Effect of gender based violence on women autonomy

Abstract

The objective of the project is to understand the effect of women autonomy in Indian households. For the purpose of the project, we define violence in its physical form (slapping, beating, etc) by husbands on their wives. And by autonomy, we refer to the degree of power women has on household related decisions – decisions that affect collective utility of household. This includes decisions that affect what to cook, house-hold purchases, healthcare expenses and whether the women can go out and live with her maternal family as per her wish. We start by exploring underlying theories that explain the relationship between violence and autonomy; from evolutionary to economics. This body will cover the scientific basis of why violence can affect women autonomy or otherwise. Often, from our quantitative analysis we’ll find out that violence seems to be correlated well with violence but the exact causal relationship as to how these variables are interacting is still under question. Using this basis, we will talk about few mathematical models that could explain relationship between violence and autonomy. After laying the theoretical work, we move to empirical analysis. Starting with quantitative techniques that can be used to explain causal relationships between explanatory and outcome variable. We explore IV methods, RCTs, and RD to give a view of some popular methods. Because we are looking at observational data from NFHS data-set; we set out to use IV methods for this work. We try to isolate the effect of autonomy on violence from violence to autonomy. As violence becomes endogenously determined in Indian household and the NFHS survey; we use height as an instrument variable to understand the effect of violence on autonomy. Since height is exogenously determined and affects the amount of violence a women experience; it satisfies the relevance criteria. Now to know if violence exclusively affects autonomy through violence is a little more difficult establish. However, authors in various literature don’t find any particular causal effects of height on autonomy apart from through violence. Under this domain of NFHS and IV methods, we look at past body of literature that have used such methods and data-set; then discuss it’s assumptions and findings in brief. After this discussion, we move on to results we got from NFHS 2015-2016 data set using similar tools and if inferences from the data have changed over time. In between, I will briefly talk about NFHS data set – to give readers a sense of background on it and how it was used for our project. I will then conclude the work by showing results, interpreting them and then giving a room for future work and discussion.