From Political Violence to Domestic Violence: Examining the Impact of Conflict on the Intimate Partner Violence in Sub Saharan Africa

Jocelyn Kelly, Johns Hopkins University
Michele Decker, Johns Hopkins University

An increasingly rich body of literature documents the “contagion” of violence. Like diseases and complex social phenomena, violence can be transmitted across individuals, groups and levels of social organization. New lines of scholarship have begun to document wide-ranging effects of political instability on a number of health outcomes. However, few studies look at how political violence may affect the perpetration of interpersonal violence. Preliminary survey studies suggest that domestic violence may increase in places affected by political instability. This project will look at this phenomenon in two different countries in sub-Saharan Africa affected by political instability: Uganda and Kenya. By combining two separate databases - the Demographic and Health Survey and the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data – this research will assess whether individuals in geographic units that experience more conflict are more likely to experience higher levels of physical and sexual domestic abuse, as measured by the DHS.