Bargaining or Backlash? Evidence on Intimate Partner Violence from the Dominican Republic

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the role of economic, political, and social factors in the incidence of intimate partner violence (IPV). It considers the extent to which two prominent theses on the determinants of IPV – (1) the household bargaining model (HBM), and (2) the male backlash model (MBM) – best explain this phenomenon in the case of the Dominican Republic. Drawing on the 2007 Demographic and Health Survey (DHS), which differentiates between physical and sexual IPV, results from logistic regressions reveal that the HBM better explains physical IPV, while the MBM better predicts sexual IPV. Further, the HBM does better accounting for IPV among wealthier women, while the MBM best explains IPV among poorer women. The findings suggest the need to reconsider broad programs and policies intended to prevent and ameliorate IPV in the Dominican Republic, and to implement targeted initiatives focusing on the economic factors motivating them.

KEYWORDS:

• Intimate partner violence
• household bargaining model
• male backlash model
• Dominican Republic
• Caribbean and Latin America

JEL Codes:

• B54
• J12
• 054

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We thank Carmen Diana Deere, James K. Boyce, Lisa Saunders, Sonia E. Alvarez, Joyce Jacobson, Cecilia A. Conrad, and Mary Lopez as well as the editors and anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this essay.

Notes

1 There are overlaps between the models given that the ability to engage in household bargaining that results from employment or home ownership may motivate male backlash, which, in turn, may motivate IPV to undermine a woman’s ability to maintain employment that she might leverage into household bargaining. Nevertheless, our argument is not that these are completely independent processes, but that they can be usefully distinguished; and to the extent that they can, there is value added in determining which process is more prevalent in IPV in the DR.

2 Finnoff (2010) also found that regions in Rwanda with higher levels of violence prior to the genocide had greater male backlash and a higher incidence of sexual violence afterward.

3 These questions were: Has your (last) husband/partner ever: Pushed, shaken, or thrown something at you? Hit you? Twisted your arm or pulled your hair? Punched you with his fist or with something that could hurt you? Kicked or dragged you across the floor? Tried to strangle or burn you? Threatened or hurt you with a knife, gun, or other weapon? Used physical force to have sexual relations although you did not want to engage in sexual intercourse? Forced you to engage in sexual acts that you do not approve of?

4 With respect to the former, Hattery notes that “IPV is not structured only by a system of patriarchy,” but “[i]t is also structured by a system of racial superiority and capitalism and of the intersections of these systems with patriarchy” (2009: 8). Regarding the latter, it is important to appreciate that systematic underreporting of IPV may be exacerbated for women due to the stigma associated with it that is reinforced by factors related not only to gender but to class, for example, such that wealthier women may report less IPV than they actually experience because of elitist views that IPV is more a problem of the poor.

5 Apart from the view that poverty may be a form of economic violence, some studies suggest that the higher incidence of IPV among the poor may be associated with the immediate psychological and material stresses of poverty (Heise 1998; Panda and Agarwal 2005).

6 Asset wealth data are assessed by household items, type of house, and other items owned at the household level.

7 Of the forty-one women in political organizations included in the data, sixteen are in the asset-poor category, thirteen in the middle asset category, and twelve in the asset-rich category.

8 Nevertheless, it is important to note, as Kimberlé Crenshaw does, that

[w]here systems of race, gender, and class domination converge, as they do in the experiences of battered women of color, intervention strategies based solely on the experiences of women who do not share the same class or race backgrounds will be of limited help to women who because of race and class face different obstacles (1991: 1246).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cruz Caridad Bueno

Cruz Caridad Bueno is Assistant Professor of Black Studies at the State University of New York, New Paltz. She is an economist specializing in economic development and the political economy of race, gender, and class inequality. She is recipient of the 2014 Rhonda Williams Prize from the International Association for Feminist Economics for her research on low-income black women workers and the correlates of gender violence in the Dominican Republic.

Errol A. Henderson

Errol A. Henderson is Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at Pennsylvania State University, where he teaches international relations, US foreign policy, the analysis of war and peace, and African politics. He has authored more than thirty scholarly publications including his latest book, African Realism? International Relations Theory and Africa’s Wars in the Postcolonial Era (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015).