Adhikary and Dutta

Domestic violence and its determinants

In this section we have explained the expected relation of domestic violence with

its potential determinants. Specification and measurement of the selected variables

have also been presented here.

Domestic Violence (DVIO): Usually, women’s experience of hit, kick, slap or beat

by their husband or other family members is viewed as the incidence of domestic

violence against women. We have collected information whether the woman is

exposed to at least any one sort of these bitter experiences in the last six months or

not. We put value ‘1’ if the woman is victim of domestic violence and ‘0’ otherwise.

Therefore, the incidence of domestic violence is a binary variable. In this study

the incidence of domestic violence is dependent variable in the regression model.

The primary objective of this study is to explore the determinants of domestic

violence and to estimate their impacts on the incidence domestic violence. Let us

now discuss the potential determinants of domestic violence for the rural women.

Economic Empowerment (ECOEMP): Having more economic empowerment

implies to have more involvement in family decision making, more contribution in

family expenditure, less dependency on other and more voice against annoyance,

atrocities and negligence in the family. As a consequence the status of women

within family increases. We can, therefore, expect that with the increase in

economic empowerment the violence on woman decreases. This is the central

hypothesis of this study. We have measured ECOEMP formulating a weighted

economic empowerment index by applying the method of Principal Component

Analysis. A detail of formulation has been explained in section-4.

Political Empowerment (POLEMP): It may have a wider connotation in literature

of social science. It shows the level connectivity of woman in the society. The

simplest way of measuring the political empowerment is whether the person has

leadership power or not. Therefore, we are justified to make it as a dichotomous

variable. It takes value ‘1’ if the woman is a leader of any political party or any

organisation and ‘0’ otherwise. Politically empowered woman are expected to

have lower experience of domestic violence.

Age of Women (AGE): We have taken the age of woman as an important

determinant of domestic violence. As a woman grows older her importance in the

family increases and experience can teach her to raise voice against violence and

negligence and to fight for her own rights. Thus age of woman is a crucial factor to

determine the suffering from DVIO. The relation between the age of woman and

DVIO is expected to be negative i.e. the higher the age of the woman the lower is

the suffering from DVIO. Age of woman is a quantitative variable and we have

taken year as a measuring unit.

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