The Impact of Court Decentralization on Domestic Violence Against Women Raúl Andrade Jimena Montenegro March 2009

Objectives General objective: Evaluate if increasing access to formal justice plays a key role in decreasing rates of domestic violence against women Specific objective: Measure the impact of a program to decentralize courts carried out in Peru between 1999 and 2002 on intimate partner violence against women Questions to address: >> Is making courts available to poor localities a strategy that may help to enforce women rights? >> What is the effect of making judicial services available on intimate partner violence against women in Peru? >> Are effects different when condition by rural/urban areas? >> Are effects different for physical violence and psychological violence?

Motivation i) High levels of domestic violence against women: 41% of women in Peru suffered some type of physical aggression during their relationship. 25% of them reports to be humiliated by their intimate partners ii) The third part of the Peruvian population lack of adequate access to justice: >> Lack of supply >> Unequal distribution of judicial services >> High cost of litigation >> Cultural barriers iii) There is an important discussion regarding to what extent formal institutions may help to address the problem of domestic violence. But there is no empirical evidence

Set up of the study: Impact of the MBJ Program Specific objectives of the program: >> To improve availability of judicial services in regions far away from urban centers, Increase the supply of judicial services Make the distribution of this supply more equal among poor regions >> Courts were built in places where because of geographical characteristics and lack of infrastructure, traveling to courts was very expensive. Mainly poor urban and rural areas >> Courts are mainly focused on judicial problems at the basic levels, they have family judges, judges of peace and civil judges >> Judges were made responsible only for jurisdictional chores, while administrative tasks were assigned to specialized staff

Methodology 1: Overview >> Impact of living in a locality under the jurisdiction of an MBJ on: Whether a woman is a victim of intimate partner physical violence Whether a woman is a victim of intimate partner psychological violence >> Combination of matching and instrumental variables techniques -- Propensity score matching helps to make treatment and control groups comparable in terms of observables characteristics. At the district level. Determinants of court location at the district level measured before the treatment are used to compute the propensity score. Matching one-to-one is used to find for each treated locality a similar control district -- Instrumental variable techniques generates exogenous variability within these groups, that are already similar in observable characteristics. At the individual level MBJ were implemented during Fujimori’s regime. We use electorate outcomes to instrument the final location of an MBJ. Done at the individual level (with clusters at the district level)

Methodology 2: Overview

Methodology 3: Assumption 1

Methodology 4: Assumption 1

Methodology 5: Assumption 2

Political variables as a determinant of final MBJs location: >> It is known that Fujimori used to allocate public resources and social services (schools, health facilities, roads, among others) according to political criteria (Schady 1999, 2002; Paxson, C. and N. R. Schady (2002) >> According to Alonso (2003) and interviewed authorities this happened as well in this program. The initial number of planned courts were 83. Because of budget cuts only 43 were built. The final selection of the localities where the courts were built was based on political interests >> First stage regression results (to be shown) support this idea Exclusion restriction: >> There is no reason to think that responses from families to political strategies affect domestic violence, once controlling for a variety of factors, such as level of income, education, alcohol consumption, history of family violence, native language, etc. Methodology 6: Assumption 3

Data >> Data from the Demographic and Health Surveys (ENDES Continua ), prepared by the National Institute of Statistics and Informatics (INEI) >> In recent years, ENDES included a module on domestic violence in order to study the linkages between violence, health, and demographic outcomes >> In Peru, the violence module has been included since the year The questionnaire is answered by all women between 15 and 49 years old present in the household. We use data for 2004; 2005 and 2006

Results 1: Physical violence

Results 2: Psychological violence

Results 3: Total sample

Results 4: Rural sample

Results 5: Urban sample

>> The program helped reducing the rate of domestic physical violence in around 10% >> This effect is driven, basically by the effects in rural areas, where the decrease in domestic violence is larger (in terms of coeffcients) >> The decrease in the rate of domestic physical violence is accompanied by a smaller effect on psychological domestic violence, both in the total sample and in the rural sample >> In urban areas, the effect takes the opposite direction. There is an increase in physical domestic violence, but no statistically significant effect on the rate of psychological domestic violence (Explanations?) Conclusions

Descriptive: Control Variables

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