7 GBV. It is particularly useful for examining the combination of risk factors that increase the likelihood that GBV will occur in a particular setting.<sup>4</sup> Although the ecological framework has gained broad acceptance for conceptualizing violence, there have been few attempts to explore how individual- and community-level risk factors relate to each other and ultimately influence women’s vulnerability to violence. A study in Bangladesh, for example, found that some aspects of women’s status could either increase or decrease a woman’s risk of being beaten, depending on the socio-cultural conditions of the community in which she lives.<sup>5</sup> These findings suggest that the same condition (autonomy of movement or participating in a credit group) may have different effects on a woman’s risk of violence depending on whether the activity is seen as acceptable or not by community norms. These findings underscore the complexity of GBV and the danger in applying knowledge gained from one site to another without understanding of the broader cultural context.<sup>6</sup> Within a given cultural context, the most appropriate way to identify risk factors for GBV is in a multivariate framework rather than through bivariate correlations. A multivariate framework allows one to control for the presence of potentially confounding factors and to establish the relative importance of different factors. To date, the majority of multivariate analysis on risk factors has been conducted in the United States and Europe, although there are some recent findings from South Africa, Bangladesh, Uganda, Chile and Nicaragua (Larrain 1994; Ellsberg, Liljestrand et al. 1997; Jewkes, Levin et al. 2002; Koenig, Lutalo et al. 2003; Koenig, Ahmed et al. 2003).

It is also important to note that risk factors should be identified for particular manifestations of GBV. While there are certainly common causes across different manifestations of GBV— such as intimate partner violence, rape by non-partners, and elder abuse, for example—the risk factors may vary somewhat between the different manifestations of abuse, as too will the relative importance of specific risk factors.

Table 1.2 reports the risk factors which have been identified for intimate partner violence, the form of GBV for which the most empirical research on risk factors has been undertaken internationally. It is immediately apparent that certain types of risk factors operate at all

> 4 The term “risk factors” is used quite intentionally, rather than the more common term “determinants”.  The term determinants implies a mechanistic (indeed, deterministic) relationship between variables: if a man abuses alcohol, for example, intimate partner violence will result.  This is clearly not the case; alcohol abuse increases the likelihood of intimate partner violence, but does not mechanistically indicate the presence of violence. 5 In one site, characterized by more conservative norms regarding women’s roles and status, women with greater personal autonomy and those who participated for a short time in savings and credit groups experienced more violence than women with less autonomy.  Community-level measures of women’s status had no effect on the risk of violence. The opposite was true in the less conservative setting where women had better overall status.  In this site, individual measures of autonomy and participation in credit schemes had no impact on the risk of violence, while living in a community where more women participated in credit groups and where women had a higher status overall had a protective effect (Koenig, M. A., S. Ahmed, et al. 2003).

6 Most of the evidence addressing the influence of cultural norms of the prevalence of gender based violence has come from ethnographic research (Levinson, 1989; Counts, D., J. K. Brown, et al., (1999).