Effect of Employment Protection on Domestic Violence

• In Event: Families and Exposure to Violence: Evidence from Social Policy and Institutional Interventions

Abstract

Intimate partner violence remains a pervasive public health crisis in the United States, affecting 1 in 3 women and 1 in 6 men over their lifetimes. While the physical and psychological consequences of abuse are widely documented, the economic barriers that prevent survivors from seeking help, particularly the threat of job loss, have received far less policy attention. This paper examines how employment protections for victims of domestic violence affect the reporting of intimate partner violence, using California's Senate Bill 400 (SB-400), implemented in January 2014, as a natural experiment.

SB-400 strengthened workplace rights for survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking by prohibiting employer retaliation against victims, mandating reasonable workplace accommodations, and extending anti-discrimination protections to a broader set of victims. By lowering the expected employment costs associated with disclosure and engagement with the justice system, the law created an institutional channel through which survivors could report abuse with reduced fear of economic reprisal.

To estimate the causal impact of the law, I employ two complementary empirical strategies. First, an interrupted time series analysis spanning 2010–2017 examines aggregate trends in intimate partner violence reporting before and after the law's implementation. Second, I construct a tract-month panel dataset covering 2012–2015 and apply a difference-in-differences design to identify changes in reporting attributable to SB-400. Results from both approaches indicate that rates of intimate partner violence reports increased by approximately 14 percent following the enactment of the law.

Heterogeneity analysis reveals that this increase is not uniform across communities. The effects are most pronounced in census tracts characterized by higher unemployment rates, higher poverty rates, larger shares of non-white and renter populations, and lower median income and educational attainment - communities where victims are likely to face the greatest economic insecurity and the fewest alternative options. Disaggregating by victim race and ethnicity, the increase in reporting appears to be driven primarily by Black and Hispanic survivors, while no statistically significant effects are found for White or Asian victims.

To distinguish between increased reporting and an actual rise in incidence, I examine outcomes for which underreporting is least likely, such as homicide and kidnapping, and find no statistically significant changes in these categories. Arrests for intimate partner violence rose following SB-400, driven by felony rather than misdemeanor cases, while 911 emergency calls for domestic abuse remained unchanged. This pattern is consistent with victims becoming more willing to engage with formal legal institutions rather than an underlying increase in violence.

These findings contribute to the economics of crime, labor market institutions, and gender-based violence literatures. They demonstrate that the design of employment law, beyond its direct effects on wages or job opportunities, can meaningfully alter household decision-making, disclosure behavior, and engagement with formal institutions. Strengthening job-retention rights for survivors represents a promising and underutilized policy lever for reducing economic barriers to disclosure and narrowing persistent disparities in reporting across racial and socioeconomic groups.

Author

• Devika Hazra, California State University, Los Angeles
  Presenting Author