Confinement and intimate partner violence†

The effect of confinement on intimate partner violence is hard to assess, partly because of usual endogeneity problems, but also because the often-used report calls poorly measure that violence. We exploit self-reported survey data from Argentina to study the extent to which the coronavirus pandemic quarantine had unintended consequences on intimate partner violence. The quarantine decree established clear exceptions for heterogeneous subsets of the population and, for reasons plausibly exogenous to the prevalence of intimate partner violence, only some individuals were forced to spend more time with their partners. Using this variability in exposure we find that the lockdown led to an increase between 12% and 35% in intimate partner violence, depending type of violence (emotional, physical or sexual). Given the Argentinian government imposed the full national lockdown when few people felt threatened by the virus, these effects are likely to have been triggered by the actual confinement.