Domestic Violence and Intra-household bargaining

project summary

<strong>Abstract:</strong> Violence against women is a serious problem in many developing countries, and Tanzania has a higher than average of prevalence of violence against women compared to other Sub-Saharan countries. There are both equity and efficiency reasons for policy makers to take violence against women seriously. In order to mitigate violence against women it is crucial to have an understanding of the underlying mechanisms that affect it. The purpose of the paper is to assess how increased social and economic autonomy influence attitudes and the prevalence of domestic violence, and how norms and behaviors are transmitted between generations. We combine the framework of Aizer (2010) and Eswaran and Malhotra (2008) to estimate the impact of autonomy on attitudes and prevalence of domestic violence. Our concept of autonomy includes a woman’s threat point, intra-relationship bargaining power and self-perception, which distinguish it from previous work on bargaining theory and domestic violence. In our model of cultural transmission we extend the framework of Mavrokonstantis (2015) to also include oblique transmission. We use data from six villages around Bagamoyo and Lake Victoria, and six secondary schools in the Dar Es Salaam area in Tanzania, which was collected during a field study in 2018. We use OLS to estimate the effect of increased autonomy on domestic violence, and find that an increase in autonomy decreases the prevalence and justification of domestic violence. We use OLS to examine the relative importance of three cultural transmission mechanisms: vertical, horizontal, and oblique. We find evidence for all three transmission mechanisms in the school sample. In the vertical transmission model we find that fathers have a positive effect on the probability of holding negative attitudes, and the opposite for mothers. In the horizontal transmission model we find a large positive effect, implying that when friends or classmates in a student’s surroundings hold negative attitudes this increases the probability of having such attitudes. In the oblique transmission model we find that having witnessed a male relative other than the father physically hurt his wife increases the probability of holding negative attitudes. In the adult sample we only find evidence of vertical transmission, measured by whether the respondent’s father has physically hurt the respondent’s mother. Here we find a large positive effect on the prevalence as well as justification of domestic violence for women, with a larger effect for the justification of violence. For men we find a significant positive effect on the justification of violence. The magnitude of the coefficient is about 40 percent smaller for men compared to women. Our results are robust to a number of different specifications, including a Probit estimation. The results suggest that by empowering women, policymakers can reduce violence directly through the autonomy of the woman, and indirectly through her impact on the attitudes of her children.