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Paper short abstract

Despite higher development, women in Southern India are far more likely to justify intimate partner violence than elsewhere. Using NFHS-5 data and nonlinear decomposition, we show that neighbourhood-level norms, not individual empowerment explain most of this paradox.

Paper long abstract

Conventional empowerment theories suggest that women in more developed regions should be less likely to justify Intimate Partner Violence (IPV). In India, however, a stark paradox emerges. Our analytical sample reveals that women in the more developed Southern states are dramatically more likely to justify IPV (77.4%) compared to women in the rest of India (37.6%). This study investigates the drivers of this "Southern Paradox" using nonlinear decomposition methods on a national sample of 56,421 currently married women. The analysis quantifies how much of the regional gap is explained by differences in observed characteristics (endowments) versus differences in the returns to those characteristics (coefficients). The decomposition analysis shows a striking finding: differences in individual empowerment indicators like education and wealth explain very little of the gap. Instead, the vast majority of the explained regional difference is attributable to a single factor: higher average IPV justification at the neighbourhood level (62.6%). These findings demonstrate that powerful neighbourhood-level norms can override the protective effects of individual empowerment, suggesting that policy interventions must directly target collective attitudes to successfully combat the normalization of violence.

JEL Classification numbers: J11, J12, J16, O12

Keywords: Intimate Partner Violence; Southern Paradox; Social Norms; Women Empowerment; NFHS-5; India.