Domestic Violence: Emotional and Physical Abuse of Wives in India

Using data from the National Family Health Survey for 2015–16 (NFHS-4) for India, this chapter examines the likelihood of wives from different backgrounds and circumstances suffering abuse, emotional or physical, from their husbands. It estimates the relationship for emotional and physical abuse as a system of equations so that the correlation between the two types of abuse can be taken into account. It then computes the probabilities of wives facing spousal abuse under a variety of circumstances depending upon, inter alia, household poverty, the women’s social group, education, the state in which they reside, their husbands’ controlling behaviour and frequency of drinking. These probabilities are then employed to decompose inequality in the likelihood of wives being abused according to a few important factors. This analysis shows that most of the inequality in the likelihood of being emotionally and physically abused could be explained by just three factors: household poverty, husbands’ controlling behaviour, and husbands’ drinking habits