Publication: Intimate Partner Violence against Women: Prevalence, Formal Reporting, and Risk Factors in Chile
Loading...
Published
2022-04
ISSN
Date
2022-04-26
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
Intimate partner violence is among the most common forms of violence against women. In Chile, one in four women who have been in a partner relationship report having experienced some type of partner violence in the past 12 months, whether psychological, physical, sexual, or economic. However, only 22 percent of female victims of intimate partner violence file a formal complaint. This study analyzes the factors that determine the likelihood that a woman will be subject to violence perpetrated by her partner or ex-partner and the factors that determine the probability of reporting the abuse. Individual factors that increase women’s risk of experiencing intimate partner violence include being young, having fewer years of education, having a disability, and having been a victim of sexual abuse in childhood. Other factors include characteristics of partners or ex-partners associated with aggressive behavior in public spaces, having been a victim of intrafamily violence in childhood, and frequent alcohol consumption. The household dynamics that prevent women from participating in economic decision-making and the widespread acceptance of inequitable gender norms also significantly increase the risk that a woman will experience intimate partner violence. The likelihood that a woman will formally report intimate partner violence is mainly determined by the frequency of the episodes, characteristics of the partners or ex-partners, economic empowerment, and whether she has support networks.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Saavedra, Trinidad; Contreras-Urbina, Manuel; Inchauste, Gabriela. 2022. Intimate Partner Violence against Women: Prevalence, Formal Reporting, and Risk Factors in Chile. Policy Research Working Paper;10016. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/37336 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication Climate and Social Sustainability in Fragility, Conflict, and Violence Contexts(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2026-01-07)Climate change is widely recognized as a driver of violent conflict, but its broader social effects remain less understood. Ignoring these dimensions risks a vicious cycle where climate policies might undermine socially just adaptation. Evidence is still limited on how climate shocks influence political participation, trust, or migration. This paper helps fill that gap by examining links between climate change, conflict, and social sustainability, with a focus on inclusion, resilience, cohesion, and legitimacy. Using secondary data from 2019–24, the study applies simple correlation-based methods to test three hypotheses on the nature, severity, and composition of these associations. The analysis combines multiple climate impact measures, new conflict classifications, recent social sustainability frameworks, and controls for population and geography. The results reveal strong correlations—not causation—between climate events and contexts of fragility, conflict, and violence. Climate impacts are most pronounced in both national and subnational conflict settings. The study also finds robust links between fragility, conflict, and violence and low levels of social sustainability, reflecting its role as both a driver and consequence of conflict. Some dimensions—such as violent events and insecurity—appear weaker in areas most affected by climate shocks. Two of the hypotheses are supported, and one remains inconclusive.Publication The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.Publication Institutional Capacity for Policy Implementation: An Analytical Framework(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2026-01-07)State capacity is an important prerequisite for policy implementation, yet at the country level it is difficult to measure, assess, and reform. This paper proposes a focus on institutional capacity: the ability of public institutions to implement the specific policy mandates for which they are responsible. Based on a review of existing literature, the paper defines the different dimensions that compose institutional capacity and groups them into two cross-cutting categories: organizational dimensions (personnel, financial resources, information systems, and management practices) and governance dimensions (transparency, independence, and accountability). The paper proposes measures for organizational and governance dimensions using existing data, shows intra-institutional variation of these measures within countries, and discusses how new data could be collected for better measurement of these concepts. Finally, the paper illustrates how the framework can be used to diagnose the sources of common problems related to weak policy implementation.Publication South Africa’s Fragmented Cities: The Unequal Burden of Labor Market Frictions(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2026-01-08)Using high-resolution administrative, census, and satellite data, this paper shows that South African cities are characterized by spatial mismatches between where people live and where jobs are located, relative to 20 global peers. Areas within 5 kilometers of commercial centers have 9,300 fewer residents per square kilometer than expected, which is 60 percent below the global median. Poor, dense neighborhoods are most affected. In Johannesburg, a 10-percentile increase in distance from the nearest business hub corresponds to a 3.7-percentile drop in asset wealth (a proxy of household wellbeing) and 4.9-percentile drop in employment. In Cape Town, the declines are 4.0 and 3.7 percentiles, respectively. Employment is 87 percent lower in the poorest decile than the richest in Johannesburg and 61 percent lower in Cape Town. These findings suggest that South Africa’s spatial organization of people and economic activity constrains agglomeration and reinforces inequality. This methodology provides a scalable and standardized data-driven framework to analyze spatial accessibility and agglomeration frictions in complex, data-constrained urban systems.Publication Investment in Emerging and Developing Economies(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2026-01-07)The world faces a pressing challenge to meet key development objectives amid slowing growth and rising macroeconomic and geopolitical risks. With the number of job seekers rising rapidly, infrastructure shortfalls continuing to be large, and climate costs mounting, the case for a significant investment push has never been stronger. Yet the capacity to respond in many emerging