Prevalence and risk factors for intimate partner sexual violence: new evidence from rural India

Rajib Acharya, Johns Hopkins University
Michael Koenig, Johns Hopkins University
Rabindra Kumar Sinha, International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS)

In spite of growing global concern on violence against women, data on this issue from South Asia remain limited, especially concerning sexual coercion. This study presents prevalence, patterns, and risk factors for lifetime and recent coercive sex from a rural population-based survey from four Indian states-- Bihar, Harahan, Maharashtra, and Tamil Nadu—collected in 2003 as part of a follow-up study to married women interviewed in the 1998–99 National Family Health Survey-2. Preliminary results indicate that about 22 percent of young women (age < 25) in the four states report having ever been coerced into sex by their husbands; prevalence within the preceding year has been 15 percent. Using multi-level random effects models, our study will investigate the respective roles of household life cycle and socio-economic variables, women’s status, husband’s risk behaviour, intergenerational exposure to violence, and contextual variables in predicting individual young women’s risk of recent coercive sex.