Domestic violence supportive beliefs in Romania

• In Event: Violence against Women

Abstract

Recent police reports document an increase in domestic violence incidents recorded nationally in Romania. Within these cases, the victims are predominantly women victimized by current of former intimate partners. Considering that violence-supporting beliefs are often precursors of intimate partner violence (IPV) perpetration, the current study examines individual and contextual factors associated with public attitudes toward marital violence against women. The analysis is based on survey data collected in Romania from a national sample of adults (N=1,257), who participated to the most recent wave of the World Values Survey (2017-2020). Although most study participants (84.6%) acknowledged that wife beating is never justified, men (18.5%) tend to have more violence-tolerant attitudes than women (12.5%) do.
Consistent with the feminist theoretical tenets, in both subsamples differentiated by gender, respondents who express gender bias and patriarchal attitudes are more likely to find acceptable the physical victimization of women by an intimate partner. Similar attitudes are reported by male and female respondents who think that violent acts against other people, including child physical abuse by parents, are sometimes or always justified. Moreover, while male respondents with a low socioeconomic status are more likely to have violence-condoning beliefs, men who never married and those residing in northwestern counties that have larger ethnic Hungarian populations tend to believe that wife beating is never justified. In both subsamples, self-assessed religiosity and the respondent’s religious denomination do not affect significantly one’s attitudes toward domestic physical violence against women.
Even if legislative and institutional progress has been made, the non-reporting of domestic violence is still an area to be explore.

Authors

• Aura Marcela Preda, ”Spiru Haret” University

• Viviana Andreescu, Department of Criminal Justice University of Louisville Louisville, KY, USA