markets and developing economies has eroded. Since the global financial crisis, investment growth has slowed to about half its pace in the 2000s, with both public and private investment weakening. Foreign direct investment inflows—a critical source of capital, technology, and managerial know-how—have also fallen sharply and become increasingly concentrated, leaving low-income countries with only a marginal share. The risks of further retrenchment are significant, as trade tensions, policy uncertainty, and elevated debt levels continue to weigh on investment. Reigniting momentum will require ambitious domestic reforms to strengthen institutions, rebuild macro-fiscal stability, and deepen trade and investment integration—the foundations of a supportive business climate. At the same time, international cooperation is indispensable. A renewed commitment to a predictable system of cross-border trade and investment flows, combined with scaled-up financial support and sustained technical assistance, is essential to help emerging markets and developing economies—especially low-income countries and economies in fragile and conflict situations—bridge financing gaps and implement the domestic reforms needed to restore investment as an engine of growth, jobs, and development.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Intimate Partner Violence : Economic Costs and Implications for Growth and Development(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-11)Violence against women, recognized globally as a fundamental human rights violation, is widely prevalent across high-, middle-, and low-income countries. Violence against women has significant economic costs in terms of expenditures on service provision, lost income for women and their families, decreased productivity, and negative impacts on future human capital formation. The paper makes a major contribution to the discussion of economic implications of intimate partner violence (IPV) through its conceptual mapping of the links between IPV and economic growth based on a review of literature on their complex dynamics based on data from Vietnam. It reviews costing methodologies and identifies types of costs that potentially can be estimated given different degrees of data availability. The paper argues strongly for a focus on estimating impacts on productivity, which is a key driver of economic growth. It also calls for committed action by both national governments and The World Bank Group in terms of integrating IPV and violence against women and girls (VAWG) into national and sectoral development plans and Bank funding streams; strengthening national statistics offices to collect, manage, and analyze data on violence systematically and regularly basis; prioritizing multi-sectoral and inter-ministerial responses; and most importantly establishing a dedicated budget or funding stream for IPV and VAWG policies, programs, and interventions.Publication Violence Against Women and Girls : Citizen Security, Law, and Justice Brief(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-04)For every three years a country is affected by major violence (defined as deaths due to war or excess homicides comparable to a major war), economic growth lags behind by 2.7 percentage points. Citizen security issues impact women and men differently. For example, women are more likely to be assaulted or murdered by someone they know - in fact, worldwide the share of homicides by an intimate partner was six times higher for female victims compared with male victims (39 percent versus 6 percent, respectively). Boys who witness intimate partner violence (IPV) during childhood are more likely to exhibit delinquent behavior and to perpetrate IPV in adulthood. And girls who witness violence are more likely to experience IPV in adulthood.Publication Estimating the Association Between Women's Earnings and Partner Violence : Evidence from the 2008-2009 Tanzania National Panel Survey(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-11)The aim of this study is to explore the relationship between women's labor market outcomes and partner violence among Tanzanian women, and to estimate the difference in women's weekly earnings between women who have been abused and women who have not. In addition, this study estimates the lost earnings to women because of partner violence as a share of Tanzania's gross domestic product. Partner violence is the most common form of violence against women and the adverse consequences for women s health have been well documented. Few studies have estimated the economic costs of partner violence in low- and middle-income countries and current evidence suggests that the cost is large. Using data from the nationally representative 2008-2009 Tanzania National Panel Survey, the study uses propensity score matching methods to estimate the difference in women's earnings from formal waged work and non-agricultural self-employment. Data on women's earnings from agricultural self-employment, the largest employment sector for women in Tanzania, were not collected in the survey. Findings from this study reveal that partner violence is pervasive in Tanzania and that abused women earn less than women who have never been abused, with the greatest loss of earnings experienced by women in formal waged work (compared to women in non-agricultural self-employment) and by women in urban areas (compared to women in rural areas).Publication Violence Against Women and Girls : Social Protection Brief(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-12)The definition of social protection (SP) programs varies widely, as do the types of interventions included and the specific outcomes sought. These programs can be implemented through public and/or private sectors, with the involvement of single or multiple government sectors, or by some combination of these actors. This brief will specifically focus on four types of social protection interventions: social assistance, social insurance, labor market programs, and early childhood development. It will offer suggestions for integrating violence against women and girls (VAWG) prevention efforts within these interventions. These areas of focus are meant to be illustrative of different social protection programs, rather than to reflect the full breadth of SP programs. In general, SP programs are public interventions that support the poorest populations and assist individuals, households, and communities to better overcome social and economic risks. Examples of programs include: a) social assistance (social safety nets): cash transfers, school feeding, and targeted food assistance; b) social insurance: old-age and disability pensions and unemployment insurance; c) labor market programs: