# **1. Introduction**

A large and growing literature illustrates that intimate partner violence (IPV) is pervasive across the world. Worldwide estimates suggest that 26 percent of women have experienced IPV in their lifetimes, 10 percent of women have experienced IPV in the past year, and that women in all countries and in households of diverse backgrounds experience IPV (e.g., Devries 2013; WHO 2021; etc.). However, the large shares of women experiencing IPV is likely underreported given substantial social desirability biases against honestly reporting IPV experiences for both the perpetrator and the victim (e.g., Fisher 1993; Gregson et al. 2002; Bell and Naugle 2007; etc.), and given potential risks posed to respondents who answer honestly (e.g., Zimmerman 1995; Ellsberg and Heise 2005; etc.).

Although there are several interlinked causes of IPV worldwide,<sup>1</sup> natural disasters have the potential to increase the already high prevalence of IPV across the world (e.g., van Daalen et al. 2022). However, the empirical evidence is far from definitive regarding the impact of disasters on IPV. Of the few settings that have been able to investigate the impact of turbulent natural disasters on IPV, several have estimated imprecise changes that can rule out neither no effect on IPV nor large changes (e.g., Frasier et al. 2004; Fagen et al. 2011; Diaz and Saldarriaga 2023; etc.).<sup>2</sup><sup>_,_3</sup> Furthermore, even evidence on the IPV impacts of changes in economic well-being, which is often a significant component of a disaster, does not uniformly suggest that worse economic outcomes lead to increased IPV.<sup>4</sup> Given the lack of definitive evidence, we need to more fully understand the impacts of different types of disasters over different time frames, along with the mechanisms by which they change the prevalence of IPV, to ensure that disasters do not aggravate the already poor global IPV situation.

Corroborating the empirical ambiguity, we present a simple conceptual framework that empha-

> 1For example, see Council of Europe (2019) for a summary of some of the cultural, legal, economic and political factors that underlie the high rates of IPV.

> 2Two settings find that disasters increase the prevalence of IPV, but they also illustrate that other dimensions captured in the survey were also trending differently between disaster and disaster-affected regions (Weitzman and Behrman 2016; Shwefer 2018).

> 3There are two findings in Dias and Saldarriaga (2022). The article finds both that there are little estimated changes in reported IPV following flooding disasters and that droughts increase the prevalence of reported IPV incidents, likely through a negative income shock. The citation above references the former result.

> 4For example, see JPAL (2022) for a summary of the conflicting evidence. Several settings illustrate instances where worse economic outcomes lead to increased IPV (e.g., Gennetian 2003; Gibson-Davis et al. 2005; Kim et al. 2007; Gupta et al. 2013; Haushofer and Shapiro 2016; Hidrobo et al. 2016; Dias and Saldarriaga 2023; etc.). However, several settings also cannot reject the hypothesis of no change in IPV from negative income shocks (e.g., Cools et al. 2020; Cooper et al. 2021; etc.); some settings even find that less economic resources actually reduce the potential for conflict over resources and lead to less IPV (e.g., Macmillan et al. 1999; Heise 2011; Bulte and Lensink 2019; Cullen et al. 2024 etc.); and some settings illustrate that whether IPV increases or decreases can depend on the characteristics of perpetrators and victims (e.g., Hidrobo and Fernald 2013).

2