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Breaking the Cycle: the Impact of Legal Reforms on Domestic Violence

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Breaking the Cycle: the Impact of Legal Reforms on Domestic Violence Breaking the Cycle: The Impact of Legal Reforms on Domestic Violence Claudio Ferraz∗ Laura Schiavony PUC-Rio UFJF February 15, 2019 Abstract Domestic violence is a widespread phenomenon. Despite the implementation of several policies addressing its reduction, causal evidence on their effects is scarce and controversial. This paper evaluates the impact of a legal reform aimed at curbing domestic violence in Brazil. We exploit the fact that while trends of male and female domestic violence are very similar before its introduction, the law covers only women. The legal reform reduced female homicides due to household aggression by 9 percent. The effects were stronger for less educated and black women– those more likely to have low bargaining power within their households. Keywords: Domestic violence, homicides, intra-household bargaining JEL: K4, J1 ∗Department of Economics, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), Rua Marquês de São Vicente, 225- Gávea Rio de Janeiro, RJ, 22453-900, Brasil. Phone: 552135271078. Email: [email protected]; and BREAD yDepartment of Economics, Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora (UFJF), Rua José Lourenco Kelmer, s/n - São Pedro, Juiz de Fora, MG, 36036-900, Brasil. Phone: 553221023541. Email: [email protected] 1 Introduction Violent crime has decreased significantly over the past centuries, specially in rich countries. Do- mestic violence, however, is still a major public policy concern in many societies. The World Health Organization estimates that one third of all women who have been in a relationship have experienced violence by their intimate partner (World Health Organization(2013)). Poor women, in particular, are significantly more likely to suffer from intimate-partner violence (IPV) due to the lack of exit options. The costs to society are enormous. Exposure to marital violence is corre- lated with suicide, depression and alcohol abuse among women. Victims are more likely to have complications during pregnancy and affected children suffer negative impacts as well as their peers (Carbone-López et al.(2006); Aizer(2011); Carrell and Hoekstra(2010); Carrell et al.(2016); Doyle Jr and Aizer(2018)). In extreme cases, domestic violence is a leading cause of female homicides. The World Health Organization estimates that almost 40 percent of worldwide mur- ders of women are originated from intimate-partner violence (World Health Organization(2013)). The prevalence of partner battering and homicide has contributed to the implementation of targeted policies in many countries. Probably due to the lack of identification or data, there are few impact evaluations of them. This paper examines the effect of a legal reform aimed at curbing intimate-partner violence. We study the Maria da Penha Law, passed in Brazil in 2006. The new regulation introduced effective mechanisms for preventing and punishing domestic violence against women, providing social as- sistance to victims and aggressors, and changing social norms. The law was recognized as one of the best legislative initiatives of the sort by the United Nations (Women(2011)). It introduced emergency protective measures for women at risk and increased the penalty for domestic violence against women. It also fostered the creation of special courts and stimulated the improvement of public services and institutions for domestic violence victims. We exploit a singular feature of this legal reform. Despite the fact that male and female domestic violence cases follow similar trends before 2006 in most of Brazilian municipalities, the law is exclusively applied for cases of aggression against women. We use a difference-in-differences model and compare the number of male and female homicides that occurred as a consequence of aggressions perpetrated within the household. We show that the parallel hypothesis is satisfied excluding the large cities of Brazil. Differently from a large literature that uses proxies for domestic violence such as self-reported cases of aggression or hospitalization records, homicides data are less likely to be biased or underestimated, are consistently collected over time, and include the universe of women. When a homicide occurs, the cause of death must be reported in official documents. 