DOES INCREASING WOMEN'S EDUCATION REDUCE THEIR RISK OF INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE? EVIDENCE FROM AN EDUCATION POLICY REFORM

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9125.12181
• Published date: 01 August 2018
• Author: ABIGAIL WEITZMAN
• Date: 01 August 2018

DOES INCREASING WOMEN’S EDUCATION REDUCE

THEIR RISK OF INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE?

EVIDENCE FROM AN EDUCATION POLICY REFORM∗

ABIGAIL WEITZMAN

Department of Sociology and Population Research Center, University

of Texas—Austin

KEYWORDS: intimate partner violence, Latin America, family violence, victimization

Although scholars have employed rigorous causal methods to examine the relation-

ship between education and crime, few of them have taken a causal approach to the

study of education and intimate partner violence (IPV) specifically. From a social

causation perspective, improving women’s education should protect them from vio-

lence, yet from a social selection perspective, education could proxy for unobserved

factors that explain negative associations between education and IPV. In this study,

I adjudicate between the two possibilities using an exogenous source of variation in

education—a 1990s compulsory schooling reform in Peru. Specifically, I conduct an

instrumented regression discontinuity that implicitly controls for women’s unobserved

endowments by comparing women who were aged slightly younger (N=8,195) and

slightly older (N=6,645) than the school-age cutoff at the time of the reform. Consis-

tent with the social causation perspective, increasing women’s schooling reduced both

their recent and longer term probabilities of psychological, physical, and sexual IPV, as

well as their recent and longer term probabilities of experiencing any IPV and polyvic-

timization. The results of supplemental mediation analyses provide support for three

interrelated causal pathways—improvements in women’s personal resources, delayed

family formation, and changes in partner selection. These findings confirm the protec-

tive effects of women’s education and further illuminate the mechanistic processes by

which this occurs.

The effects of educational expansion on crime in the United States and Europe

are well documented—numerous scholars have found that increasing formal school-

ing reduces rates of property crime, violent crime perpetrated against strangers, and

white-collar crime (Hjalmarsson, Holmlund, and Lindquist, 2015; Lochner, 2004, 2007,

2011; Machin, Marie, and Vuji´

c, 2011, 2012; Meghir, Palme, and Schnabel, 2012;

Moretti, 2005), as well as corresponding conviction and incarceration rates (Hjalmarsson,

Holmlund, and Lindquist, 2015; Machin, Marie, and Vuji´

c, 2011, 2012). Nevertheless,

few scholars have investigated the consequences of educational expansion outside the

∗This research was conducted while the author was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michi-

gan, with support from a training grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of

Child Health and Human Development (T32 AG000221).

Please direct all correspondence to Abigail Weitzman, Population Research Center, CLA 2.708C,

The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712-1086 (e-mail: aweitzman@utexas.edu).

C2018 American Society of Criminology doi: 10.1111/1745-9125.12181

CRIMINOLOGY Volume 56 Number 3 574–607 2018 574

COMPULSORY SCHOOLING AND INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE 575

United States or Europe or have considered the link between educational expansion and

intimate partner violence (IPV) specifically. Although some scholars have asserted that

IPV and other types of crime share a similar etiology (Fagan and Wexler, 1987; Felson,

2006; Felson and Lane, 2010), other scholars have disagreed (R. E. Dobash et al., 2004;

Moffitt et al., 2000; Thomas, Dichter, and Matejkowski, 2011). Whether educational ex-

pansion has an analogous effect on IPV, particularly with respect to IPV victimization,

and if so, why this occurs, thus, remain open questions. In this study, I draw on a 1990s

compulsory schooling reform in Peru to investigate the individual-level effects of in-

creasing women’s schooling on their risk of IPV victimization in the Latin American

context.

Many scholars view IPV as a form of gender-based violence in which men, more than

women, use violence to maintain power within their relationships (Atkinson, Greenstein,

and Lang, 2005; R. E. Dobash et al., 2004; R. P. Dobash et al., 1992; Weitzman, 2014).

