Do disasters always increase intimate partner violence? Evidence from the 2018 Earthquake in Papua New Guinea

This paper examines how an earthquake in Papua New Guinea changed people’s attitudes about and the prevalence of intimate partner violence. Although there are several reasons why disasters can aggravate intimate partner violence, among men in disaster-affected regions, the acceptability of intimate partner violence declined significantly.

There was a smaller and noisier decline in reported incidents of intimate partner violence, driven by declines among women, who are the least likely to underreport intimate partner violence. The results highlight that the responsibilities of household members and social norms can change in sufficiently turbulent disasters, which can lead to improvements, and that measurement issues need to be better addressed to improve understanding of intimate partner violence.