Understanding Domestic Violence

Scientific investigation of the problem of domestic violence is a relatively recent endeavor; it is only within the past 30 years that violence against women has been widely acknowledged as a threat to the health and rights of women and to national development. With the recognition of violence against women as a global problem came the need for the development of methodologies to collect data on violence ethically, and in a manner that maximizes the validity and reliability of the data. To this end, the DHS program began to collect information on the prevalence of domestic violence within the context of the household in the early 1990s. However, it was not till the late 1990s that DHS developed a standard module of questions in consultation with experts. The module and its implementation conform to the recommendations of the World Health Organization for ethical collection of data on domestic violence.

Based on DHS data the table below shows the proportions of women age 15-49 reporting any violence since age 15 and of ever-married women age 15-49 reporting spousal violence:

By contrast, in all countries except the Dominican Repubxlic, the proportion of women who have physically abused their husbands is a small fraction of the proportion who have been abused by their husbands.

Women who report having experienced spousal violence also frequently report several immediate physical consequences: in Colombia, more than half of the women who reported experiencing violence reported that they had bruises and aches; between 5 and 13 percent of women who had experienced violence in the six countries for which data are available report having an injury or broken bone. Despite the injurious outcomes that are often associated with the experience of domestic violence, many women do not seek help for the violence; those not seeking help range from 41 percent in Nicaragua to 78 percent in Cambodia. Most of those who do seek help turn to their own families and to friends or neighbors.

The study examines the role of several different individual, household, and family characteristics in defining a woman's risk of experiencing spousal violence. The two factors that are found to most consistently affect a woman's risk of spousal violence are having a husband who is frequently drunk and having a family history of domestic violence. This research also shows that the likelihood of experiencing violence increases with the number of controlling behaviors exhibited by the husband: in the Dominican Republic, 10 percent of women whose husbands do not manifest any of the controlling behaviors studied report having ever experienced violence, compared with 17 percent of women whose husbands exhibit 1-2 controlling behaviors, and 76 percent of women whose husbands manifest 5-6 of the given controlling behaviors. Further, rates of domestic violence are found to be lower for couples who share responsibility for household decisions than for couples in which the husband or the wife takes household decisions alone.

In examining the health effects of violence the report finds that in most countries women who have ever experienced violence are less likely to have had a birth that was wanted at the time of conception and have a higher likelihood of having had a non-live birth. While the experience of violence tends to be associated with slightly higher rates of ever use of contraception, the data suggest higher rates of contraceptive discontinuation among women who have experienced violence and higher unmet need. Self-reported prevalence of STIs is also higher among women who have experienced violence than among women who have not.

Women are not the only ones to suffer health-related repercussions from domestic violence. Starting from conception, children of mothers who have experienced violence are also at disproportionate risk for poor health outcomes. In many countries, mothers who have experienced violence are less likely to receive antenatal care in the first trimester of their pregnancy and to have under-five mortality rates that are higher than for mothers who have not experienced any violence. Further, the proportion of children age 12-35 months that is fully vaccinated against childhood diseases is higher by 5-10 percent among mothers who have not experienced violence than among mothers who have in Colombia, Egypt, Nicaragua, and Peru; it is higher by 38 percent in India, and by 49 percent in the Dominican Republic.