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/

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

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

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