Socioeconomic factors and intimate partner violence: A household survey

Abstract

This study aimed to describe the prevalence of intimate partner violence in a community sample, as well as identify associations between these behaviors and socioeconomic factors. Given the predominance of these studies in high-income countries, more investigations are needed in low-and middle-income countries. The prevalence of types of intimate partner violence was investigated in a probabilistic sample of 532 women between 18 and 60 years. A sociodemographic questionnaire and The Revised Conflict Tactics Scales (CTS2) were used. Considering recent episodes, the rates of women victimized by their partners were: 48.31%, 10.81% and 7.79%, for psychological, physical and sexual violence, respectively. The rates of these modalities of violence perpetrated by the women were 51.89%, 13.73% and 4.47%, respectively. Logistic regressions indicated that higher educational and socioeconomic levels are associated with a lower likelihood of women being victims or perpetrators of violence. According to the literature, these factors represent nonlinear influences on violence between partners, however, are important for developing intervention strategies for this problem.