Citation

Ivert AK, Merlo J, Gracia E. Eur. J. Public Health 2017; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Affiliation

Department of Social Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Valencia, Valencia, Spain.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, Oxford University Press)

DOI

10.1093/eurpub/ckx138

PMID

29036678

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Intimate partner violence against women (IPVAW) is a global and preventable public health problem. Public attitudes, such as victim-blaming, are important for our understanding of differences in the occurrence of IPVAW, as they contribute to its justification. In this paper, we focus on victim-blaming attitudes regarding IPVAW within the EU and we apply multilevel analyses to identify contextual determinants of victim-blaming attitudes. We investigate both the general contextual effect of the country and the specific association between country level of gender equality and individual victim-blaming attitudes, as well as to what extend a possible general contextual effect was explained by county level gender equality.

METHODS: We analyzed data from 26 800 respondents from 27 member states of the European Union who responded to a survey on public perceptions of domestic violence. We applied multilevel logistic regression analysis and measures of variance (intra-class correlation (ICC)) were calculated, as well as the discriminatory accuracy by calculating the area under the receiver operator characteristic curve.

RESULTS: Over and above individual characteristics, about 15% of the individual variance in the propensity for having victim-blaming attitudes was found at the country level, and country level of gender equality did not affect the general contextual effect (i.e. ICC) of the country on individual victim-blaming attitudes.

CONCLUSION: The present study shows that there are important between-country differences in victim-blaming attitudes that cannot be explained by differences in individual-level demographics or in gender equality at the country level. More research on attitudes towards IPVAW is needed.

Language: en