Effect of justification of wife-beating on experiences of intimate-partner violence among men and women in Uganda: A propensity matched scores approach

In some communities, rationalization of mens controlling attitudes are associated with justification of gender norms such as wife-beating as a method of correcting spouse behaviour. In this quasi-experimental study, we investigate the causal effects of acceptability of gender norms justifying wife-beating on experiences of sexual, emotional and physical intimate partner violence (IPV) among Ugandan men and women. We analysed the 2016 Uganda Demographic and Health Survey data using propensity-score matching. The exposure variable is acceptability of gender norms justifying wife-beating measured on binary scale and the outcomes are respondents life-time experiences of sexual, physical, and emotional IPV. We matched respondents who accepted gender norms justifying wife-beating with those that do not using 1:1 nearest neighbor matching with a caliper to achieve comparability on selected covariates. We then estimated the causal effects of acceptability of gender norms justifying wife-beating on the study outcomes using a logistic regression model. Results showed that of the 4,821 (46.5%) out 10,394 respondents who reported that a husband is justified in beating his wife for specific reasons, the majority (3,774; 78.3%) were women compared to men (1,047; 21.7%). We found that at population level, men and women who accept gender norms justifying wife-beating are about 1.5 times more likely to experience each of the three forms of IPV. In the sub-group analysis, men who justify wife-beating were more likely to experience emotional and physical IPV but not sexual IPV. However, women who justify wife-beating were more likely to report experiences all of the three forms of IPV. In conclusion, acceptability of gender norms justifying wife-beating has a positive effect on experiences of different forms of IPV by men and women in Uganda. Government should tackle the drivers of acceptability of gender norms justifying wife-beating at the societal level.