An Illusion of the Nordic Paradox

Is the ‘Nordic Paradox’ an illusion? Measuring intimate partner violence against women in Europe

Iñaki Permanyer & Amalia Gomez-Casillas
International Journal of Public Health (2020) | Cite this article | Metrics details

Objectives

Recent studies suggest that intimate partner violence (IPV) against women in Europe is highest among some of the most gender egalitarian countries in the world, like Sweden, Finland and Denmark. This paper aims at disentangling the so-called Nordic Paradox.

Methods

We have decomposed traditional IPV indicators into a ‘previous partner’ and ‘current partner’ components and presented new IPV indicators that are sensitive to the frequency of victimization. The new indicators are based on aggregated data from Agency for Fundamental Rights Survey on violence against women for the 28 EU Member States.

Results

The country rankings in terms of IPV levels change substantially when overall prevalence measures are substituted by their ‘previous partner’ and ‘current partner’ components and, especially, when considering the frequency of victimization. When comparing the traditional IPV prevalence ranking with the current partner violence repetition-sensitive indicator ranking, the Nordic countries fall several positions.

Conclusions

Our findings suggest that the prevalence of IPV tends to be higher in more gender-egalitarian countries because union formation and dissolution occur more often, but not because men are necessarily more violent against their partners.

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Scatterplots comparing the share of women who had a previous partner (horizontal axes) with the standard intimate partner violence prevalence index P(upper panel), the previous partner repetition-sensitive intimate partner violence index pRp (middle panel), and the current partner repetition-sensitive intimate partner violence index cRc (lower panel) across the 28 EU Member States. Best-fit regression lines added to show the direction of the relationships. Notes: Reference population: women declaring that are currently married or in a civil partnership, living with a partner, involved in a relationship without living together. Country labels follow the ISO3166 codes: Austria (AT); Belgium (BE); Bulgaria (BG); Cyprus (CY); Czech Republic (CZ); Germany (DE); Denmark (DK); Estonia (EE); Greece (EL); Spain (ES); Finland (FI); France (FR); Croatia (HR); Hungary (HU); Ireland (IE); Italy (IT); Lithuania (LT); Luxembourg (LU); Latvia (LV); Malta (MT); Netherlands (NL); Poland (PL); Portugal (PT); Romania (RO); Sweden (SE); Slovenia (SI); Slovakia (SK); United Kingdom (UK); European Union (EU).