Does property ownership by women reduce domestic violence? A case of Latin America

ABSTRACT

It is widely believed that empowering women via various material means increases women’s outside options and, thereby, makes them less vulnerable to intimate partner violence. However, the effect of such empowerment on domestic violence could be subtle particularly in countries with pre-existing high tolerance to violence, weak law enforcement and male institutional domination. Using cross-sectional household-level survey data for Latin American countries, we test the effect of property ownership by women on domestic violence. The results show that a woman’s sole property ownership is not associated with less domestic violence against her; sometimes the correlation is even positive. However, married women who co-own the property are less likely to face domestic abuse by husbands.

KEYWORDS:

• Domestic violence
• property ownership
• women empowerment

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• D1
• J12
• J16

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The sexual abuse allegations against a once powerful Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein in 2017 triggered similar accusations against many prominent figures and generated widespread public condemnations.

2. Violence against women can take many forms. The 1994 United Nations General Assembly Resolution defined such violence as ‘Any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in physical, sexual, or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life.’ (United Nations General Assembly 1994).

3. For example, see Angelucci (2008), Bhattacharyya et al. (2011), Eswaran and Malhorta (2011), Kaukinen and Powers (2015), and Panda and Agarwal (2005) for an exhaustive discussion on the interplay between multitude of socio-economic factors and domestic violence against women in developing countries.

4. Full results for odds ratio are available from the authors upon request.

5. Bowlus and Seitz (2006) use Canadian data and find that even though men are slightly more likely to abuse nonworking wives, employment is a deterrent factor as long as it is taken up before the onset of abuse. Anderberg et al. (2016), using the UK’s Annual Population Survey, show that an increase in male unemployment reduces domestic violence. However, a rise in female unemployment augments the incidence of intimate partner violence.