Publication: No Association between HIV and Intimate Partner Violence among Women in 10 Developing Countries
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Published
2010
ISSN
1932-6203
Date
2012-03-30
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Background: Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) has been reported to be a determinant of women's risk for HIV. We examined the relationship between women's self-reported experiences of IPV in their most recent relationship and their laboratory-confirmed HIV serostatus in ten low-to middle-income countries. Methodology/Principal Findings: Data for the study came from the most recent Demographic and Health Surveys conducted in Dominican Republic, Haiti, India, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Rwanda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Each survey population was a cross-sectional sample of women aged 15-49 years. Information on IPV was obtained by a face-to-face interview with the mother with an 81.1% response rate; information on HIV serostatus was obtained from blood samples with an 85.3% response rate. Demographic and socioeconomic variables were considered as potentially confounding covariates. Logistic regression models accounting for multi-stage survey design were estimated individually for each country and as a pooled total with country fixed effects (n = 60,114). Country-specific adjusted odds ratios (OR) for physical or sexual IPV compared to neither ranged from 0.45 [95% confidence interval (CI): 0.23-0.90] in Haiti to 1.35 [95% CI: 0.95-1.90] in India; the pooled association was 1.03 [95% CI: 0.94-1.13]. Country-specific adjusted ORs for physical and sexual IPV compared to no sexual IPV ranged from 0.41 [95% CI: 0.12-1.36] in Haiti to 1.41 [95% CI: 0.26-7.77] in Mali; the pooled association was 1.05 [95% CI: 0.90-1.22]. Conclusions: IPV and HIV were not found to be consistently associated amongst ever-married women in national population samples in these lower income countries, suggesting that IPV is not consistently associated with HIV prevalence worldwide. More research is needed to understand the circumstances in which IPV and HIV are and are not associated with one another.
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Publication A Preliminary Study of Intimate Partner Violence Among Nepali Women in the United States(2009)Although there is a growing number of studies on intimate partner violence ( IPV) in U. S. South Asian communities, the examination of IPV among Nepali women in the United States is still in the initial stage. The purpose of this study was to assess the prevalence of and vulnerabilities to IPV among 45 Nepali immigrant women residing in the New York metropolitan area. 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We find that a plausible channel underlying this effect is an increase in women’s modern contraceptive use—potentially resulting from improvements in public provision of health services—which leads to marital conflict, especially when the husband’s son preference is stronger than the wife’s.Publication Women's Police Stations and Intimate Partner Violence(Elsevier, 2017-02)Although women's police stations have gained popularity as a measure to address intimate partner violence (IPV), there is little quantitative evaluation of their impacts on the incidence of IPV. This paper estimates the effects of women's police stations in Brazil on female homicides, a measure of the most severe form of IPV. Given that a high fraction of female deaths among women ages 15–49 years can be attributed to aggression by an intimate partner, female homicides appear the best proxy for severe IPV considering the scarcity of data on IPV in Brazil. 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