Intimate partner violence and help-seeking: The role of femicide news

Intimate partner violence (IPV) is one of the most frequent forms of violence against women. One in three women worldwide has suffered from physical and/or sexual violence in her lifetime (WHO, 2021); one in five women who have had at least one partner has experienced physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2015). The most extreme act of violence against women is the gender-related murder of a woman by a man, or femicide. This is not an uncommon phenomenon: in 2017, 87,000 women in the world were intentionally killed, and in 58% of the cases the perpetrator was a current or former partner or a family member (Stöckl et al., 2013, UNODC, 2018). To fight against IPV, more than 150 countries have taken initiatives and implemented policy interventions, including stricter sanctions for the abusing partners, faster police and judiciary procedures, financing of shelter homes, communication and education campaigns (WHO, 2012, WHO, 2013).1

Recognition and reporting of IPV is a fundamental step to end gender-based violence (Heise and Garcia-Moreno, 2002). In this paper, we focus on this step and study the determinants of help-seeking behavior by survivors of intimate partner violence. We consider Italy and we investigate the effect of femicide news on the calls to the Italian helpline against gender-based violence, and on the reporting of domestic abuse and maltreatments to the police.

The Italian case is instructive because figures on IPV are in line with the international evidence. About 31% of women aged 16 to 70 have suffered from physical or sexual violence at least once in their life (ISTAT, 2021c); in 2018, 80% of femicides were made by a current or former partner, or by a family member (55% and 25%, respectively, ISTAT, 2020). The Italian policies to fight against gender-based violence, protect the survivors, and prosecute the offenders, are aligned to those implemented worldwide and recommended by the WHO. Among them, there is the creation of the dedicated 1522 helpline. Available 24/7 in several languages, the 1522 helpline is the official, public-funded service that provides support and information to survivors of violence and stalking, and guidance to public and private social-health and support services on the national territory, including “anti-violence” centers and shelters (ISTAT, 2019).

The effect of a femicide news on a survivor of IPV is in principle ambiguous. On the one hand, it can increase the salience of the expected benefits of seeking for help (or, equivalently, of the expected costs of not taking action) due to, e.g., empathy or identification with the victim. On the other hand, the femicide news can increase fear of reprisal by the violent partner, especially if calling for help does not immediately stop violence. To empirically study which effect dominates, we combine different sources covering the period 2015–2019: (i) a unique, geolocalized, high-frequency dataset of killings of girls and women, (ii) a novel administrative dataset on province-level weekly calls to the 1522 helpline, (iii) an administrative database of province-level, monthly police reports on domestic abuse and maltreatments, (iv) a dataset on national weekly Google searches of femicide victims, and (v) data extracted from the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone, on broadcast, print, and web daily news related to violence against women.

Three main results emerge. First, helpline calls increase by 0.054 calls per 100,000 inhabitants in a given week after a femicide is reported in the news. This effect, which corresponds to a 11% increase, is detectable in the province and in the week after the femicide has occurred. Second, monthly police reports increase by 0.118 per 100,000 inhabitants, which corresponds to a 6% rise. Third, we show that not all femicide news have the same effects on help-seeking behavior. Calls to the helpline increase more when the femicide spurs more general interest, as captured by Google searches for the victim’s name, when news coverage on gender-related violence is more intense, when the victim of the femicide is young, and when the method of killing is brutal.

The findings of this paper add to a growing literature on IPV and the effectiveness of policy interventions aimed at reducing violence against women. For example, Aizer and Dal Bo (2009) show that the introduction of no-drop laws leads to increased help-seeking behaviour, and Chin and Cunningham (2019) show that laws allowing for the officer discretion to arrest are associated with a lower number of intimate partner homicides. Amuedo-Dorantes and Deza (2022) report that sanctuary policies that limit the co-operation of law enforcement agencies with federal immigration authorities, induce a decrease in femicides among Hispanic women in the US. Iyer et al. (2012) find that higher female representation in the local governments is associated to a rise in help-seeking by survivors of gender-based crimes, and Miller and Segal (2019) document higher rates of IPV reporting when the female representation among police officers increases. Levy and Mattsson (2020) and Gauthier (2022) show that the reporting of gender-based violence and abuse has increased following the #MeToo movement, which is consistent with the idea that heightened public awareness boosts the credibility of reporting, and decreases the uncertainty about the consequences and fear of retaliation (Lee and Suen, 2020, Cheng and Hsiaw, 2022). Similarly, Colagrossi et al. (2022) estimate increased reporting of violence following a media campaign advertising the use of the Italian anti-violence helpline. Our empirical results show that documenting and talking about femicides and gender-related violence is important to raise recognition and reporting of IPV. The finding that more media coverage and higher general interest induce more help-seeking behavior, provides empirical support to policy interventions aimed at raising and maintaining awareness about IPV.

This paper also contributes to understand the drivers of help-seeking behavior and of gender-based violence, which have been recently investigated by, e.g., Yilmaz, 2018, Tur-Prats, 2019, González and Rodríguez-Planas, 2020, Angelucci and Heath, 2020, and Tur-Prats (2021). By focusing on the drivers of the IPV survivors’ response, we provide a complementary perspective to the literature studying crime and the impact of exposure to the media, which typically focuses on the offenders’ response.2 Card and Dahl (2011) exploit results of football games broadcast and show a rise in IPV violence after an upset loss, while Jensen and Oster (2009) find that the introduction of cable television in India is associated to significant decreases in the acceptability of IPV. Dahl and DellaVigna (2009) find that violent crime decreases on days with larger theater audiences for violent movies. Gulino and Masera (2022) estimate that news of corruption scandals affect the propensity of supermarket customers to steal. As in our case, the effect of the news is localized in time and space. Our paper adds to this literature by showing that help-seeking behavior from victims of IPV is a specific response to a femicide news – and not to any news about non-IPV related murders. If the victim is young or the femicide is brutal, calls increase more. Murder-suicides, instead, reduce the impact of the news. Factors such as emotional impact for the general public and the IPV survivors, salience and coverage of the news, and increased awareness and information are possible drivers for the increase in help-seeking behavior after a femicide news is released.

Our results translate into important policy implications. Raising awareness on violence against women and covering femicide events in the news can play a valuable role in prompting survivors to report violence. The response to news salience in terms of help-seeking behavior, however, is short-lived. Policy makers may remedy by promoting frequent and systematic information campaigns and by encouraging public discussion about gender-based violence. The finding that both helpline calls and police reports increase following the news of a femicide also suggests that potential help-seekers may be effectively reached not only via established channels (i.e. police) but also via dedicated services such as helplines.

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: Section 2 describes the data used for the analysis and provides background information on femicides, helpline calls and police reporting in Italy. Section 3 proposes a model of help-seeking behavior, while Section 4 outlines our empirical approach. Section 5 describes our findings. Sections 6 Discussion, 7 Conclusions discuss the results and conclude.

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