acase@tulane.edu / Background
Violence against women (VAW) is a global epidemic, estimated to affect between 10-60% of all women at some point during their life. VAW is associated with a host of poor physical, emotional, and reproductive health outcomes and is a significant financial burden.. Displaced populations are theorized to be particularly at risk, though little quality evidence to back up this claim exists thus far. Haiti presents a unique opportunity to analyze the effect of displacement due to the recent earthquake on experience of various forms of IPV. The effect of displacement on various forms of IPV (physical, emotional, and sexual) were analyzed to understand whether women who were displaced were at greater risk of experience of IPV and sexual assault.
Methods
Two waves of Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data were used to analyze the association between displacement and experience of intimate partner violence as well as forced sex. Various individual-level controls were also included. Outcome variables were all binary, with the exception of an ordinal variable that classified severity of physical IPV. Difference-in-Difference logit and multinomial logit regressions were performed. Where appropriate, bootstrapping, propensity score weighting, and sub-group analyses techniques were also used.
Results
There was a marginally significant relationship between women who were displaced after the 2010 earthquake and physical IPV, but the risk did not change significantly between waves. For all outcomes, displacement was not significant. In the multinomial logit model, using no experience of physical violence as the comparison group, displaced women were significantly more likely to experience less severe forms of physical IPV. Education, while a significant protective factor prior to the earthquake, became far less protective in a post-disaster context.
Conclusion
This study added to the limited research done on post-disaster displacement and various forms of GBV. The results indicate that women who were displaced in Haiti after the earthquake were not necessarily at increased risk of VAW compared to non-displaced Haitians. This is in line with the existing data that did have a comparison group, and indicates that displacement in and of itself is not significant risk factor for IPV and sexual assaults. Further high-quality research is needed to fully understand the relationship between disasters and VAW. / 1 / Nicholas John Thomas
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TULANE/oai:http://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/:tulane_75470 |
| Date | January 2017 |
| Contributors | Thomas, Nicholas (author), Gage, Anastasia (Thesis advisor), School of Public Health & Tropical Medicine Global Health Management and Policy (Degree granting institution) |
| Publisher | Tulane University |
| Source Sets | Tulane University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | electronic, 187 |
| Rights | No embargo, Copyright is in accordance with U.S. Copyright law. |
Page generated in 0.0019 seconds