The Role of Socioeconomic Factors on Women’s Risk of Being Exposed to Intimate Partner Violence

Abstract

The most important thing learned about intimate partner violence (IPV) over the last 20 years is that violence is gendered and can be learned after faced and can only be understood in the context of gender inequality. To promote gender equality, a number of legal reforms and policies have been put in place over the last decade. The main problem is that there is relationship between all the socioeconomic and demographic factors. This begs the question, does the high educational level, social and economic status of a woman put her at lower risk of experiencing domestic violence? The study hypothesizes that those socioeconomic factors such as literacy, political rights, urbanization, laws against violence, the annual income of women, and the number of women in the labor force can affect IPV prevalence. The study uses secondary data concerning socioeconomic factors from 26 predominantly Muslim countries in Asia-Pacific and North Africa. Findings from the study show that socioeconomic factors such as literacy, political rights, a higher level of urbanization, and the laws against violence have significant impacts and may decrease the prevalence of IPV. However, other socioeconomic factors such as the annual income of women and increased women in the labor force produced unclear results. The test for collinearity on the impacts of each socioeconomic factor against one another was found to be insignificant.