Domestic Violence in Mexico: Reviewing the Connections with Women's Empowerment

Irene Casique, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
Roberto Castro, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

The links between women’s empowerment and domestic violence have been not sufficiently explored, and the nature and direction of the relationship remains unclear. Two aspects that contribute to the difficulty of assessing clearly the connections are the multidimensionality of women’s empowerment and the diversity of behaviors known as domestic violence. In this paper we intend to go further in what is currently know in Mexico about the relationships between two particular dimensions of women’s empowerment: decision-making power and autonomy, and four types of domestic violence: emotional, economic, physical and sexual. The analysis is based on data from the National Survey on the Dynamic of the Relationships in the Household in Mexico, and preliminary logistic regression results suggest that women’s larger decision-making power increases the risks of emotional and economic abuse, while women’s larger freedom of movement enhances the risk of emotional violence but decreases the probabilities of physical abuse.