3,406 research outputs found
What Works to Prevent Partner Violence? An Evidence Overview
Lori Heise reviews the empirical evidence of what works in low- and middle-income countries to prevent violence against women by their husbands and other male partners. The review focuses on prevention programmes rather than responses or services, and on research-based evaluations rather than insights from practice. Individual chapters cover: changing gender norms, childhood exposure to violence, excessive alcohol use, women’s economic empowerment, law and justice system reform. Heise summarises the evidence that links each factor with the risk of partner violence as well as the effectiveness of prevention programmes
How do area-level socioeconomic status and gender norms affect partner violence against women? Evidence from Tanzania.
: To explore how area-level socioeconomic status and gender-related norms influence partner violence against women in Tanzania. : We analysed data from the 2010 Tanzania Demographic and Health Survey and used multilevel logistic regression to estimate individual and community-level effects on women's risk of current partner violence. : Prevalence of current partner violence was 36.1 %; however, variation in prevalence exists across communities. Twenty-nine percent of the variation in the logodds of partner violence is due to community-level influences. When adjusting for individual-level characteristics, this variation falls to 10 % and falls further to 8 % when adjusting for additional community-level factors. Higher levels of women's acceptance towards wife beating, male unemployment, and years of schooling among men were associated with higher risk of partner violence; however, higher levels of women in paid work were associated with lower risk. : Area-level poverty and inequitable gender norms were associated with higher risk of partner violence. Empowerment strategies along with addressing social attitudes are likely to achieve reductions in rates of partner violence against women in Tanzania and in other similar low-income country settings.<br/
Determinants of partner violence in low and middle-income countries : exploring variation in individual and population-level risk
Background: Lack of understanding of factors that contribute to an individual woman's risk of partner
violence as well as factors that collectively account for the distribution of violence across settings,
continues to compromise efforts to design effective prevention programs. Likewise, key
methodological questions remain unanswered, most notably how best to conceptualize, capture,
and measure partner violence for the purposes of research. This thesis attempts to bridge these
gaps by analyzing the risk and protective factors of partner violence across a variety of low and
middle-income settings, with an emphasis on Brazil and Peru.
Methods: The analysis herein draws on data from the WHO Multi-Country Study of Domestic
Violence and Women's Health, a population-based survey that interviewed over 24,000
reproductive age women, in 15 sites about their experiences of violence. The thesis examines the
patterning of partner violence in Brazil and Peru and explores the relative utility of using Latent Class
analysis (LCA) compared with traditional WHO case definitions, to identify and classify cases of
partner violence. It then uses generalized estimating equations to develop an explanatory model of
the factors that best predict an individual woman's risk of experiencing severe partner violence, as
identified by LCA. Later chapters present two ecological analyses: one that identifies the cluster-
level factors in Brazil and Peru that emerge as most predictive of cluster-level prevalences of
domestic violence; and a second analysis that uses the full WHO data set, 18 Demographic and
Health Surveys, and a variety of United Nations and independent data bases to test various theories
on how macro-level factors work to influence a country's overall level of partner violence.
Results: LCA categorizes cases of partner violence differently than the WHO case definition,
although both tend to identify similar risk factors. The WHO approach, however, seriously
underestimates the effect size for cases of serious violence. Without further research it remains
unclear whether the categories identified through LCA represent fundamentally different "types" of
partner violence as suggested by some research in high income countries, or merely differential
groupings by serverity.
At an individual level, partner-related factors emerge as the most predictive of a woman's lifetime
risk of partner violence, including exposure to violence as a child, level of controlling behavior,
frequency of drunkenness, history of fights with other men and having outside sexual partners.
Marital conflict, having more than two children, living together versus being married, not completing
secondary school, and poor communication between the couple are also strongly associated with
partner violence in both Brazil and Peru.
At a cluster level, the proportion of women completing secondary school, norms around male
dominance, and the proportion of households in which a partner routinely comes home drunk are
among the strongest variables predicting the cluster-level mean of partner violence. At a macro
level, a range of variables related to women's status, gender inequality, social norms and overall
level of socio-economic development predict a country's prevalence of partner violence. in
multivariate analysis, norms related to the acceptability of wife beating and male control of female
behavior, as well as women's access to formal wage employment appear the most strongly linked to
the distribution of past year partner violence. A country's level of male drinking or male binge
2 drinking does not predict levels of abuse, illustrating that the factors that predict individual level risk
can be different from those that predict population-level risk.
