Profiling domestic violence: a multi-country study

Profiling Domestic Violence: A Multi-Country Study Calverton, MD: ORC Macro (2004), 120 pages.

This report, from the series of DHS Analytical Studies, uses household and individual-level data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) program to examine the prevalence and correlates of domestic violence and its health consequences for women and their children in nine countries: Cambodia (2000), Colombia (2000), the Dominican Republic (2002), Egypt (1995), Haiti (2000), India (1998-99), Nicaragua (1998), Peru (2000), and Zambia (2001-02). Violence against women has been acknowledged internationally as a threat to the health and rights of women and to national development only within the past 30 years. The DHS program began to collect information on the prevalence of domestic violence within the context of the household in the early 1990s. Not until late in that decade, however, did the program develop a standard module of survey questions in consultation with experts on measurement of domestic violence, gender, and survey research. The proportions of ever-married women reporting spousal or Intimate partner violence vary from country to country. They are highest at 48 percent in Zambia, 44 percent in Colombia, and 42 percent in Peru, and they are lowest at 18 percent in Cambodia, 19 percent in India, and 22 percent in the Dominican Republic. In Egypt and Nicaragua, about one in three ever-married women reports having experienced domestic violence. Women who had ever been pregnant were asked about their experience of violence during pregnancy. The proportions of women who reported spousal abuse during pregnancy were highest in Colombia and Nicaragua at 11 percent and lowest in Cambodia at I percent, with Haiti and the Dominican Republic at 5 percent. In five of the nine countries included in this report, data on domestic violence were collected by asking about several discrete acts of violence that can be categorized as primarily physical, emotional, or sexual in nature. In all five of these countries, the most frequently reported acts of physical violence were being pushed, shaken, slapped, targeted with a thrown object, or having one's arm twisted. In all countries, more than one in six women report having experienced at...