The Impacts of Education on Domestic Violence: Evidence from China

ABSTRACT

Exploiting the Compulsory Schooling Law reform in China, this paper investigates the causal impact of education on the likelihood of women experiencing domestic violence from their spouse. The local average treatment effects (LATE) obtained through the instrument variables approach indicate that one additional year of schooling lowers women’s likelihood of experiencing physical and sexual abuse from their spouse by 7.1 and 3.4 percentage points, respectively. Further, we find that the causal impacts of education are more pronounced in the subsample of women who are less educated, women in rural areas, and women in regions with relatively lower human capital endowment prior to the reform. Additionally, we explore various channels and find that change in attitudes towards gender roles may be an important channel explaining the impact of increased female education on lowering domestic violence. We also address the possible bias caused by migration of individuals, and our results remain robust.

KEYWORDS:

• Education
• domestic violence
• compulsory schooling law
• gender norm
• china

Notes

¹ Entire report can be found at http://www.partners4prevention.org/about-prevention/research/men-and-violence-study.

² Before 1986, there was no policy stipulating compulsory basic education (6-year or 9-year). Although the central government had been emphasizing the necessity of implementing universal education since 1949, the implementation and development of primary compulsory education had been greatly hindered due to the influence of some historical events. In 1982, the ‘Constitution of the People’s Republic of China’ stipulated, ‘the state runs various schools and popularizes primary compulsory education’; however, this constitution was not strictly enforced. Therefore, the 1986 ‘Compulsory Schooling Law’ is the first and most important education law since the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

³ Although the Compulsory Schooling Law of 1986 gave school-age children the right to receive at least nine years of tuition-free education, the law has never been strictly enforced. The financial burden of compulsory education was mainly borne by the families. In order to reduce the educational burden of the poor and rural families, the government implemented a series of reforms in the 2000s: the ‘tuition control’ in 2001, followed by the ‘Two Exemption and One Subsidy (TEOS)’ reform in 2003, and finally the ‘free compulsory education’ reform in 2006, which exempted all rural students from paying tuition and miscellaneous fees (Xiao, Li, and Zhao 2017).

⁴ Since 2000 survey provides a more complete set of gender norm variables, we present our results based on 2000 survey data.

⁵ To save space, the channel analysis using a large set of these variables are not reported in the text, but available upon request.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Ministry of Education, China (grant No. 21YJA840015); the National Nature Science Fund of China (Grant No. 71874051 and 71703100).