Conclusion: The next generation of research should focus on longitudinal and mixed method studies
to help clarify the temporal associations among variables and identify how and why certain factors
emerge as markers for risk
Greentree II: Violence against Women and Girls, and HIV
Compiled and edited by Lori Heise and Elizabeth McGrory, this publication synthesizes the discussions and conclusions of a three-day expert consultation on the links between HIV and violence against women and girls (VAWG).
STRIVE convened the consultation with support from WHO, UNICEF, UNAIDS and the Greentree Foundation in order to:
- examine the existing evidence base on the links between VAWG and HIV and identify critical knowledge gaps
- develop a conceptual model that captures the potential pathways through which violence influences HIV-related outcomes
- propose a research agenda to resolve outstanding questions
-suggest priority actions for policy, programmes and researc
Cross-national and multilevel correlates of partner violence:an analysis of data from population-based surveys
Background On average, intimate partner violence aff ects nearly one in three women worldwide within their lifetime.
But the distribution of partner violence is highly uneven, with a prevalence of less than 4% in the past 12 months in
many high-income countries compared with at least 40% in some low-income settings. Little is known about the
factors that drive the geographical distribution of partner violence or how macro-level factors might combine with
individual-level factors to aff ect individual women’s risk of intimate partner violence. We aimed to assess the role that
women’s status and other gender-related factors might have in defi ning levels of partner violence among settings.
Methods We compiled data for the 12 month prevalence of partner violence from 66 surveys (88 survey years) from
44 countries, representing 481 205 women between Jan 1, 2000, and Apr 17, 2013. Only surveys with comparable
questions and state-of-the-art methods to ensure safety and encourage violence disclosure were used. With linear
and quantile regression, we examined associations between macro-level measures of socioeconomic development,
women’s status, gender inequality, and gender-related norms and the prevalence of current partner violence at a
population level. Multilevel modelling and tests for interaction were used to explore whether and how macro-level
factors aff ect individual-level risk. The outcome for this analysis was the population prevalence of current partner
violence, defi ned as the percentage of ever-partnered women (excluding widows without a current partner), aged
from 15 years to 49 years who were victims of at least one act of physical or sexual violence within the past 12 months.
Findings Gender-related factors at the national and subnational level help to predict the population prevalence of
physical and sexual partner violence within the past 12 months. Especially predictive of the geographical distribution
of partner violence are norms related to male authority over female behaviour (0·102, p<0·0001), norms justifying
wife beating (0·263, p<0·0001), and the extent to which law and practice disadvantage women compared with men in
access to land, property, and other productive resources (0·271, p<0·0001). The strong negative association between
current partner violence and gross domestic product (GDP) per person (–0·055, p=0·0009) becomes non-signifi cant
in the presence of norm-related measures (–0·015, p=0·472), suggesting that GDP per person is a marker for social
transformations that accompany economic growth and is unlikely to be causally related to levels of partner violence.
We document several cross-level eff ects, including that a girl’s education is more strongly associated with reduced
risk of partner violence in countries where wife abuse is normative than where it is not. Likewise, partner violence is
less prevalent in countries with a high proportion of women in the formal work force, but working for cash increases
a woman’s risk in countries where few women work.
Interpretation Our fi ndings suggest that policy makers could reduce violence by eliminating gender bias in ownership
rights and addressing norms that justify wife beating and male control of female behaviour. Prevention planners
should place greater emphasis on policy reforms at the macro-level and take cross-level eff ects into account when
designing interventions
Bright X-ray bursts from 1E 1724-3045 in Terzan 2
During about 3 years wide field monitoring of the Galactic Center region by
the WFC telescopes on board the BeppoSAX satellite, a total of 14 type-I X-ray
bursts were detected from the burster 1E 1724-3045 located in the globular
cluster Terzan 2. All the observed events showed evidence for photospheric
radius expansion due to Eddington-limit burst luminosity, thus leading to an
estimate of the source distance (~7.2 kpc). Preliminary results of the analysis
of the bursts are presented.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, Proc. 5th Compton Symp., Portsmouth 199
- …