Violence Begets Violence: Armed conflict and domestic sexual violence in Sub-Saharan Africa
Gudrun Østby ()
Additional contact information
Gudrun Østby: Peace Research Institute Oslo
No 233, HiCN Working Papers from Households in Conflict Network
Abstract:
While the study of the causes of civil conflict is a well-established sub-discipline in the conflict literature, less is known about how political violence affects society. Although the majority of the direct victims of war are men, women face more insidious challenges, such as difficulty in providing for families and coping with sexual violence. The consequences of a conflict in terms of sexual violence are not limited to the abuses performed by conflict actors, nor are they limited to the period when the conflict was active. Drawing on psychological theories, this paper argues that armed conflict can have negative consequences for sexual violence in the private sphere. Combining subnational data on armed conflict events with individual-level data on partner abuse from DHS surveys in 17 Sub-Saharan African countries for a total of 95,913 women aged 15-49, I analyse the impact of conflict intensity on intimate partner sexual violence (IPSV). Individual-level analyses show that there is an independent, significant effect of armed conflict intensity in the home region of the respondent as regards her risk of experiencing IPSV. This result is robust even when controlling for factors such as childhood exposure to parent violence and the husband’s alcohol consumption.
Keywords: Domestic violence; intimate partner sexual violence; armed conflict; GIS, DHS; Sub-Saharan Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 36 pages
Date: 2016-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)
Downloads: (external link)
http://www.hicn.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/HiCN-WP-233.pdf (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hic:wpaper:233
Access Statistics for this paper
More papers in HiCN Working Papers from Households in Conflict Network
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tilman Brück () and () and () and ().