Abstract
BackgroundViolence against Women –despite its perpetuation over centuries and its omnipresence at all social levels– entered into social consciousness and the general agenda of Social Sciences only recently, mainly thanks to feminist research, campaigns, and general social awareness. The present article analyzes in a secondary analysis of German prevalence data on Violence against Women, whether the frequency and severity of Violence against Women can be described with power laws.Principal FindingsAlthough the investigated distributions all resemble power-law distributions, a rigorous statistical analysis accepts this hypothesis at a significance level of 0.1 only for 1 of 5 cases of the tested frequency distributions and with some restrictions for the severity of physical violence. Lowering the significance level to 0.01 leads to the acceptance of the power-law hypothesis in 2 of the 5 tested frequency distributions and as well for the severity of domestic violence. The rejections might be mainly due to the noise in the data, with biases caused by self-reporting, errors through rounding, desirability response bias, and selection bias.ConclusionFuture victimological surveys should be designed explicitly to avoid these deficiencies in the data to be able to clearly answer the question whether Violence against Women follows a power-law pattern. This finding would not only have statistical implications for the processing and presentation of the data, but also groundbreaking consequences on the general understanding of Violence against Women and policy modeling, as the skewed nature of the underlying distributions makes evident that Violence against Women is a highly disparate and unequal social problem. This opens new questions for interdisciplinary research, regarding the interplay between environmental, experimental, and social factors on victimization.
Highlights
Capturing a clear picture of Violence against Women (VaW), both in numbers and in severity, has proved a major challenge in Social Sciences, because of the difficulties in accessing the affected population and the data generally being based on retrospective accounts
This finding would have statistical implications for the processing and presentation of the data, and groundbreaking consequences on the general understanding of Violence against Women and policy modeling, as the skewed nature of the underlying distributions makes evident that Violence against Women is a highly disparate and unequal social problem
Numerous national prevalence studies [1] –mainly carried out in the 90s and early 2000s– have partly solved this challenge, quantifying VaW and showing its social impact. And despite this knowledge, the statistical distribution of VaW has never been taken into consideration, it might provide a deeper insight into a major social problem which is still unsolved
Summary
Capturing a clear picture of Violence against Women (VaW), both in numbers and in severity, has proved a major challenge in Social Sciences, because of the difficulties in accessing the affected population and the data generally being based on retrospective accounts. Numerous national prevalence studies [1] –mainly carried out in the 90s and early 2000s– have partly solved this challenge, quantifying VaW and showing its social impact And despite this knowledge, the statistical distribution of VaW has never been taken into consideration, it might provide a deeper insight into a major social problem which is still unsolved. This fact is even more surprising as power-law distributions are omnipresent in many human activities [2], inter alia in other violent social phenomena, such as the number of casualties in wars [3], the severity of terror-attacks [4],[5] or human insurgency [6] This confirms the fact that research on VaW is treated and published separately from other studies on violence, slowing down the progress of scientific research and social knowledge, as inter- and transdisciplinary synergies are rarely exploited. The present article analyzes in a secondary analysis of German prevalence data on Violence against Women, whether the frequency and severity of Violence against Women can be described with power laws
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