Environmental Disruption of Gender-Based Violence

• In Event: Gender and Violence in South Asia

Abstract

In this article, we seek to merge open questions regarding the relationship between economic development and gender inequality with an emerging literature on cultural change. In particular, we seek to explain why gender-inflected attitudes, beliefs, behaviors, and violence—“norms”—exhibit differential persistence across settings. To do so, we propose a three-part study. First, where we investigate the formation of these behaviors, characterizing which norms are relatively susceptible to change and identifying the most formative periods of life and the extent to which they vary across categories of norms. Second, we explore two particularly salient expressions of patriarchal domination: the hazards into child marriage and into domestic violence. Preliminary work finds that droughts which occur in the early years of a marriage perhaps counterintuitively reduce the hazard of first-time domestic violence by between 0.27 and 0.30 percentage points in the year of the drought’s occurrence, equivalent to a 6.8-7.4% reduction in the overall hazard into domestic violence. An emphasis is on identifying mechanisms for such an effect. Finally, future work seeks to measure how external shocks such as droughts may “disrupt” the intergenerational transmission of these norms by studying the competing interactions between inherited tradition and first-hand experience.

Author

• Tanushree Goyal, Princeton University