Neighborhood Effects and Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence: Latest Results

Abstract

In the last two decades, there has been an exponential growth in public health and social scientific research on how the neighborhood physical and social environments impact upon a range of health outcomes. This focus reflects a desire on the part of public health practitioners to once again emphasize the critical role that contextneighborhood and community residential environments-can play in promoting population health. Neighborhood effects on general and youth violence have been extensively studied, and there is a smaller but growing evidence base on the role of the neighborhood environment and the types of violence that often occur "behind closed doors" or among the adults within families: intimate partner and sexual violence.Intimate partner and sexual violence continue as major public health and social problems worldwide, with an estimated 1 in 5 women and 1 in 10 men victimized in their lifetimes in the United States. 1 Until recently, most public health and healthcare system efforts to address intimate partner and sexual violence have been healthcare clinic-or agency-based responses to victims of violence. Increasingly, public health practitioners and scientists are developing and testing primary prevention strategies, based in residential neighborhoods and integrating social networks, peer norms, and community mobilization approaches. 2, 3 Despite these efforts and a renewed interest in neighborhood effects research more generally, there is still the need for more qualitative and quantitative research to generate and test strong hypotheses that ultimately will inform intimate partner and sexual violence primary prevention efforts at the neighborhood level. Thus, we developed a call for papers focusing on neighborhood effects on these 2 forms of violence, in an effort to stimulate and identify the most recent work in this critical area. The papers received-a mixture of both qualitative and quantitative reports-offer a sense of where this area of work is moving, as well as locate new areas for further research.Cunradi and colleagues 4 use Bayesian space-time models to assess the relationship between neighborhood-level alcohol outlets and rates of intimate partner violence-related calls to police and crime reports. In this ecological study, the authors report associations between off-premise outlets and high rates of partner violence police calls and crime reports, and conclude that further research is needed to elucidate the mechanism by which an alcohol-related area characteristics might relate to individual-level risk of experiencing or perpetrating partner violence.Rothman and colleagues 5 focus on whether and how neighborhood-level characteristics are related to partner violence among youth, also called teen datingFrye is with

The Neighbourhood Effects on Health and Well-being (NEHW) study

“…By now, hundreds of crosssectional and more recently longitudinal studies have linked area characteristics, both physical and social, to a range of health behaviours and outcomes such as distress and anxiety, depression (Truong and Ma, 2006;Kim, 2008;Mair et al, 2008) substance use (Stockdale et al, 2007), partner violence (Frye and O'Campo, 2011;Pinchevsky and Wtight, 2012), cardiovascular disease (Chaix, 2009), obesity and lack of physical activity (Sallis and Glanz, 2009), perinatal outcomes (Metcalfe et al, 2011), and poor self-rated health and chronic conditions (Poortinga et al, 2007;Meyer et al, 2014).…”

Neighbourhood context and abuse among immigrant and non-immigrant women in Canada: findings from the Maternity Experiences Survey

“…This work indicates that abuse is higher in low-income neighbourhoods (Frye and O'Campo 2011). Immigrants tend to concentrate in low-income neighbourhoods, at least upon their arrival to the host country (Alba et al 2000).…”

“…Immigrant women may face many circumstances that increase their social vulnerability and risk for abuse (Midlarsky et al 2006). Concentration of immigrants upon arrival to the host country in low-income neighbourhoods (Alba et al 2000) that have a higher prevalence of abuse (Frye and O'Campo 2011) might further intensify abuse against immigrant women.…”

“…Over the last two decades, growing interest among health researchers in socioecological environments (Berkman and Kawachi 2003) has led to the study of neighbourhood socioeconomic position (SEP) and partner violence beyond individual SEP (Frye and O'Campo 2011). This work indicates that abuse is higher in low-income neighbourhoods (Frye and O'Campo 2011).…”

“…In the current paper, we examine the following two possibilities: that high proportions of low-income households in a neighbourhood may increase abuse against immigrant women, as demonstrated in past studies for non-immigrant women (Frye and O'Campo 2011), and that, conversely, a high concentration of immigrants in a neighbourhood might be protective for immigrant women, as larger minority population neighbourhoods decrease negative attitudes toward minorities who live there (Be 0 cares et al. 2009;Ray and Preston 2009).…”