skills-building programs, job-search and matching programs, and improved labor regulations; and d) early childhood development. Other program interventions, which fall under what is referred to as social protection, aim to strengthen families abilities to respond to hardships by promoting gender equality. Examples include early childhood development, projects that focus on at-risk youth, or targeted poverty alleviation programs.Publication Domestic Violence IS a Public Affair : Strengthening Institutions to Promote Equitable Development and Combat Violence Against Women in Uruguay(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2009-04)Around the world, at least one out of three women is beaten, coerced into sex, or otherwise abused during their lifetime. Women are most at risk to suffer violence at home and from men they know, usually a family member, intimate partner or spouse. A comprehensive analysis of domestic violence in nine developing countries based on Demographic and Health Surveys shows that more than 40 percent of women reported being victims of spousal or intimate partner abuse. The analysis also demonstrates that domestic violence directly impacts the health and well-being of abused women. An example of this is that infant and mortality rates are higher among women who have been victims of violence than those who have not experienced any form of violence.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication “Crowding In” Effect of Public Investment on Private Investment Revisited(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-08-27)Current investment trends in emerging market and developing economies are not enough to meet the needs of their growing populations and will fall short of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals related to human and physical capital development. Public investment can play a critical role in addressing this shortfall, especially if it can crowd-in private investment. Using theory and panel data for 109 developing countries from 1980–2019, this paper investigates whether public investment crowds in or crowds out private investment. The paper also explores how the relationship changes across different groups of countries and under different institutional settings. The analysis uses changes in predicted disbursements on loans from official creditors to developing country governments as an instrument for changes in public investment. The findings show that public investment is a complement to private investment, raising the marginal productivity of the latter. As a result, an extra dollar of public investment raises private investment by 1.6 dollars. The findings also reveal stronger evidence of crowding-in of private investment in low-income countries and Sub-Saharan Africa, where investment needs are greatest. Finally, the findings are embedded in a model with imperfect capital markets, which shows that public investment can be used as an effective vehicle to address underinvestment issues induced by capital market distortions.Publication Digital Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13)All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.Publication Purchasing Power Parities and the Size of World Economies(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2020-05-19)The International Comparison Program (ICP) is a worldwide statistical initiative led by the World Bank under the auspices of the United Nations Statistical Commission. It produces comparable price and volume measures of gross domestic product (GDP) and its expenditure aggregates across economies. Through a partnership with international, regional, sub-regional and national agencies, the ICP collects price data and GDP expenditures to estimate purchasing power parities (PPPs) for the world’s economies. The report provides ICP results for the benchmark year 2017 and revised results for earlier years. ICP data are used for socio-economic analyses by researchers, academics, policy makers at the national and international levels, and by organizations such as the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the United Nations, and the World Bank. Notably, PPPs and ICP data are used in indicators monitoring progress towards eight goals of the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the World Bank’s international poverty lines, and the construction of the Human Development Index by the United Nations, among others. The use of PPPs continues to grow and the ICP website (icp.worldbank.org) lists many applications of the data by the development community, academia, media and others.Publication Noncomparable Poverty Comparisons(Taylor and Francis, 2017-01-23)Poverty estimates based on enumeration from a single point in time form the basis for most country-level analysis of poverty. Cross-country comparisons of poverty, and global counts of the poor, implicitly assume that country-level poverty headcounts are comparable. This paper illustrates that the assumption of comparability is potentially invalid when households are interviewed multiple times throughout the year, as opposed to a single-visit interview. An example from Jordan illustrates how the internationally comparable approach of handling data from repeat visits yields a poverty rate that is 26 per cent greater than the rate that is currently reported as the official estimate.Publication Taxes, Spending, and Equity: International Patterns and Lessons for Developing Countries(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-11-17)Taxes and public spending underpin the basic administration of government and finance the human capital and infrastructure investments needed for economic growth. They can also have a significant and immediate impact on poverty and inequality. The question of how public finance can support longer-term growth objectives while promoting equity has become even more important in recent years, given the high fiscal deficits and debt levels most countries emerged with in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. These included the increasing cost of debt and the need to restart environmentally sustainable growth while helping households address the learning losses and other social scars caused by the pandemic. This paper examines the global evidence on which households pay which taxes and who benefits from what spending, and critically, the net effect on different households across the income distribution. The aim is to identify the patterns and lessons that emerge for designing progressive fiscal policies. A global dataset of 96 countries is assembled, spanning all regions of the world and all national income levels, grounded in the Commitment to Equity (CEQ) approach to fiscal incidence.