A recent EU-wide report by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights found that 22 percent of women had experienced Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) in their lifetime, and wide-cited estimates by the WHO suggest that the global incidence is significantly higher. The scale and impact of IPV, have attracted the attention from multiple academic disciplines that -- from different angles -- are trying to provide accurate evidence on this important and devastating phenomenon. Besides the indubitable and widely documented adverse impact of IPV on women’s physical and mental health, children exposed to IPV are also increasingly recognized as victims in their own right. The harm to children exposed to IPV may be both direct through the witnessing of abuse or indirect by affecting the mother-child interactions. Growing up in a family where the mother is abused by her partner might represent a grave shock for the child, potentially hindering the development of their human capital.

This project will provide evidence on the impact of children’s exposure to IPV on their cognitive and socio-emotional development between birth and age seven, and on the role of with mother’s responses to abuse. To this purpose, this project will implement and further develop a methodology recently introduced in economics to study the technology of human capital formation. The focus will be on the dynamics of the accumulation of skills, studying how skills co-evolve, and the role of mother-child interactions in this process. Most importantly, in relation to this highly successful recent literature, we will incorporate, for the first, time IPV as a negative input.

The strength of this method will be fully exploited by using an exceptionally rich source of data –internationally unique in containing all the necessary information for this analysis within a large representative population. The Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) is a UK cohort study that includes (i) annual indicators of the incidence of IPV; (ii) high-frequency and reliable measures of children’s cognitive and socio-emotional skills; (iii) extremely detailed set of information on mother-child interactions as well as mother’s mental health.

Specifically, the project will address three research questions that will further the understanding of how children’s development is hampered by exposure to IPV. First, how large are the direct effects of children’s exposure to IPV on their development of cognitive and socio-emotional skills? This in effects casts exposure to IPV as a form of harmful maltreatment. Second, what are the indirect effects generated by change in mother-child interactions as a response to IPV? Such interactions can potentially amplify or compensate for the negative impact of IPV on children witnessing IPV. Third, what interactions between skills, and between skills and mother-child interactions, shape the dynamic effects of IPV on children’s development of socioemotional and cognitive skills over their early life years? Such interactions are crucial for suggesting the optimal nature and timing of policy interventions.
The current project will hence contribute to a highly influential and rapidly growing economic literature studying the importance of early childhood conditions for development and will allow new important insights to be gained by fully exploiting the richness of an existing unique data resource. In developing this analysis, our project will draw on, and contribute, to a research that spans multiple disciplines including sociology, psychology, pediatrics and criminology. The findings of this project respond to the need of thoroughly documenting and further studying the damaging effect of IPV within the family with the purpose of suggesting effective policy recommendations to alleviate its effect.