Prevalence of Domestic Violence and its Related Factors in Married Women Aged 18-49 Years in Yasuj, Iran

In recent years, violence against women has been an important problem in developing and developed countries; In such a way that the World Health Organization has declared domestic violence as a public health epidemic. Violence against women is a complex social phenomenon with psychological, physical, and moral damage. Hence, the present study was designed to investigate the prevalence of domestic violence and its related factors in married women aged 18-49 years in Yasuj, Iran.

The present cross-sectional (descriptive-analytic) study was conducted by simple random sampling, with 384 married women aged 18-49 years with a minimum of one-year marriage were enrolled from four urban health centers. Data were collected using demographic and domestic violence (33 questions in physical, verbal, emotional and financial aspects) questionnaires. Data were analyzed by the SPSS 23 software using descriptive and analytic (logistic regression) statistics.

The mean age of women was 29.32 ± 5.89 years, the mean age of marriage was 21.55 ± 4.20 years. The mean age and marriage age of the husbands were 33.92 ± 6.62 and 26.47 ±4.28 years, respectively. About 90 women had experienced domestic violence during their lifetime. The most common types of violence were verbal (80), emotional (73), financial (48) and physical (22), respectively. The most common form of verbal violence was yelling (29) and verbal arguments (21). The most common form of emotional violence was the husband's interference in the relationship between the wife and her family members (18), the husband's dominance and the expectation of the wife's obedience (17). The most common form of financial violence was reluctantly paying alimony to the wife (12) and also the husband making financial decisions without asking the wife’s opinion (10). The most common form of physical violence was pushing (11.5), slapping (9) and throwing objects (9). According to logistic regression analysis, husband's age at marriage was the only predictive factor of domestic violence against women (Exp β =0/925, CI0/95 Expβ=0/86-0/99, Sig= 0/0025).

Considering the high prevalence of domestic violence against women, especially verbal and emotional violence, teaching life skills, especially communication skills in marital life, is necessary in premarital counseling.