Education and Intimate Partner Violence in Peru

Purpose: Intimate Partner Violence has a negative impact on many health and well-being indicators both for a woman and her children. The power-imbalance theory of domestic violence suggests that where there is a difference in status between partners, domestic violence will be more likely. As education is an important status variable, according to this theory, educational homogamy or parity should be a protective factor, whereas significant disparity should pose a risk. Little work has been done to investigate the effects of the male partner’s education on the risk of domestic violence, especially in low- and middle- income countries. Furthermore, studies often look at the presence of domestic violence as a simple binary variable, without taking into account the severity of the violence. This study addresses this gap, using the revised Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS2) to investigate factors that differentiate less-severe from severe domestic violence, and discusses the results in light of the power-imbalance theory of domestic violence.

Methods: The sample of 13,384 women was taken from the 2012 Peru Demographic and Health Survey (DHS). The Peru 2012 DHS contains a robust domestic violence module covering emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, making it an excellent dataset with which to study the effects of education on domestic violence. Multinomial logistic regression was used to determine the relative risk ratios of experiencing IPV given various educational and demographic variables, as well as known IPV risk factors.

Results: Approximately 37% of women reported experiencing physical or sexual IPV at some point in their lives. An increase in a woman’s years of education was associated with a lower risk of severe IPV as compared to less-severe domestic violence, but did not significantly predict the presence or absence of IPV. The male partner’s years of education has a curvilinear relationship with the probability of a woman experiencing IPV. Increased education for male partners is consistently protective against severe/severe  domestic violence, but likelihood of experiencing less-severe IPV actually increased with each year of education up until the middle of high school. Educational homogamy does not appear to significantly predict IPV.  Cohabitation, low socioeconomic status, early union formation, urban residence, male partner’s drinking habits, and the woman’s violence against her partner were found to be significant risk factors.

Implications: Our findings suggest that increased education for women and men can help to lower the risk of physical and sexual IPV. More research is needed to better understand the impact of men’s education on the severity of IPV, and especially how interventions can strengthen its protective effect. The lack of significance of educational homogamy does not seem to fit with the power-imbalance theory of IPV or the literature on educational homogamy. In the Peruvian context, the increased education of individuals - rather than the couple’s educational parity - seems to be an important factor for decreasing domestic violence. Results pertaining to prevalence of IPV among certain demographic groups (urban, low SES, cohabiting couples) may serve to focus intervention efforts.