Disentangling and Preventing Economic Violence against Women (ECOVI)
![Photo Credit: Rucha Vasumati Satish](/fileadmin/_processed_/c/f/csm_3d9158db-6081-467c-94a8-b8f8eb6d7ab6__1__16ef96f6d0.webp)
Project Description
Violence against women is a violation of fundamental human rights and substantially compromises women’s health, wellbeing, and empowerment. Globally, more than one in four women experience physical and/or sexual violence by a partner in their lives. This risk is considerably higher among women in low- and middle-income countries and in cultures with pronounced patriarchal gender norms. However, existing research has so far neglected an important dimension of intimate partner violence (IPV): economic abuse. This form of abuse includes denying women the right to participate in financial decisions, taking away their income or preventing them from seeking employment. The consequences are profound – economic IPV compromises women’s economic welfare and independence, traps them in abusive relationships, and adversely affects their mental health. To tackle this major global health concern, ECOVI has three objectives: first, to establish the prevalence of different forms of economic IPV; second, to develop a theory of economic abuse by investigating drivers of economic IPV and linkages with other forms of IPV; and third, to design and test a community-based prevention approach. To this end, I will focus on India, which is home to 670 million women and girls and exhibits high levels of gender discrimination that exacerbate women’s vulnerability to economic IPV. I will capitalise on a mixed-methods approach, including (i) systematic reviews and meta-analyses, (ii) conducting qualitative in-depth interviews and focus groups, and (iii) implementing a cluster randomised controlled trial and innovative survey experiments with husbands and wives in 150 Indian communities. ECOVI will generate the largest existing database on economic IPV and establish an evidence-informed prevention approach. This has the potential to yield ground-breaking scientific and programmatic evidence on how to alleviate the economic violence and associated economic hardship that women worldwide are facing.
Collaborators:
Rucha Vasumati Satish (Freelance Research Consultant)
Siuli Mukhopadhyay (Professor, Department of Mathematics, IIT Bombay)
The project is funded by an European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant.
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Project Publication
Steinert JI, Boehret I, Vasumati Satish R, Sharma S, Chatterji S. ‘We don’t get money in our own hands’: evidence from focus group discussions on economic abuse against women in two states of India. BMJ Global Health. 2023; 8(10), e012576.