Gender Policy and Intimate Partner Violence in Colombia

Abstract

In 1995, Colombia signed the first legally binding international treaty that criminalizes all forms of violence against women. After this, the government took a number of steps to improve laws and policies, but progress was slow. This paper employs a differences-in differences approach and Demographic and Health Surveys from 2010 and 2015 to estimate the impact of a renewed effort to reduce intimate partner violence (IPV), based on recommendations by the UN. To identify the effect of the national policies, it uses the fact that while the central government passes laws and formulates policies, it partly relies on departments (provinces) to implement them. Of Colombia’s 33 departments, about a quarter had a gender policy in place by 2010. The main finding is that self-reported physical violence decreased from 20% to 16% between 2010 and 2015 in departments that had implemented IPV policies, while it stayed at 18% in the others.