Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) Types Are Common Among Turkish Women From High Socioeconomic Status and Have Differing Effects on Child Abuse and Contentment With Life

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: Intimate partner violence (IPV) against women is an important public health problem. In this study, we aimed to investigate the exposure of IPV types, child abuse and decrease in life contentment of married women from high socioeconomic status in Turkey. METHODS: Data were collected using an online/written questionnaire and Contentment with Life Scale. The questionnaire included definitions of physical, emotional, economic and sexual IPV and asked how many times they experienced these types of abuse. RESULTS: We found that physical, emotional, economic and sexual IPV exposure were 19%, 45.2%, 12.5%, and 6%, respectively, which suggest that IPV types were common in this group, too. Physical child abuse was higher among physical and emotional IPV victims (p=0004, p=0.02, respectively), while emotional child abuse was higher only among physical IPV victims (p=0.01). On the other hand, exposure to economic and sexual IPV was not related to any type of child abuse in this sample (p>0.05). Physical and economic IPV victims were statistically older (p=0.004, p<0.001, respectively), married for longer time (p<0.001 for both) and had relatively lower education level (p<0.001 for both), while sexual IPV victims had lower education level than non-victims (p=0.03). We demonstrated that physical-emotional and sexual intramarital IPV significantly reduce the women’s contentment with life scores when compared with non-victims (p=0.02, p<0.001 and p=0.03, respectively). CONCLUSION: IPV exposure is also severe among married women with high socioeconomic levels and is associated with child abuse in the family and a decrease in life contentment. Lengthened education period among women with similar socioeconomic levels may be an additional protective factor for IPV by delaying the age of marriage and increasing the individual income.

Examining the impact of economic abuse on survivors of intimate partner violence: A scoping review

“…Over half of the studies (n = 18) in this scoping review collected data from samples within the United States [2][3][4][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. Three articles came from Turkey [32][33][34], two came from South Africa [35,36] and one article came from Germany [37], Ghana [38], Hong Kong [39], India [40], Malaysia [41], and Palestine [42]. A single article used data collected as part of a multi-country study of China, Cambodia, Papua New Guinea, and Sri Lanka [43].…”

“…All but two studies [39,41] had entirely female samples. The race/ethnicity of the sample was not documented in 12 studies [30,[32][33][34][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43]. Six of the studies reported having a sample in which 50% or more identi ed as white [3,4,18,28,29,31].…”

“…The remaining studies either did not use a validated scale [20,23,34,37,38,40] or did not indicate how economic abuse was measured [32].…”

“…Only one study controlled for gender [39], as most studies included entirely female samples. Finally, ve studies included no covariates [30,[32][33][34]41]; this was typically due to the type of analytic strategy used.…”

“…Eleven studies used logistic regression to predict the odds that survivors will experience a particular outcome based on experiencing economic abuse [20, 23-26, 30, 37-40, 43]. Other methods used included chi-square tests [32,34,41], t-tests [33,34], and analysis of variance [42].…”