The Causes and Consequences of Intimate Partner Violence in Urban Neighborhoods: Three Essays on the Social Contexts of Violence

Quantitative research on urban violence has historically focused on analyzing street crime and its predominantly male victims, largely neglecting to consider violence that more frequently affects women, such as intimate partner violence (IPV). Given the sweeping extent to which IPV harms women in th...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Bastomski, Sara Shoshanna
Format: Dissertation
Language:English
Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2017
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Summary:Quantitative research on urban violence has historically focused on analyzing street crime and its predominantly male victims, largely neglecting to consider violence that more frequently affects women, such as intimate partner violence (IPV). Given the sweeping extent to which IPV harms women in the U.S., this oversight is troubling. Yet it also presents an opportunity for scholars to develop an integrated framework for studying how violence directly impacts the lives of men and women who live in disadvantaged urban communities and households. Drawing from a social-ecological perspective, this dissertation re-conceptualizes IPV as an important and undertheorized component of the urban crime problem. In a series of three empirical studies, I examine the causes and consequences of IPV for women living in disadvantaged households and neighborhoods. In the first empirical chapter, I use arrest data from the Chicago Police Department and the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods to examine the spatial concentration of intimate partner perpetrated homicides and nonfatal domestic violence in Chicago. Employing spatial statistics to identify statistically significant clusters of neighborhoods with high IPV rates, I demonstrate that between 1994 and 2011, 54% of all intimate partner homicides took place in just 20% of Chicago's neighborhoods. I also find that IPV is consistently concentrated in the city's most disadvantaged neighborhoods over shorter time intervals. These findings show that spatial statistics, which are widely used in studies of street crime, could be used to improve our current knowledge of IPV. Understanding how IPV is distributed across neighborhoods will enhance the capacity of policymakers, law enforcement officials, and nonprofit institutions to prevent IPV and its consequences. In the second empirical chapter, I investigate the relationship between relative socioeconomic resources and women's subsequent IPV victimization. Using nationally representative data on married, cohabiting, or otherwise romantically involved urban couples from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, I examine how relative educational attainment is associated with subsequent risk of male-to-female IPV. My results indicate that there is a positive association between relative education favoring the female partner (i.e. the female partner has a higher level of educational attainment than her male partner), and subsequent male-to-female IPV. This relationship holds even after adjusting for key individual and household-level characteristics that are well established as risk factors for IPV. Notably, relative educational attainment favoring the male partner is not associated with subsequent female-to-male IPV, suggesting the relationship between relative education and IPV is gender specific, and thus disadvantages women exclusively. These findings offer empirical support for gendered resource theory, which accounts for the ways in which culturally prescribed gender roles influence the dynamics of heterosexual or opposite-sex couples. In the third empirical chapter, I examine how IPV impacts women's subsequent mental health and material hardship, using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. Though the associations between IPV, mental illness, and material hardship are well established, few studies on these topics have used broadly representative data sets or produced robust causal estimates. Therefore, it is difficult to know if long-term negative outcomes associated with IPV victimization are due to IPV or are primarily driven by selection. I address concerns about selection bias by employing propensity score matching models, and I find that for disadvantaged urban women, IPV victimization is associated with higher levels of depression and material hardship two years later. This evidence draws attention to the impact that IPV can have on multiple domains of women's lives, and underscores the need for further work on how the effects of IPV play out over the life course. The evidence presented in this dissertation demonstrates that our responses to IPV need not be limited to programs that target individuals (such as batter-intervention programs). My results indicate that women's risk of violence victimization is shaped in measurable ways by intimate relationships, households, and neighborhoods. As such, we need to develop IPV interventions that take in to account the social contexts of violence, mobilizing resources more effectively to address the needs of our country's most vulnerable women.
ISBN:9780355017526
0355017520