hassan and Ms. Eman Shady for their assistance with typing, preparation, and translation of study documents; Mr. Ali Rashed for his assistance with data entry and management; Ms. Amal Refaat for her training of the interviewers and supervision of the fieldwork; Dr. Ragui Assaad for his scientific recommendation to conduct a panel study; Ms. Sally Dijkerman for her assistance with the preparation of this article; and Ms. Francine Pope, Ms. Teresa Parker, and Ms. Carol McMurtray for their assistance with research administration. Finally, we express our heartfelt gratitude to the women who participated in this study, without whom this project would not have been possible. This article was drafted while Dr. Sarah Zureick-Brown was a postdoctoral fellow in the Hubert Department of Global Health, Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University.
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Yount, K.M., Zureick-Brown, S. & Salem, R. Intimate Partner Violence and Women’s Economic and Non-Economic Activities in Minya, Egypt. Demography 51, 1069–1099 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-014-0285-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-014-0285-x