Compulsory schooling reform and intimate partner violence in Turkey

Abstract

We examine how Turkey's 1997 compulsory schooling policy affects intimate partner violence (IPV) using the 2008 and 2014 Turkish National Survey of Domestic Violence Against Women and regression discontinuity design. We find conclusive evidence that the policy reduces physical violence against rural women, whereas this evidence is suggestive for the sample of all women. For the urban sample, we reveal large negative, but statistically insignificant, effects on sexual violence and partners preventing women from working. We find null policy effects on psychological violence for the sample of all women. The policy appears to have been protective against IPV for women overall. In addition, we show that the policy effects are realized through changing partner characteristics as well as women's increased schooling. Our results contradict previous evidence for Turkey, and we demonstrate that the previous evidence misclassifies two key variables.