Addressing gender-based violence in the Latin American and Caribbean Region : A critical review of interventions

The authors present an overview of gender-based violence (GBV) in Latin America, with special emphasis on good practice interventions to prevent GBV or offer services to its survivors or perpetrators. Intimate partner violence and sexual coercion are the most common forms of GBV, and these are the types of GBV that they analyze. GBV has serious consequences for women's health and well-being, ranging from fatal outcomes, such as homicide, suicide, and AIDS-related deaths, to nonfatal outcomes, such as physical injuries, chronic pain syndrome, gastrointestinal disorders, complications during pregnancy, miscarriage, and low birth-weight of children. GBV also poses significant costs for the economies of developing countries, including lower worker productivity and incomes, and lower rates of accumulation of human and social capital. The authors examine good practice approaches in justice, health, education, and multisectoral approaches. In each sector, they identify good practices for: (1) law and policies; (2) institutional reforms; (3) community-level interventions; and (4) individual behavior change strategies.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Gender and Development,Gender and Social Development,Public Health Promotion,Children and Youth,Adolescent Health,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Youth and Governance,Gender and Social Development,Children and Youth

Preventing and responding to gender-based violence in middle and low-income countries : a global review and analysis

Worldwide, patterns of violence against women differ markedly from violence against men. For example, women are more likely than men to be sexually assaulted or killed by someone they know. The United Nations has defined violence against women as"gender-based"violence, to acknowledge that such violence is rooted in gender inequality and is often tolerated and condoned by laws, institutions, and community norms. Violence against women is not only a profound violation of human rights, but also a costly impediment to a country's national development. While gender-based violence occurs in many forms throughout the life cycle, this review focuses on two of the most common types-physical intimate partner violence and sexual violence by any perpetrator. Unfortunately, the knowledge base about effective initiatives to prevent and respond to gender-based violence is relatively limited. Few approaches have been rigorously evaluated, even in high-income countries. And such evaluations involve numerous methodological challenges. Nonetheless, the authors review what is known about more and less effective-or at least promising-approaches to prevent and respond to gender-based violence. They present definitions, recent statistics, health consequences, costs, and risk factors of gender-based violence. The authors analyze good practice initiatives in the justice, health, and education sectors, as well as multisectoral approaches. For each of these sectors, they examine initiatives that have addressed laws and policies, institutional reforms, community mobilization, and individual behavior change strategies. Finally, the authors identify priorities for future research and action, including funding research on the health and socioeconomic costs of violence against women, encouraging science-based program evaluations, disseminating evaluation results across countries, promoting investment in effective prevention and treatment initiatives, and encouraging public-private partnerships.

Violence against women in relation to literacy and area of residence in Ethiopia

Objective: This study explores violence against women in a low-income setting in relation to residency and literacy. Setting: The study was conducted within the Butajira Rural Health Programme (a Health and Demographic Surveillance Site), which includes rural and semi-urban settings in south-central Ethiopia. Design: This is a community-based cross-sectional study and is part of the WHO Women's Health and Life Events multi-country study. It included 1,994 randomly selected married women. Methods: A standardised WHO questionnaire was used to measure physical violence, residency, literacy of the woman and her spouse, and attitudes of women about gender roles and violence. Analyses present prevalence with 95% confidence intervals and odds ratios derived from bivariate and multivariate logistic regression models. Results: In urban and rural areas of the study area, the women were of varying ages, had varying levels of literacy and had spouses with varying levels of literacy. Women in the overall study area had beliefs and norms favouring violence against women, and women living in rural communities and illiterate women were more likely to accept such attitudes. In general, violence against women was more prevalent in rural communities. In particular, violence against rural literate women and rural women who married a literate spouse was more prevalent. Literate rural women who were married to an illiterate spouse had the highest odds (Adj. OR=3.4; 95% CI: 1.7–6.9) of experiencing physical violence by an intimate partner. Conclusion: Semi-urban lifestyle and literacy promote changes in attitudes and norms against intimate partner violence; however, within the rural lifestyle, literate women married to illiterate husbands were exposed to the highest risks of violence

Catalyzing personal and social change around gender, sexuality, and HIV: Impact evaluation of Puntos de Encuentro´s communication strategy in Nicaragua

Somos Diferentes, Somos Iguales (SDSI) is a communication for social change strategy whose objective is to prevent future HIV infections in Nicaragua, through mass communication actions that include educational entertainment programs, strengthening of local capacity, and the development of alliances within the communities. This report presents the results of an interinstitutional evaluation to explore the impact of SDSI on gender equity, stigma reduction, personalization of risk perception, knowledge and use of services, interpersonal communication, HIV prevention practices, and individual and collective effectiveness for HIV prevention. The impact evaluation showed that the SDSI strategy made a great contribution in key aspects of HIV prevention. In addition to individual changes in behavior directly associated with greater exposure to SDSI and changes at the social level identified in qualitative studies, the results validate the conceptual framework, of both the intervention and the evaluation

