Individual, Community, and Social Network Influences on Beliefs Concerning the Acceptability of Intimate Partner Violence in Rural Senegal

Abstract

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is a pressing international public health and human rights concern. Recent scholarship concerning causes of IPV has focused on the potentially critical influence of social learning and influence in interpersonal interaction through social norms. Using sociocentric network data from all individuals aged 16 years and above in a rural Senegalese village surveyed as part of the Niakhar Social Networks and Health Project ( n = 1,274), we estimate a series of nested linear probability models to test the association between characteristics of respondents’ social networks and residential compounds (including educational attainment, health ideation, socioeconomic status, and religion) and whether respondents are classified as finding IPV acceptable, controlling for individual characteristics. We also test for direct social learning effects, estimating the association between IPV acceptability among network members and co-residents and respondents’ own, net of these factors. We find individual, social network, and residential compound factors are all associated with IPV acceptability. On the individual level, these include gender, traditional health ideation, and household agricultural investment. Residential compound-level associations are largely explained in the presence of the individual and network characteristics, except for that concerning educational attainment. We find that network alters’ IPV acceptability is strongly positively associated with respondents’ own, net of individual and compound-level characteristics. A 10% point higher probability of IPV acceptability in respondents’ networks is estimated to be associated with a 4.5% point higher likelihood of respondents being classified as finding IPV acceptable. This research provides compelling evidence that social interaction through networks exerts an important, potentially normative, influence on whether individuals in this population perceive IPV as acceptable or not. It also suggests that interventions targeting individuals most likely to perceive IPV as acceptable may have a multiplier effect, influencing the normative context of others they interact with through their social networks.

Perpetration and Experience of Spousal Violence Among Nigerian Women: An Analysis of the 2008 and 2013 NDHS

“…A longitudinal study on the subject would be more effective in addressing the possible causal relationship between IPV perpetration and victimization (El-Bassel, Gilbert, Wu, Go, & Hill, 2011; Testa, Livingston, & Leonard, 2003). Additional variables such as the network ties (Sandberg et al, 2021; Stephenson, Sato, Finneran, 2013), psychological traits of the respondent and the respondent’s husband (Hellmuth & McNulty, 2008; Shore, Cornelius, & Idema, 2011), and interactions between demographic and socioeconomic variables (Afifi et al, 2009; Foran & O’Leary, 2008) can be added to multivariate models to provide additional explanation to IPV victimization. This study has shown that the association between IPV perpetration and victimization cuts across 2008 and 2013, and longitudinal data will provide a clearer and deeper picture of such an association.…”

Adolescent Peers and Prevention: Network Patterns of Sexual Violence Attitudes and Bystander Actions

“…For example, researchers found that measuring network characteristics across community settings like church and school (e.g., network diversity or the number of different social roles a person inhabits across social settings) can protect men from perpetration of sexual assault (Kaczkowski et al, 2017). More important to bystander intervention, several studies showed that attitudes like rape myth acceptance or acceptability of partner violence cluster in friend networks (Sandberg et al, 2018; Swartout, 2013). Swartout’s study found young college men whose high school male peer networks had strong rape myth acceptance and hostility toward women showed higher levels of those attitudes themselves.…”

Social Norms Sustaining Intimate Partner Violence: A Systematic Review of Methodologies for Proxy Measures

“…There was significant variation in how these items were operationalized at the individual and group levels. For example, group-level aggregates ranged from the average number of items endorsed across individuals (Jesmin, 2015, 2017; Linos et al, 2013; Nadeem & Malik, 2019; Vyas & Heise, 2016), the proportion of individuals in the group that agreed with at least one scenario (Benebo et al, 2018; Cau, 2017; Cofie, 2020; Jesmin, 2015, 2017; Yount, Roof, et al, 2018), the proportion that agreed with all statements (Mogford & Lyons, 2014), the proportion that agreed with no statements (Kadengye et al, 2019), and various cut-offs based on the proportion of individuals agreeing with at least one statement (Ahmad et al, 2019; Antai & Adaji, 2012; Sandberg et al, 2018). The remaining studies used measures of attitudes toward female autonomy, men’s controlling behavior, and equitable and inequitable gender roles.…”