Women’s Police Stations and Domestic Violence : Evidence from Brazil
Although women’s police centers have been gaining popularity as a measure to address domestic violence, to date no quantitative evaluations of their impacts on the incidence of domestic violence or any other manifestations of gender equality have b...
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| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2015
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2015/11/25470471/women’s-police-stations-domestic-violence-evidence-brazil http://hdl.handle.net/10986/23461 |
| Summary: | Although women’s police centers have
been gaining popularity as a measure to address domestic
violence, to date no quantitative evaluations of their
impacts on the incidence of domestic violence or any other
manifestations of gender equality have been done. This paper
estimates the effects of women’s police stations in Brazil
on female homicides, as a measure of the most severe form of
domestic violence. Given that a high fraction of female
deaths among women ages 15 to 49 years can be attributed to
aggression by an intimate partner, female homicides appear
the best available proxy for severe domestic violence
considering the scarcity of data on domestic violence. The
paper uses a panel of 2,074 municipalities and takes
advantage of the gradual rollout of women’s police stations
from 2004 to 2009, to estimate the effect of establishing a
women’s police station on the municipal female homicide
rate. Although the analysis does not find an association on
average, women’s police stations appear to be highly
effective among some groups of women: women living in
metropolitan areas and younger women. Establishing a women’s
police station in a metropolitan municipality is associated
with a reduction in the homicide rate by 1.23 deaths per
100,000 women (which roughly amounts to a 17 percent
reduction in the average homicide rate in metropolitan
municipalities). The reduction in the homicide rate of women
ages 15 to 24 is even higher: 5.57 deaths per 100,000 women.
Qualitative work suggests that better economic opportunities
and less traditional social norms in metropolitan areas may
explain the heterogeneous impacts of women’s police stations
in metropolitan areas and outside them. |
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