The most common form of violence perpetrated against women is intimate partner violence (IPV), which is the act or threat of physical, psychological, or sexual harm by a current or former partner. This project proposes to investigate how community and structural disadvantages increase the risk of IPV and inform effective prevention strategies. In particular, we define community disadvantages as negative conditions in the community environment, such as community-level crime and unemployment, and structural disadvantages as markers of low social status at the individual level that are determined by social, political, and economic structures, such as having a low income or low education. Exposure to community and structural violence and deprivation may cause or exacerbate violence in relationships by normalising psychological and physical aggression, decreasing the capacity or will for intervention into ‘domestic affairs’, or increasing life stress and trauma. Yet to our knowledge there are few studies that have tested whether structural disadvantages precede and are associated with IPV against women over time and no longitudinal study that has tested how the community environment may affect IPV among women outside the United States.

Our project will have four stages. First, we will examine whether greater exposure to negative community conditions, such as community crime and unemployment, over time leads to the experience of intimate partner violence in young adulthood. Second, we will test whether the effects of negative community exposures on IPV are amplified when individuals have experienced structural disadvantages over time, such as low socioeconomic status. Third, we will investigate whether community and structural contexts affect IPV by influencing broader individual- and family-level conditions such as substance misuse, mental health, and family environments in childhood. Finally, we will analyse whether these effects vary based on whether a person is male or female or the victim or perpetrator of violence.