Do women misreport domestic violence: evidence from couple data

Abstract

The literature on domestic violence against women excessively employs survey data in which there is only women side of the violence. In this study by benefiting from a couple data, we use both men and women reporting of violence to understand if education has an impact on violence reporting. Common factors can affect violence reporting and endogeneity problem arises. This paper exploits an exogenous increase in mandatory years of schooling in Turkey to avoid endogeneity problem arises from education. The emphasis of the paper is on the connection between reporting violence behavior of couples and their education. Schooling reform increased junior high school completion rate by 10 ppt for married women and 16 ppt for married men in the sample. Increased schooling of women raises the probability of underreporting psychological violence while it reduces the probability of over-reporting physical violence. Hence one should be careful inferring causal relations from onepartner data while studying on sensitive behaviors.