Linking natural disasters, stress, and domestic violence

By Alvin Lee

SMU Office of Research & Tech Transfer – The April 2015 Nepal earthquake, also called the 2015 Gorkha earthquake, inflicted severe damage on the country. Nearly 9,000 people died and some 22,000 people were hurt. The 7.8-magnitude quake also caused half a million houses to be fully collapsed or damaged beyond repair, which translates approximately to US$7 billion in damage – about a third of Nepal’s GDP at the time.

While the economic impact of natural disasters is extensively studied, SMU PhD in Economics candidate Arpita Khanna decided to explore the less examined effects of such calamities on the occurrence of intimate partner violence (IPV), which the World Health Organization describes as “any behaviour within an intimate relationship that causes physical, psychological, or sexual harm to those in the relationship”.

In the paper “Do Natural Disasters Cause Domestic Violence?: A study of the 2015 Nepal earthquake" which she co-wrote with SMU Associate Professor of Economics Tomoki Fujii, Khanna examined data from the Nepal Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) before (2011) and after the earthquake (2016). In both surveys women were asked if they have ever experienced from their husbands/partners:

• Less severe violence e.g., pushed, slapped, hair pulled
• Severe violence e.g., kicked, strangled, threatened with weapon
• Sexual violence e.g., physically forced into unwanted sex
• Other harmful actions e.g., actions leading to bruises, sprains, broken bones etc.

The research and findings

She adopted a difference-in-differences method to tease out the impact of the earthquake on the occurrence of domestic violence, wherein variation between pre versus post period and earthquake affected areas versus unaffected areas was used.

Those who lived in areas that registered a 7 or 8 rating on the Modified Mercalli Intensity (MMI) rating of earthquake intensity were defined as “earthquake affected areas”. She wrote:

“Intensity 7 represents ‘very strong shaking’, which would cause considerable damage to poorly built or badly designed structures. Intensity 8 represents ‘severe shaking’, which would cause considerable damage to ordinary substantial buildings with partial collapse and great damage to poorly built structures.”

Khanna found that overall, an “exposure to intensity 7 or above tends to increase the likelihood of experiencing any physical violence by 8.9 percentage points”. But within urban areas that figure jumped to 30.9 percentage points.

“Reconstruction in the urban areas was far more complex than it was in the rural areas due to the scarcity of land, complexities involved with land registration, multi-ownership of land, disputes among kin, higher costs of reconstruction, and so forth,” Khanna explains, citing the research of Bothara et al., 2016.

“Moreover, the [reconstruction grant of US$2,600] provided by the National Reconstruction Authority (NRA) was inadequate to reconstruct in accordance with the NRA guidelines. While the NRA's grant was the same between the urban and rural areas, the inadequacy was more severe in the urban areas due to high construction costs,” she adds.

“Because of these reasons, it is possible that reconstruction and subsequent return to normalcy in the urban areas were much slower than those in the rural areas and due to these reasons, people in urban areas faced a lot of stress which may have contributed to IPV.”

Khanna’s paper also looked at sources of stress such as alcohol and tobacco consumption among men, which rose in urban areas after the earthquake but not in rural areas. Other factors such as loss of wealth also correlated to increased IPV but only in areas of MMI intensity of 8 and above where the earthquake “would cause considerable damage to ordinary substantial buildings with partial collapse and great damage to poorly built structures”.

Her research also suggested that women with a family history of inter-parental violence tend to have an increased likelihood of experiencing domestic violence due to exposure to the earthquake relative to women with no family history of inter-parental violence.

What, then, are the lessons for governments and policymakers to be learnt?

“One of the important lessons that other governments can draw from the Nepal earthquake is that they need to pay close attention to how reconstruction policy is being designed,” notes Khanna, who was awarded the 2021 SMU Interdisciplinary Doctoral Fellowship for exemplary research crossing traditional disciplinary boundaries. “It needs to be ensured that the policy genuinely benefits the victims of the natural disaster and leaves no victims behind.

“In addition, while the focus of relief agencies, NGOs and governments is on assisting people in building their homes, governments need to be aware of the psychological stress that people face as well. It would be beneficial to be mindful of the impact on the mental health of victims. In particular, as the results of the study show, increased stress may translate into domestic violence.”

She concludes, “Thus, relief efforts should go beyond the usual reconstruction assistance and consider the stress, and possible increase in IPV as a result of the natural disaster as well.”

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