Empowerment and IPV at the Community Level

Intimate partner violence (IPV), although committed at the individual or household level, is a community-level phenomenon. It is the social norms, local culture, and patriarchal structures that justify such violence and provide further stimulus for it through peer behaviour. The violence is legitimized at the community level through a collective process of pinning the blame on the victim so that it is the women who have to face social stigma. Further, communities are often nested within a hierarchical structure. This chapter examines the relationship between empowerment and intimate partner violence (IPV) at the community level in India using spatial statistical methods. We use exploratory methods like quantile and excess risk maps, Global Moran’s I, Getis–Ord statistics, and Multivariate Geary statistics. It is followed by the estimation of spatial regression models and Geographically Weighted Regression models. Results validate the positive impact of empowerment on reducing IPV observed at the individual level in Chap. 3 .