Factors associated with recent intimate partner violence: findings from WHO multi-country study

 This paper drawing on research from the WHO multi-country study on women’s health and domestic violence sought to identify factors that are consistently associated with abuse across sites, in order to inform the design of IPV prevention programs.

 The main findings, recently published in the open access journal BMC Public Health are that:

• despite wide variations in the prevalence of IPV, many factors affect IPV risk similarly across sites.
• as far as IPV is concerned, high socio-economic status (SES) and formal marriage offer protection to women.
• alcohol abuse, cohabitation, young age, attitudes supportive of wife beating, having outside sexual partners and growing up with domestic violence increase the risk of IPV.
• similarly, experiencing or perpetrating other forms of violence in adulthood increase the risk of IPV.
• since risk of IPV is highest in younger women, schools are an important setting for primary prevention activities.
• particularly, schools have the potential to address issues of relationships, gender roles, power and coercion within existing youth violence and bullying programmes.

These findings are published in: :

Abramsky,T.; Watts,C.H.; Garcia-Moreno,C.et al.What factors are associated with recent intimate partner violence: findings from the WHO multi-country study on women’s health and domestic violence. BMC Public Health 2011, 11:109.

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