Intimate partner violence under forced cohabitation and economic stress: Evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic

By Esther Arenas-Arroyo, Daniel Fernandez-Kranz, Natalia Nollenberger. Journal of Public Economics, 2020

161 citations recorded by the source corpus.

With the COVID-19 outbreak imposing stay at home and social distancing policies, warnings about the impact of lockdown and its economic consequences on domestic violence have surged. This paper disentangles the effect of forced cohabitation and economic stress on intimate partner violence. Using an online survey data set, we find a 23% increase of intimate partner violence during the lockdown. Our results indicate that the impact of economic consequences is twice as large as the impact of lockdown. We also find large but statistically imprecise estimates of a large increase of domestic violence when the relative position of the man worsens, especially in contexts where that position was already being threatened. We view our results as consistent with the male backlash and emotional cue effects.

Subfields: Demography, Gender Studies, Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7deddbf146924e1a8856c31833090ce3b981560a

Citations in the corpus

• Global prevalence and burden of depressive and anxiety disorders in 204 countries and territories in 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic (2021, unknown): “20,21 We also estimated greater change in the prevalence of major depressive disorder and anxiety disorders among younger age groups than among older age groups.”