The Paradox of Increased Violence Against Women amidst Growing Popularity of Anti-Gender-Based Violence Norms: Insights from Six Sub-Saharan African Countries

This study examines recent increases in women’s experiences of emotional abuse or psychological intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW victimizations) across six selected sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. It identifies their drivers and discusses their implications on recent efforts aimed at improving women’s mental health across Sub-Saharan Africa. Two rounds of nationally representative data from six countries which participated in the internationally standardized and comparable Domestic Violence Module of the Demographic and Health Surveys between the years 2010 and 2021 and provided their data as Couple Recode datasets (n = 34,955 couples) were analyzed using several complementary models including multiple logistic regressions and advanced multivariate decomposition techniques. The results revealed significant increases in women’s emotional violence victimizations across time, ranging from a 2%-point increase in Mali to 13%-point increase in Burkina Faso (the average increase across countries was 9%). Consistent with the gender theory and the relative resource theory, women with personal income surpassing the husbands’ and those in relationships where they or their partner justified IPVAW had higher odds of experiencing emotional IPVAW victimization. Other significant risk factors include polygynous marriages, child marriage, and witnessing interparental violence during childhood. Over time, the increases in emotional IPVAW were predominantly due to recent pro-emotional IPVAW changes in the behaviors of male partners. These included the proportion of men who were sometimes drunk on alcohol (7% contribution), who professed the Islamic faith (29% contribution) and whose female partners were in the 25-34 years age brackets (28% contribution). Implications of findings for women’s mental health and anti-IPVAW efforts are discussed.