Working paper title: Domestic violence in Russia: Shocks or historical legacies?

Abstract

By: Ekaterina Borisova, Timothy M. Frye, Koen Schoors & Vladimir Zabolotskiy

We study contemporaneous and historical factors of intimate partner domestic violence (DV) using the Covid-19 pandemic as a shock. As a primary data source on DV and pandemic hardships, we use a geocoded online survey of about 23,000 respondents conducted in November 2020 in 61 Russian regions and supplement it with night lights data to measure economic activity and data from the 1897 Census of the Russian Empire to gauge historical gender inequality. We find that economic hardships and mental health problems during the pandemic are positively associated with the prevalence of DV, measured by DV awareness of both women and men and self-reported DV experience among women. We observe a similar pattern for the perceived increase in DV since the beginning of the pandemic, reported by women and men. Yet the underlying cultural norm of DV acceptance is not dented by these socioeconomic shocks. Using the Google Trends search index as an alternative measure of DV, we show in a DiD setting that the intensity of DV-related searches increases in the weeks following the lockdowns, which confirms the survey-based results. Contrary to the literature on the historical roots of gender norms and DV, we find only limited effects of historical gender inequality on present-day DV. We conclude that while socioeconomic shocks, rather than historical roots, explain DV variation in Russia, they fail to explain the variation in the underlying social norms about DV.

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