Some scholars, however, assert that IPV is more appropriately conceptualized as a violent

form of dyadic conflict in which men and women often both partake (Bartholomew and

Cobb, 2010; Dutton, 2012; Felson, 2006; Felson et al., 2015; Moffitt, Robins, and Caspi,

2001). Still, others argue that both conceptualizations may be accurate given that IPV can

occur for different reasons in different relationships (Johnson, 1995; Kelly and Johnson,

2008).

Irrespective of how IPV is conceptualized, many scholars have suggested that women’s

education is protective against it (Ackerson et al., 2008; Flake, 2005; Friedemann-S´

anchez

and Lovat ´

on, 2012; Jewkes, 2002; Perales et al., 2009), a notion I refer to as the “social

causation perspective” (figure 1a). Yet there is also reason to believe that certain circum-

stances that lead women to achieve more schooling also affect their risk of IPV (whether

gender based or dyadic). For instance, having a father who holds a traditional gender

ideology may simultaneously make a woman more likely to leave school early and more

likely to enter or stay in an abusive or unhappy relationship than if she had a father who

possessed a comparatively more egalitarian ideology. In other words, it remains possible

that observed negative relationships between women’s education and IPV are explained

by omitted characteristics of women and their circumstances, giving rise to the possibility

of social selection (figure 1b).1

Indeed several scholars have found no association between women’s education

and IPV (Hindin and Adair, 2002; Panda and Agarwal, 2005; Schuler et al., 1996),

or that the association disappears once other characteristics of women and their

households are controlled for (Bangdiwala et al., 2004; Bhattacharyya, Bedi, and

Chhachhi, 2011; see Vyas and Watts [2009] for a thorough review of the de-

bate). The results of these studies have suggested one of two possibilities. Ei-

ther the effects of women’s education are mediated by subsequent outcomes in

women’s lives, such as employment and family formation, or the commonly ob-

served negative relationship between women’s education and IPV is a function of

unobserved characteristics, such as features of their childhood households, that simul-

taneously contribute to their educational attainment (Cueto et al., 2014; Dercon and

Krishnan, 2009; Gertler and Glewwe, 1992) and later risk of IPV (figure 1b; Bangdiwala

et al., 2004; Hoffman, Demo, and Edwards, 1994).

1. “Social causation” and “social selection” have been used to characterize similar debates about the

effects of education on other outcomes such as mental health (Halpern-Manners et al., 2016).

576 WEITZMAN

Figure 1. Theoretical Relationships Between Women’s Education

and Intimate Partner Violence

(a)

(b)

Causal mechanisms/ potential mediators

Simultaneous selection

Background characteris tics (e.g.,

childhood socioeconomic status,

parents’ gender ideology, self-

esteem, and other unobservable

endowments)

Education

Intimate partner violenc e

Education Intimate partner violence

Family formation

Women’s resources

Attitudes toward

violence

Partner selection

This study serves as one of the first explicit tests of whether women’s education has

a causal effect on intimate partner violence and further adjudicates between potential

mechanisms by which this effect could occur. To evade the problem of selection bias

(where education and IPV are both a function of preexisting, unobserved factors), I ex-

ploit an exogenous source of variation in education—a compulsory schooling reform in

Peru that extended the mandated years of schooling by 5 years but only for children still

enrolled in primary school at the time. Specifically, I use a strategy known as an instru-

mented or “fuzzy” regression discontinuity that compares IPV rates among women who

were slightly younger than the primary school-age completion threshold in 1993, when

the reform was enacted, to those slightly older than it. This strategy isolates the effects

of education while implicitly controlling for all potential confounders (for examples, see:

Behrman, 2015a, 2015b; Grant, 2015; Ozier, 2016; Weitzman, 2017). To discern between

various mechanisms, I conduct a supplemental mediation analysis. Taken together, these

analyses help to reconcile discrepant findings within past research, bolster theoretical con-

ceptualizations of the relationship between women’s education and IPV, and broaden our

understanding of the effects of educational expansion on crime in a developing country

context.