Intimate partner violence and depression among women in rural Ethiopia: a cross-sectional study

Background: Studies from high-income countries have shown intimate partner violence to be associated with depression among women. The present paper examines whether this finding can be confirmed in a very different cultural setting in rural Ethiopia. Method: A community-based cross-sectional study was undertaken in Ethiopia among 1994 currently married women. Using the Composite International Diagnostic Interview (CIDI), cases of depressive episode were identified according to the ICD-10 diagnosis. Using a standardized questionnaire, women who experienced violence by an intimate partner were identified. A multivariate analysis was conducted between the explanatory variables and depressive status of the women, after adjusting for possible confounders. Results: The 12-month prevalence of depressive episode among the women was 4.8% (95% CI, 3.9% and 5.8%), while the lifetime prevalence of any form of intimate partner violence was 72.0% (95% CI, 70.0% and 73.9%). Physical violence (OR = 2.56, 95% CI, 1.61, 4.06), childhood sexual abuse (OR = 2.00, 95% CI, 1.13, 3.56), mild emotional violence (OR = 3.19, 95% CI, 1.98, 5.14), severe emotional violence (OR = 3.90, 95% CI, 2.20, 6.93) and high spousal control of women (OR = 3.30, 95% CI, 1.58, 6.90) by their partners were independently associated with depressive episode, even after adjusting for socioeconomic factors. Conclusion: The high prevalence of intimate partner violence, a factor often obscured within general life event categories, requires attention to consider it as an independent factor for depression, and thus to find new possibilities of prevention and treatment in terms of public health strategies, interventions and service provision. © 2009 Deyessa et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd

A Quantum-Conceptual Explanation of Violations of Expected Utility in Economics

The expected utility hypothesis is one of the building blocks of classical economic theory and founded on Savage's Sure-Thing Principle. It has been put forward, e.g. by situations such as the Allais and Ellsberg paradoxes, that real-life situations can violate Savage's Sure-Thing Principle and hence also expected utility. We analyze how this violation is connected to the presence of the 'disjunction effect' of decision theory and use our earlier study of this effect in concept theory to put forward an explanation of the violation of Savage's Sure-Thing Principle, namely the presence of 'quantum conceptual thought' next to 'classical logical thought' within a double layer structure of human thought during the decision process. Quantum conceptual thought can be modeled mathematically by the quantum mechanical formalism, which we illustrate by modeling the Hawaii problem situation, a well-known example of the disjunction effect, and we show how the dynamics in the Hawaii problem situation is generated by the whole conceptual landscape surrounding the decision situation.Comment: 9 pages, no figure

A dynamic mechanism and surplus extraction under ambiguity

We study the question of auction design in an IPV setting characterized by ambiguity. We assume that the preferences of agents exhibit ambiguity aversion; in particular, they are represented by the epsilon-contamination model. We show that a simple variation of a discrete Dutch auction can extract almost all surplus. This contrasts with optimal auctions under IPV without ambiguity as well as with optimal static auctions with ambiguity—in all of these, types other than the lowest participating type obtain a positive surplus. An important point of departure is that the modified Dutch mechanism is dynamic rather than static, establishing that under ambiguity aversion—even when the setting is IPV in all other respects—a dynamic mechanism can have additional bite over its static counterparts. A further general insight is that the standard revelation principle does not automatically extend to environments not characterized by subjective expected utility

Learning to Generate Ambiguous Sequences

In this paper, we experiment with methods for obtaining binary sequences with a random probability mass function and with low autocorrelation and use it to generate ambiguous outcomes. Outputs from a neural network are mixed and shuffled, resulting in binary sequences whose probability mass function is non-convergent, constantly moving and changing. Empirical comparison with algorithms that generate ambiguity shows that the sequences generated by the proposed method have a significantly lower serial dependence. Therefore, the method is useful in scenarios where observes can see and record the outcome of each draw sequentially, by hindering the ability to make useful statistical inferences

Projective Expected Utility

Motivated by several classic decision-theoretic paradoxes, and by analogies with the paradoxes which in physics motivated the development of quantum mechanics, we introduce a projective generalization of expected utility along the lines of the quantum-mechanical generalization of probability theory. The resulting decision theory accommodates the dominant paradoxes, while retaining significant simplicity and tractability. In particular, every finite game within this larger class of preferences still has an equilibrium.Comment: 7 pages, to appear in the Proceedings of Quantum Interaction 200