Sexual Violence and Women Empowerment in India: Findings from a Nationally Representative Sample Survey

Promoting gender equality and the empowerment of women and elimination of violence against women was recognised as an important component in the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Intimate partner violence is one of the most common forms of gender based violence throughout the world. Empowering women is an effective measure required to tackle the problem of domestic violence. There are various parameters that are used to measure women empowerment like education, work force participation, women’s decision making capacity in the family etc. In this paper we have analysed the relationship between women’s experience of spousal sexual violence and women empowerment using the ecological model of domestic violence proposed by Heise. We have used the data of the 4th National Family Health Survey (NFHS-4) conducted in India in 2015–2016. Our results show that common empowerment related factors like education was not significantly associated with women’s experience of sexual abuse. Moreover, the likelihood of facing sexual abuse by husband was found higher among working women. We observe that relational and contextual factors like husband’s assertion of control over wife, cultural norms that condone wife abuse significantly increased women’s likelihood of experiencing sexual violence by husband.