Risk Factors for Gender-based Violence: The Case of Indian Agriculture

Overview

The study documents the incidence of domestic and workplace violence among Indian female agricultural workers, and the factors that put these women at risk of violence. Multiple years of nationally representative domestic violence data are analyzed, focusing on agricultural laborers. This analysis is supplemented by a literature review on working conditions for female tea plantation workers, who form the bulk of hired female agricultural labor in India, focusing on factors that enable workplace violence in this setting.

Among the findings, we observe that women whose families have a history of domestic violence, and women whose partners drink frequently, are about 20 percent more likely to be survivors of domestic violence themselves. Importantly, women who are employed are more likely to be survivors of domestic violence, especially women who are employed in commercial plantations, which further confirms the need to look at domestic and workplace violence in connection with each other.