This paper aims at shedding light on the relationship between women’s empowerment
and domestic violence. For this, we explore different ways to measure women’s
empowerment and domestic violence, and analyze whether the relation depends on the
definitions used. We take advantage of a rich data set collected in rural Colombia,
including several measures of self-esteem, disagreement towards domestic violence, participation
in household decisions and social capital; and analyze the relationship with
both aggressive and controlling ways of domestic violence. The results indicate that the
different measures of women’s empowerment help explain much better the aggressive
ways of domestic violence than the controlling ones. Our results show a positive correlation
between women’s empowerment and domestic violence. This goes in line with
the theories that argue that men use violence as a way to leverage their power within
the household. Among the different latent measures of women’s empowerment we used,
we found that social capital and self-esteem are significantly correlated with aggressive
domestic violence. We do not find that more common proxies, such as women’s participation
in household decisions, are significantly correlated to domestic violence.