It takes a village: Mobilizing community norms enforcement to reduce intimate partner violence

Abstract

More than one in four women worldwide have experienced intimate partner violence (IPV), yet few policy interventions have proven to be effective in reducing IPV. Those that have all operated at the community level rather than targeting households at risk. This paper seeks to establish whether community-wide treatment is a necessary component of behavior change, and, if so, what is the mechanism through which engaging non-violent households promotes behavior change among those at risk. Models of social norms offer a potential pathway via enhanced norms enforcement, but empirical evidence is lacking. To test whether social norms enforcement can reduce the incidence of IPV, we evaluate the Peruvian government’s flagship IPV prevention program using a field experiment randomized across 250 communities. Households experiencing IPV were identified at baseline and offered 8–12 interactive sessions led by community health workers, combining prevention curricula with telenovela-style edutainment. In a randomly chosen half of communities, 30% of non-violent couples are also invited to participate. Consistent with previous findings, the program substantially reduced IPV reported by at-risk women, with effects concentrated among active participants. In addition, effects on at-risk women were significantly larger in communities that also delivered the program to low-risk households. We show that the expanded program achieves greater reductions in IPV by generating program effects among at-risk households that are the most difficult to reach: in villages that targeted households at risk, IPV falls exclusively among program participants, while in villages that also engaged nonviolent households, IPV also falls among at-risk non-participants. Moreover, the benefits of the expanded program are observed even when delivered to couples at home rather than in a group setting in which participants can interact. Overall, these patterns indicate that engaging non-violent households activates community-level norms enforcement, providing novel evidence that collective norms activation is central to extending the reach and efficacy of IPV prevention efforts.