The impact of domestic violence on female labour supply

Posted on: 1 March 2023 by Dr Noemi Mantovan in Research

With a staggering number of yearly victims of domestic abuse in the UK, Dr Noemi Mantovan explores how partner violence impacts women’s life choices with respect to partnership status, labour supply and fertility.

Violence from men towards their female partner is present in every part of the world with staggering estimates that almost a third of all women in the world have been victims of physical or sexual violence at the hand of their partners.

The UK is no exception, with over two million victims of domestic violence every year.

Domestic violence is different from other violent crimes for two main reasons: first, the incidence of domestic violence is very likely to be underestimated, as reporting is very low for several reasons, including fear of retaliation, economic dependency, and victim blaming.

While 61% of all violent crimes in the UK are not reported to the police, this number is much higher for domestic violence, with survey responses to the Crime Survey for England and Wales indicating 87.8% of domestic violent incidents are unreported in face-to-face interviews (ONS, 2019).

Second, domestic violence is the crime category with the highest degree of repeated victimisation.

With an estimated at least once a year in our country, women already trapped in violent relationships have a higher possibility of being abused.

As a result, domestic violence has far reaching consequences for women’s mental and physical health, well-being, fertility, poverty and employment.

Exploring how domestic violence affects women’s life choices

While an increasing amount of scholars have turned their attention to the short-term impact of domestic violence, my recent article “The Dynamics of Domestic Violence: Learning About the Match”, co-written with Professor Dan Anderberg and Professor Robert M. Sauer, represents the first study to focus on the impact domestic violence has on women’s life cycle choices and wellbeing.

We develop, simulate, and estimate a dynamic model able to match women’s choices and life events using longitudinal data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, to then use the estimated model to explore predicted responses to policies and economic changes.

As evidence suggests women do not know immediately whether their partner is violent, we create a beliefs system in which women discover the aggressive nature of their partners over time.

The results indicate that not only the incidence of domestic violence, but also the fear that domestic violence will be repeated, creates incentives for women to delay fertility, reduce fertility overall, divorce more often and impacts labour supply.

Our study also investigates the outcomes of possible policies aimed at reducing domestic violence.

Can subsidies and income support help break the cycle of abuse?

Our results show that higher wages reduce women’s overall exposure to domestic violence, by empowering females and making them less likely to be trapped in abusive relationships.

Better job opportunities for women imply that they would be less likely to have children early in their relationships, thus having time to understand the nature of a partner.

Moreover, they would be able to leave an abusive partner by being financially independent.

However, while higher wages reduce women’s overall exposure to abuse, our study finds that both income support and subsidised childcare fail to do so, despite these measures making -in principle- mothers more financially independent.

We find that, surprisingly, income support for single mothers does not seem to reduce the incidence of domestic violence, as in a dynamic context it encourages early fertility and leads to a higher level of dependence and abuse among mothers.

Subsidising childcare for working mothers leads to mixed results, as it also can encourage early fertility.

On the one hand it brings an anticipation of fertility in the earlier stages of relationships, with the unintended consequence that women end up being more exposed to abusive partners.

On the other hand, subsidising childcare encourages women to be part of the labour force, thus mitigating the exposure to abuse by offering them a way out of a violent partnership.