Intimate Partner Violence Against Women in India: Is Empowerment a Protective Factor?

This paper explores if women’s empowerment is a protective factor against intimate partner violence (IPV) using a nationally representative, cross-sectional sample of 45,211 ever-married women in India. Descriptive statistics were used to examine women’s empowerment, and differences in individual-level and household-level characteristics among the sample. Logistic regression analyses were conducted to assess the contribution of the indicators of women’s empowerment in predicting past-year and lifetime physical and sexual IPV. Women who possessed a secondary education or higher, owned property, and had high intrahousehold decision-making power were less likely to experience IPV. Implications for practice and research are discussed.