Research Insights: Can Greater Privacy Yield More Accurate Measurements of Violence Against Women?

The private nature of intimate partner violence (IPV) introduces very large costs to self-identifying as a victim, leading to a large potential for misreporting. When women in Peru were provided greater levels of privacy, their report did not yield differences in the prevalence rates of physical and sexual violence relative to that obtained from standard surveys. However, more educated women report higher rates of IPV under greater privacy than through face-to-face methods, while there is no significant difference among the least educated women.