1 The homicides are registered as deaths caused by aggression. In contrast, self-reported data usually suffer from underreporting and may be biased according to the respondent’s characteristics. Self- reported data might also be affected by the introduction of laws aimed at curbing domestic violence and fail to pick up true impacts. Similarly, measures based on hospitalization may fail in the identification of injuries caused by domestic violence, as in Brazilian datasets. Studies document that fatal and non-fatal intimate partner aggressions respond similarly to policy changes (Stevenson and Wolfers(2006); Miller and Segal(2018)). We restrict our analysis to municipalities with less than 100,000 inhabitants comprising 5230 out of 5507 municipalities in Brazil. Capital cities and large municipalities have very different pre- intervention trends as a considerable share of violent crimes in these localities are driven by drug- related homicides. We use data from the Brazil’s National Health System (SUS) on male and female homicides that occurred as a consequence of aggression inside the household from 2001 to 2015. In addition to the cause of death, our microdata also provides information about the educational level and race of the victims that allow us to test different hypothesis that exist in the theoretical literature. We find that the introduction of the Maria da Penha Law reduced female homicides due to house- hold aggression by 9 percent with increasing effects over the years. The reduction in female homi- cides was concentrated in cases which the aggression was due to firearms, while we also find significant effects when looking at homicides caused by aggression without firearms. We conduct placebo tests and do not find effects on deaths caused by unintended aggressions or accidents within the household, suggesting the absence of manipulation of official statistics to omit domestic vio- lence. The effects estimated were particularly large for poorer women with less bargaining power in the household. While the decrease in female homicides was 2.6 percent for women with primary school or more, the effect was a decline of 6.7 percent for women with less than primary schooling. Because of the high correlation of education and race in Brazil, the effects were concentrated in black women. Finally, consistent with theories that argue that women that have economic power are less susceptible towards suffering domestic violence, we find that the legal reform had a partic- ularly large effect in localities where the women’s median wage was lower. While we do not have detailed data to pinpoint the different mechanisms that explain these effects, we gathered aggregate data that shows a very large increase in the number of hotline reports in aggression and the number of incarcerated men under the Maria da Penha Law. Our findings indicate that the Maria da Penha Law had a significant effect in protecting women that were most at risk. The literature on the determinants of domestic violence usually analyzes the risk 2 of aggression based on women’s bargaining position in the household, men’s desire for resources or partner control, and social norms. Corroborating the first view, a growing body of studies shows that increases in female income, reductions in gender wage gap, and governmental transfers sig- nificantly reduces intimate partner violence, with evidences of spillover effects (Bowlus and Seitz (2006);Aizer(2010); Hidrobo et al.(2016);Buller et al.(2018); Haushofer et al.(2018)). The re- duction of costs associated with divorce also impacts women’s household bargaining power and reduces spousal violence (Stevenson and Wolfers(2006);Brassiolo(2016)). In line with the second view, there are evidences that increase in female educational level and income stimulate psycholog- ical violence, threats of violence, and other controlling behaviour (Bloch and Rao(2002);Erten and Keskin(2016); Hidrobo and Fernald(2013); Anderson and Genicot(2015)). Specifically, Bobonis et al.(2013) and Bobonis et al.(2015) find that conditional cash transfers (CCT) to women reduce physical abuse and increase violent threats in short run, with no long run effects. According to the social norm view, domestic violence is likely to be culturally transmitted, so it is difficult to break the cycle. Kids that grow up in violent households are more likely to repeat this pattern after growing-up (Abrahams and Jewkes(2005); Ehrensaft et al.(2003)). Moreover the use of vio- lence against women is shaped by social norms that are highly persistent over time (Alesina et al. (2016)). In some contexts, however, changes in laws can induce changes in social norms by shifting the behavior of a large share of individuals into a new equilibrium (Acemoglu and Jackson(2017)). Our study relates mostly to the incipient literature on policies aimed at combating domestic vio- lence. The effect of policies that increase the probability or severity of punishment for domestic violence is ambiguous, since this kind of aggression is usually perpetrated by family members. By one hand, Iyengar(2009) provides evidence that laws that require the arrest of abusers when do- mestic violence is reported increase spouse homicides probably due to a reduction in report rates. By other hand, Aizer and Dal Bó(2009) concludes that policies which prohibit the prosecutor to drop charges of domestic violence increase the reporting and decrease the number of men mur- dered by intimates. Perova and Reynolds(2015) show that the creation of women’s police stations in Brazil is associated with a reduction in homicide rates of some groups of women. There are also evidences that an expansion of female participation in policing and legal bodies increases the re- porting of gender crimes and reduces intimate partner fatal and non-fatal abuses (Miller and Segal (2018);Kavanaugh et al.(2018)). Specifically, the Maria da Penha Law was evaluated by Cerqueira et al.(2015) and Azuaga and Sampaio(2017).
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