Intimate Partner Violence in Peru: An Assessment of Competing Models

Corey S. Sparks, University of Texas at San Antonio
Lila Valencia, University of Texas at San Antonio

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is one of the most common forms of violence against women worldwide. The most recent WHO (2013) reports show that nearly one third (30%) of women reported ever experiencing either physical IPV, with regional figures as large as 38%. Risk factors exist at the individual, couple and ecological levels, but no systematic study of models at these various levels has been attempted. The goal of this analysis is to present a systematic evaluation of competing models of IPV risk. Using a Bayesian modeling framework, we compare models at various levels and evaluate their performance in terms of explaining IPV risk. In general, individual-centric models fit the data better than the couple-centric models, and the best fitting model considered woman’s and couple’s effects, plus heterogeneity at the region level. Overall, in the Peruvian setting, partner violence is largely a product of individual and couple-level dynamics.