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Intimate partner violence and female property rights

Abstract

Intimate partner violence (IPV) affects 30% of ever-partnered women worldwide. This study demonstrates how stronger female marital property rights can lead to lower levels of IPV. If women are financially protected outside of marriage, they in turn experience lower levels of violence inside marriage. Using a natural experiment from the colonization of Sub-Saharan Africa, this study aims to isolate the direct effect of large-scale changes to women’s property rights from other IPV risk factors. The findings show that more equitable marital property rights could both reduce the incidence of IPV and also increase women’s own condemnation of the violence. The empirical estimates suggest that legal property reform could render at least 12 million women less vulnerable to IPV across Sub-Saharan Africa.

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Fig. 1: Split ethnic groups and legal systems.
Fig. 2: IPV experience by ethnicity.
Fig. 3: IPV experience and beliefs.

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Data Availability

Replication data are available on the author’s website:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jYMALcPdqU6ZB0FXzXdonMoFuJc1p-MG/view. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code Availability

Replication code is available on the authors website:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jYMALcPdqU6ZB0FXzXdonMoFuJc1p-MG/view. Source data are provided with this paper.

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Acknowledgements

The author received no specific funding for this work.

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Authors

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S.A. conceived the research, put together the data, conducted the analyses and wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Siwan Anderson.

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The author declares no competing interests.

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Peer review information: Nature Human Behaviour thanks Lori Heise, Nathan Nunn and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

Primary Handling Editor: Aisha Bradshaw.

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Anderson, S. Intimate partner violence and female property rights. Nat Hum Behav 5, 1021–1026 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01077-w

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