Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona, USA E-mail:
Kathmandu, Nepal.
J Water Health. 2020 Aug;18(4):579-594. doi: 10.2166/wh.2020.024.
Household water management is often women's responsibility, as related to the gendered nature of household roles. Ethnographic data suggest that household water insecurity could increase women's exposure to emotional and physical forms of intimate partner violence (IPV), as punishments for failures to complete socially expected household tasks that rely on water (like cooking and cleaning) and the generally elevated emotional state of household members dealing with resource scarcity. Here, we test the associations between sub-optimal household water access and women's exposure to IPV, using the nationally-representative data from Nepal Demographic and Health Survey, 2016. Drawing upon the intra-household bargaining model as the theoretical framework, we run instrumental variable probit regression, to test the association between household water access and prevalence of IPV against women. After controlling for other known covariates of IPV such as women's empowerment and education, the findings substantiate that worse household water access consistently elevates women's exposures to all forms of IPV. This suggests that improvements in household water access may have additional ramifications for reducing women's risk of IPV, beyond currently recognized socioeconomic benefits. While both household water access and IPV have known health consequences, linking them provides another pathway through which water could affect women's health.
家庭用水管理通常是女性的责任，这与家庭角色的性别性质有关。民族志数据表明，家庭用水不安全可能会增加女性遭受情感和身体形式亲密伴侣暴力（IPV）的风险，因为未能完成依赖水的社会期望的家庭任务（如烹饪和清洁）会受到惩罚，而家庭资源稀缺会导致成员普遍处于紧张状态。在这里，我们利用尼泊尔 2016 年全国代表性的人口与健康调查数据，检验了次优家庭用水获取与女性遭受 IPV 的关系。我们依据家庭内讨价还价模型作为理论框架，采用工具变量概率回归来检验家庭用水获取与针对女性的 IPV 患病率之间的关系。在控制了其他已知的 IPV 协变量（如妇女赋权和教育）后，研究结果证实，较差的家庭用水获取情况确实会增加女性遭受所有形式 IPV 的风险。这表明，改善家庭用水获取情况可能会除了目前公认的社会经济效益之外，还有助于降低女性遭受 IPV 的风险。虽然家庭用水获取和 IPV 都有已知的健康后果，但将它们联系起来提供了另一种途径，说明水可能会影响女性的健康。
