WITHRAWN: Neighbourhood Effects on Intimate Partner Violence Against Women: Evidence from a UK Birth-Cohort Study

Introduction: Intimate partner violence (IPV) is the most common violence perpetrated against women. Designing effective prevention requires understanding the causes of IPV, best evidenced by studies that measure exposures and outcomes prospectively over time. However, the effects of community- or structural-level factors on IPV against women have not been investigated prospectively outside the United States. We therefore investigated the effect of long-term exposure to neighbourhood-level deprivation on the risk of experiencing IPV among women in a birth cohort followed over 21 years in the United Kingdom.

Methods: Data were from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children, which followed our target sample, 7219 women, from birth and their mothers. At age 21, participants self-reported the frequency of experiencing physical, psychological, or sexual IPV since age 18 (from 0=never to 3=often). Participants' mothers reported on family-level socioeconomic characteristics (e.g., income, residential mobility) at ten time points from baseline (gestation) until children were 18 years old. Participants' exposure to neighbourhood-level deprivation was measured at each time using the Indices of Multiple Deprivation, which indicate overall deprivation at the Lower Layer Super Output Area level (a proxy for residential neighbourhoods). We analysed the effect of sustained exposure to greater neighbourhood-level deprivation on the risk of experiencing IPV using marginal structural models with inverse probability weighting, which accounted for time-varying confounding by socioeconomic indicators and sample attrition.

Results: 25% of women reported experiencing any IPV between ages 18–21. At baseline, 15% of participants lived in the most deprived quintile of neighbourhoods and 26% in the least. Across several model specifications, long-term exposure to more versus less deprived neighbourhoods increased the risk of experiencing IPV in early adulthood. Longer exposure to more severe neighbourhood deprivation increased participants' mean frequency of IPV experiences (b=0.08, 95% CI: -0.01–0.17) and odds of experiencing any IPV by 43% (95% CI: -0.02–0.87).

Conclusions: Sustained exposure to greater neighbourhood-level deprivation over the first 18 years of life increased women's risk of experiencing IPV in early adulthood. Preventive strategies should consider neighbourhood environments as intervention targets and important contextual factors affecting women's experience of IPV, with a particular need to identify and target the structural determinants of neighbourhood deprivation. Further longitudinal studies should be conducted to test the underlying mechanisms and generalisability of these neighbourhood effects on IPV against women.