Status mismatch and self-reported intimate partner violence in the European Union: does the country’s context matter? Lynn van Vugt, Ioana Andreea. European Societies, May 6 2022. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616696.2022.2068184
Abstract: We explore whether status mismatch in education or income within couples is associated with self-reported intimate partner violence (IPV) and whether a country’s context relates to this. We used data collected by the ‘FRA Violence Against Women Survey’ in 2012, and we identified three dimensions of self-reported IPV: IPV via controlling behaviour, psychological IPV, and physical IPV. Based on logistic multilevel estimates of approximately 21,000 women in 27 European countries, we found that women, who were higher educated or earned more than their partners, were more likely to report all three types of IPV. We tested the impact of the societal context by looking at gender ideology, crime rates and the acceptance of domestic violence within a country. Our results suggest that only the level of crime directly impacts IPV, albeit only through controlling behaviour and psychological forms. Furthermore, none of the contextual characteristics moderate the relationship between status mismatch and IPV. Therefore, at least in our sample of European countries, the individual-level factors seem to weigh more than the societal context.
Keywords: Intimate partner violence against womenstatus mismatchcontextual factorsEuropean Union
Conclusion and discussion
In this study, we set out individual and contextual factors that relate to the levels of IPV in the EU. We used a novel dataset that collected information on self-reported IPV among women living in 27 EU countries. We identified three dimensions of IPV, i.e. IPV via controlling behaviour, psychological IPV and physical IPV. Based on logistic multilevel models, the following main conclusions were drawn.
First, we found that the relative resource theory was supported and that status mismatch does matter in explaining IPV. Women with a higher education level than their male partners were more likely to report IPV via controlling behaviour, psychological IPV and physical IPV than women who had the same or a lower education level than their male partners. The same holds for women who earned more than their male partners. Our findings were robust, and the corresponding effect sizes were moderate and slightly stronger for the educational mismatch than for the income mismatch. These results are in line with previous research from various countries (Atkinson et al. 2005; Weitzman 2014; Zhang and Breunig 2021), but add value by showing both the educational mismatch and income mismatch are relevant predictors, independent of each other. However, after including crime rates in the model, the relationship between income mismatch became not significant in relation to all three types of IPV, and education mismatch became insignificant in relation to self-reported psychological and physical IPV. Therefore, our results suggest that in countries with a stronger culture of violence, the relationship between status mismatch within the couple and IPV is suppressed.
Next, we showed that contextual factors matter in explaining self-reported IPV, although this is limited. Against our expectations, we found that in countries with higher crime rates, women were less likely to report IPV via controlling behaviour and psychological IPV than women living in countries with lower crime levels. We could think of different reasons: Firstly, a reason could be that for women living in countries with higher crime rates, violence is a legitimized way to manage social interaction within the family (McGloin et al. 2011; Ousey and Wilcox 2005). Women living in these countries could be more desensitized to violence because it occurs with a greater frequency in their daily lives and, therefore, will not interpret the controlling behaviour or psychological IPV from their partner as an experience of IPV. Secondly, another underlying mechanism for this could be for women in highly violent countries less acceptable to talk with other people about IPV, including the interviewer (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights [FRA] 2015). Thirdly, the measurement of crime rates itself could explain this finding. Previous research has shown that crime reporting differs across EU countries (Torrente et al. 2017), which could mean that the official statistics do not correctly reflect the level of crime within a country or the differences between the countries. With the data at hand, it is not possible to disentangle which of these arguments are behind our findings.
A more methodological conclusion regards the questions covering different aspects of IPV that were asked in the FRA survey. We found that not all items included in the questionnaire were meaningful in all countries, i.e. some questions referred to incidents that are so rare that in some countries, no variation in answers was recorded. Furthermore, after the equivalence tests were conducted, the final list of items that composed the three scales of IPV was limited compared to the initial list of items. This is not necessarily bad news, as it implies that it is possible to measure these dimensions of IPV with a limited number of questions. Additionally, we were able to establish that the three IPV scales exhibit cross-country equivalence, i.e. partial scalar invariance for psychological IPV and metric invariance for the other two. This is again good news, as it implies that these scales can be used within the set-up of regression analysis and will yield unbiased coefficients. We note, however, that the prevalence of cases of IPV was low, and this has implications for studies that more specifically want to identify and study its victims more in detail. This is also why we did not attempt to understand the intensity of IPV but focused on its prevalence.
This study has many limitations. First, self-reported violence had to be used, and the extent to which the reported IPV matches the actual experienced IPV is unknown (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights [FRA] 2015). However, even if we would have at our disposal statistics of reported IPV, one can argue that these figures are biased because many victims will not go to the police and file a complaint. This could be especially true for IPV via controlling behaviour and psychological IPV. Next, due to the low occurrence of IPV in the sample, we decided to examine IPV in the current relationship, without setting a time frame, for example, IPV occurring within the previous 12 months. Therefore, it could be possible that the education level of the woman was lower when the abuse occurred, but that the women had become more highly educated in the meanwhile (the same reasoning could follow for earnings). Furthermore, the IPV occurrence and the gravity of IPV manifestation could have common but also different precedents. Future research is warranted along these lines. In addition, future research should also examine the different relationships in which IPV occurs. In this investigation, heterosexual couples were investigated, and the questions regard situations in which the man abuses the woman. However, it is also recognized that bidirectional IPV exists or that women abuse their male partners (Dokkedahl and Elklit 2019) and IPV can also occur in lesbian and gay partnerships (e.g. see review: Rollè et al. 2018).
Our findings suggest that individual-level characteristics seem to be better predictors of IPV than the country’s context. However, we should consider that this could be related to the country sample in our analyses, i.e. European countries where IPV is largely not supported by the (formal or informal) institutions and with limited variation in the measures that we use to capture country-level characteristics. Possibly with a different country sample that includes societies where gender equality or the acceptance of domestic violence variables have more extreme values compared to the European countries, or using country-level averages and including the heterogeneity around those means (Ivert et al. 2020), our findings could be challenged.
The implications of our findings for the European level policy build on the conclusions regarding the importance that the individual-level factors, i.e. the education and income mismatch, still have for IPV. We propose that a substantial contribution to further decrease in IPV in Europe can be made in two ways: first by normalizing families where the women have higher income or education in the couple, and second by discouraging the use of violence as a legitimate way to manage social interaction within the family. How this can be achieved, is a question that we leave to behavioural change theorists and practitioners, as they could provide the understandings and the tools to support policy-makers in designing effective, focused interventions to achieve these goals.
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