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Social Indicators Research
Published in: Social Indicators Research 1/2020

11-10-2019 | Original Research

A Fuzzy Index and Severity Scale to Measure Violence Against Women

Authors: Francesca Bettio, Elisa Ticci, Gianni Betti

Published in: Social Indicators Research | Issue 1/2020

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Abstract

Measuring and comparing levels of violence against women across individuals or countries are controversial exercises, and yet they remain essential to understanding the phenomenon. We develop a scale of severity of violence against women based on fuzzy set theory. The scale can be used to derive fuzzy indexes of violence which account for the prevalence, frequency and severity of violence. Unlike existing alternatives, however, the scale that we propose is based on objective information rather than subjective assessment; it is parsimonious in terms of the amount of information that it requires; and it is less vulnerable to risks of cultural bias. We exploit our scale to unravel a puzzle which arises from the largest survey of violence against women in Europe to date, namely that some of the more gender equal countries record higher prevalence rates for violence from intimate partners. We show that the puzzle is resolved once violence is weighted by severity using our scale instead of being measured by simple prevalence.
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Appendix
Available only for authorised users
Footnotes
1
The literature typically distinguishes between sexual violence and sexual harassment, and so does the FRA survey. This is partly because sexual violence is primarily associated with violence in the home, while sexual harassment is typically associated with violence outside the home. Also, sexual harassment was not considered a type of violence until recently.
 
2
See also the U.N. report (2014) Guidelines for Producing on Violence against Women: p. 19.
 
3
This also holds if any act of physical violence is compared with the gravest act, namely intentional homicide of women. According to Eurostat crime series, recorded prevalence rates for femicides are below 1 woman every hundred thousand in the vast majority of European countries and not much above in the remaining minority. In comparison, 140 European women in every hundred thousand reported having been burned at least once by their partner in the year preceding the survey, although this is the rarest act of physical violence reported by (living) women in the FRA survey.
 
4
To clarify, suppose ‘she’ experienced ‘being slapped’ more than 5 times and her frequency class—(cj,i) = 5+—is the highest. Suppose also that 1% of the women in the population report being slapped more than five times. Then F(cj,i) = 0.01, F(1) = 0.01 and her membership for being slapped is equal to 1.
 
5
Individual prevalence of violence—how many individuals experienced a given act of violence—matters alongside relative population prevalence—how often a given act of violence was experienced in the population compared to other acts. Our fuzzy index accounts for both: individual prevalence is factored in by means of the individual membership function in step 3 and relative prevalence in the population is accounted for by the weighting structure in step 4.
 
6
The above sequence formalizes micro-level aggregation, i.e. aggregation for the single individual across acts of violence, and, optionally, types of violence. Macro level aggregation to obtain population values is straightforward and is performed by averaging out individual values \(\mu_{h,i}\) or \(\mu_{i}\) over the N individuals in the population.
 
7
Items describing psychological violence were not included in this question. Hence the test of internal validity and reliability of our measure considered only physical and sexual violence. The sole item of psychological violence included was ‘threatened to be hurt physically’ which, for the purpose of the validity test, we treated as a physical violence item since in the FRA survey questionnaire it is always included in the list of items referring to physical abuse.
 
8
The number of items listed for sexual violence was too low for correlation analysis; hence calculations were restricted to physical violence.
 
9
Recall, however, that we chose to focus on sexual, physical and psychological violence perpetrated by the partner also because this facilitates comparison with other scales. In principle, the FVS can be applied to all types of violence and all perpetrators.
 
10
The reason for excluding psychological violence from the comparison is that the SVAWS adopts a rather selective notion of psychological violence by considering “only acts which were directly or indirectly physically abusive” (p. 106).
 
11
An extended version of the ISA, renamed Partner Abuse Scale, was developed by Hudson in the 1990s in order to incorporate newer kinds of partnership that were becoming increasingly common (Attala et al. 1994). We chose however, to consider the original scale, since in the Partner Abuse Scale the severity of single item responses is measured by the frequency and not by the nature of the abuse.
 
12
Tables 5, 6 and 7 in the Appendix list all the items in each of the three scales, distinguishing between those we could match and those we could not match. They also record sameness of ranking (with our scale) on an item-by item basis, and put forward possible reasons for discordance where discordance occurs.
 
13
It obviously falls outside the scope of this article to review or even summarize this literature. We can only mention selected contributions with opposing views. For example, FRA (2014) finds a positive correlation between gender equality and lifetime prevalence of physical and/or sexual violence; Straus (1994) and Aizer (2010) estimate an inverse relation; while Yodanis (2004) and Gressard et al. (2015) find either a negative or a non-significant association depending on the type of violence.
 
14
Here too we consider violence reported to have occurred in the 12 months preceding the interview. The drawback is that the number of women reporting any violence may be small for some countries. This is why we are not providing individual country figures for prevalence rates or the FIV index. However, they are available upon request.
 
15
Note that the FRA survey was conducted in 2012, i.e. we are comparing equality and violence scores for the same year.
 
16
EIGE publishes also two satellite indices on intersecting inequalities and violence. These indices are conceptually related to gender equality, but are not included in the core index because they measure phenomena affecting a selected group of the population (EIGE 2013).
 
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Metadata
Title
A Fuzzy Index and Severity Scale to Measure Violence Against Women
Authors
Francesca Bettio
Elisa Ticci
Gianni Betti
Publication date
11-10-2019
Publisher
Springer Netherlands
Published in
Social Indicators Research / Issue 1/2020
Print ISSN: 0303-8300
Electronic ISSN: 1573-0921
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-019-02197-7

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