Intimate Partner Violence and Child Growth: The Effect of Domestic Abuse on Children Lenght-for-Age Z-Scores

Abstract

This paper looks at the long-term health effect of domestic violence on children’s growth in Egypt. Most often, the literature focuses on the psychological effect on the children with a few exceptions that focus on physical health. This being said, studies that look at the effect on children’s nutritional status are scarce and do not draw out the causal relationship between both variables. Using data from the Egyptian Demographic Health Survey (EDHS) of 2014, the objective of this paper is to provide causal evidence for domestic violence’s impact on children’s development and growth through an instrumental variable: female genital cutting. Given that domestic violence questionnaires are available for a subsample of the population, we focus on a reduced form model where we look at the effect of mother’s female genital cutting on children’s physical health. We find evidence of a statistically significant causal effect of female genital cutting on long-term malnutrition in Egyptian children under five. Having a mother who has had a genital cutting reduces mean z-scores of length-for-age by 0.47 standard deviation. We also provide evidence that female genital cutting increases the probability of being a victim of domestic violence in a significant way. Thus, the impact of female genital cutting on children’s physical health flows through domestic violence. To provide evidence that goes beyond the average effect, we conduct a distributional analysis. Our distributional analysis suggests that, at z-scores less than -2, the difference in the treated (mothers who are victims of genital mutilation) and untreated groups is due to differences in characteristics between both groups, however at z-scores equal or higher than -2, the differences between the treated and the control group are not explained by differences in characteristics. This means that female genital cutting has a negative impact on children physical health but not to the extent of increasing the probability of stunting.